Shinji Hayashi, 67, remembers the night of April 14, 2016.

He and his wife had just returned home from shopping and put their bags on a table, when a violent tremor struck.

“It felt as if two hands had grabbed our home and shuffled it up and down,” recalled Hayashi, who ran a photo store at the time in the town of Mashiki in Kumamoto Prefecture.

What he felt was the first foreshock earthquake of a series of seismic events that would come to be known as the Kumamoto Earthquakes of April 2016.

The couple’s eldest daughter was trapped in her bedroom. After getting her out,........

© The Asahi Shimbun