Great Hanshin earthquake were from Kobe. Among major cities, Kobe, with its population of 1.5 million, was the closest to the epicenter and hit by the strongest tremors. This was Japan's worst earthquake in the 20th century after the Great Kantō earthquake in 1923, which claimed more than 105,000 lives. Most of the largest earthquakes in Japan are caused by subduction of the Philippine Sea Plate or Pacific Plate, with mechanisms that involve either energy released within the subducting plate or the accumulation and sudden release of stress in the overlying plate. Earthquakes of these types are especially frequent in the coastal regions
Poetry Kanto Nishihara Katsumasa with an advisory board consisting of Shuntarō Tanikawa, Kazuo Kawamura and William I. Elliott, but in 2011, issue number 27, Botsford became sole editor. In 2005 the look of "Poetry Kanto" changed, with the professional designer/publisher's services shifting from Tokyo to Kamakura, the headquarters of the small but growing literary publisher Minato-no-hito (literally "a guy at the harbor", taken from the title of Tarō Kitamura’s poem). Since 2005, "Poetry Kanto" has featured a wide and diverse range of poets such as Gwyneth Lewis, Ilya Kaminsky, Beth Ann Fennelly, Vijay Seshadri, Harryette Mullen, Ellen Bass, Rigoberto González, Ayukawa Nobuo,