Professor was an early seismologist at the Central Meteorological Observatory of Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

, researching deep (subduction zone) earthquakes. His name is attached to the Wadati-Benioff zone. It was Wadati's 1928 paper on shallow and deep earthquakes, comparing maximum below surface displacement against distance from the epicentre, which led Charles Richter to develop his earthquake magnitude scale

Richter magnitude scale

The expression Richter magnitude scale refers to a number of ways to assign a single number to quantify the energy contained in an earthquake....

in 1935. he was also inspired charles ritcher.