What type of boundary is Tokyo sitting on?

#1

Tokyo is situated on the Kanto plain which is under constant threat from earthquakes and tsunamis. The Kanto plain covers 17,000 square kilometres, spreads over more than half of the region of Tokyo, Saitama Prefecture, Kanagawa Prefecture, Chiba Prefecture, Gunma Prefecture and the Tochigi Prefecture (Wikipedia, 2013). It is home to over half of the country's population, and is a commercial lifeline to Japan. The Kanto plain is extremely extremely close to a TECTONIC TRIPLE JUNCTION, where multiple slabs of the earth's crust slide and move past each other. The boundary that Tokyo and the Kanto plain sits on is a subducting boundary, where are plate or multiple plates in this case, move against each other and eventually start moving underneath it's neighbouring plate. Japan currently lies on the Eurasian plate, the problem is the Philippine plate and the Pacific plate are subducting under Japan westerly which is very dangerous and could cause a huge earthquake or tsunami (Black and Amos, 2011). According to Goldfinger (2011), "The Kanto region is very complex, and the size of quakes triggered there is probably going to be limited by that complexity, but given the proximity to Tokyo, even a limited quake there would be damaging."

BBC Science and News, 2011

YouTube, 2008