Japan

I don't think more than a handful of people will read this but still...

Not much work done (bar the day job in automaton fashion) with the news from Japan. Shocking stuff. I read that volcanic activity in the south is now added to the litany of woes.

In the modern age we can grasp the concept of cause and effect - we see that there is no vengeful deity behind tectonic movement.

If this were several hundred years ago it would be a disaster that would stay in the collective race consciousness in the form of folklore, legend.

If this were several hundred years ago it could inspire - through fear - a rethink about the morality of the country so punished by the Gods that hold sway in that region of the world. For surely no other explanation would make sense.

Perhaps they'd document it. Certainly they would. Facts would seem outlandish, fiction would creep in to support the telling. Perhaps it'd be subsumed into a larger religion. A lesson from a fearsome spiritual lord.

It's the closest in my short life I've come to comprehending how disaster inspired tales endure the longest. Whatever calamity that likely inspired enduring myths like Atlantis or parts of the bible, must have been on a similar scale.