Presentation Information
[P10-04]Collection of Informations of earthquakes felt in Yokohama during the 1870s using full-text searches of an online foreign newspaper archive
*Kentaro HATTORI1 (1. Kansai University)
Researches on felt earthquakes in pre-modern Japan, such as Tokyo, have been progressing mainly using historical documents written in Japanese. Information of earthquakes felt in Yokohama during the early Meiji period can also be obtained from contemporary newspapers in English, such as the London and China Telegraph and the North China Herald. In this study, we collect descriptions on felt earthquakes of Yokohama in the two newspapers, using an online newspaper database NewspaperArchive by full-text searches (e.g. "earthquake"). The coverage period in this study is 1870 to 1880, including the Odawara Earthquake on 13 May, 1870 and the Yokohama Earthquake on 22 February, 1880. Numbers of days when the articles on felt earthquakes in Yokohama have been published, in the two newspapers, are shown in Fig. 1. For comparison, numbers of days of felt earthquakes in Yokohama per year from a German catalog Statistik der Erdbeben von 1865 - 1885 [Fuchs (1886)] are added. Data Table 1 shows the results of searching for information on perceptible earthquakes using existing English-language newspaper databases. We also try to investigate each source of the articles of the London and China Telegraph, the North China Herald, and Fuchs (1886), to improve the credibility of data.
