Shinto Shrine Code?

Over at AltJapan, there's a story about a video that shows that Shinto Shrines act as a visual code to show the break line of tsunamis along the coast! WOAH! A tsunami hit Fukushima... and none of the shrines got destroyed?! That's got to be some major divine mojo working there!


20110820　原発建設　警告は無視された？ by PMG5

... or it's just Shinto shrines being built at the location where historical tsunami broke against the shore. As explained over at AltJapan:

It is not for nothing that Shinto shrines are generally built on high ground. One resident interviewed in the piece relates how local lore, handed down from parent to child, said to take refuge at the local shrine in the event of a tsunami. It proved true during the disaster, saving many lives.

Like the "tsunami stones" and folktales found throughout the region, these shrines represent an attempt from those who lived long ago to communicate the dangers of tsunami to future generations. It seems likely that's precisely why they were built in these specific locations.

Woah... a set of religious structures built based on observations of natural phenomenon, acting as a predictive guide to the impact of occasional catastrophic seismic events? Now that's religious encoding that works! It's almost like evidence-based predictions of flood-zones, but done before such user-friendly tools like Google existed. It's almost...... scientific! (If only they had relied on a better form of knowledge dissemination, other than oral tradition...)

It would be interesting for someone to look at sea-side Shinto shrines and correlate their location (elevation and location) based on historical records as well as predicted tsunami impacts.