Often this association included thunder and lightning, which many early modern books regarded as essentially the same phenomenon as earthquakes but occurring above the ground. Perhaps more than any phenomenon other than shaking, Japanese lore associated earthquakes with flashes of light. The purpose of this section is to survey the major varieties of early modern precursors and to take note of their theoretical basis, a point often ignored by modern and contemporary advocates of the value of these phenomena for earthquake prediction. I examine this topic in detail in chapter 6. Moreover, many of the specific precursory phenomena claimed by contemporary advocates of this approach are the same phenomena found in nineteenth-century texts. Significantly, contemporary earthquake prediction in Japan and some other parts of the world is based on the same basic claim that we find in Thoughts on Earthquakes and other nineteenth-century works: if only we can catalogue and study a sufficient variety of precursors, we might be able to predict earthquakes. Examples include unseasonably warm weather, steam or hot mist, stars or the moon appearing red, peculiar clouds in the sky, changes in well water, emissions of light, and (especially after 1855) strange animal behavior. Starting in the nineteenth century, certain phenomena that suggested excess heat or emissions of hot vapor from within the earth came to be routinely listed as precursory phenomena. The new idea that earthquake precursors exist and might be useful in predicting a main shock derived from yin-yang explanations of earthquakes. We saw that Nishikawa Joken expressed skepticism regarding the possibility of earthquake prediction by divination, and indeed no influential Japanese works on earthquakes regarded them as amenable to divination in advance. Although claims of earthquake precursors were not new in 1830, Thoughts on Earthquakes was the earliest widely read book to compile these alleged precursors with an eye to the future. The imbalance of yin and yang beneath the earth might manifest itself in a variety of precursor phenomena ( zenchÅ). Significantly, the book extends this approach to suggest that earthquakes might be predictable. Portraying earthquakes as events with explainable mechanical causes was part of the strategy in Thoughts on Earthquakes for promoting calm.
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