AI Summary
5 min readAll Shook Up
When the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami struck Indonesia, nearly a quarter of a million people died. Entire towns vanished. But on one island called Simeulue, out of 80,000 residents, fewer than ten people lost their lives. The tsunami hit Simeulue just as hard as everywhere else. The difference was that the people there had been raised on stories about tsunamis—folk tales that described the warning signs, explained what to do, and told them when to flee. While children in the West grew up on Cinderella and the Three Little Pigs, children on Simeulue grew up on tsunami tales. And when the ground began to rumble, just as it had in their bedtime stories, they knew exactly what to do.
The Underground Bestiary
Before plate tectonics became scientific consensus in the 1960s, cultures around the world invented their own explanations for why the earth shakes. And remarkably, most of them involved giant animals living underground.
In Japan, the earliest legends blamed a creature called the Jishin Mushi—a ten-legged oblong giant with the head of a dragon whose burrowing caused tremors. That theory eventually gave way to a massive eel, upon whose back all the islands of Japan supposedly rested. Finally, a catfish named Namazu became the official culprit. Even today, road signs in Japan warning of earthquake-related closures depict a smiling cartoon catfish.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:42) **The 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and the Power of Folklore** - The episode opens with the 2004 tsunami and the island of Simeulue, where ancient folklore about tsunamis saved nearly all of its 80,000 residents.
- 2 (03:45) **Pre-Modern Earthquake Explanations: Gods, Giants, and Animals** - A tour of historical and mythological explanations for earthquakes, from Japan's giant catfish to Norse mythology's chained Loki.
- 3 (08:48) **The Cusco Earthquake of 1650 and a Manufactured Miracle** - After a 7.5 magnitude quake, the Catholic church in Cusco, Peru, invented a miracle to counter the fact that Incan buildings survived while Spanish ones were destroyed.
- 4 (10:50) **Native American Folklore and the 1700 Cascadia Earthquake** - In the 1980s, the USGS used Native American folk tales to discover that a massive earthquake and tsunami had devastated the Pacific Northwest in 1700.
- 5 (12:25) **The 1855 Edo Earthquake and the Catfish as a Rebel Hero** - After the 1855 quake in Tokyo, the earthquake-causing catfish Namazu was depicted as a hero in popular woodblock prints.
- 6 (13:55) **Mariah Woodworth Edder and the Doom Sealers** - The story of a 19th-century preacher who prophesied a massive earthquake would destroy California on April 14, 1890.
- 7 (18:10) **The Day the Earthquake Didn't Come** - On April 14, 1890, thousands of Doom Sealers fled their homes, but the prophesied earthquake never arrived.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Folklore usually depends on the little things. The daily struggle to survive, the terror of a new location, or even violence and crime. But even when the events are bigger than we can imagine, folklore has a way of showing up.
Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by GennaRose Nethercott, research by Cassandra de Alba, and music by Chad Lawson.
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