Yesterday's Earthquake...

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Hi everyone, first of all I should just say that myself and everyone I know is 100% fine and reasonably unaffected by yesterday's earthquake. In my prefecture, we had an extremely bad earthquake, but it falls well short of anything that could be called a disaster. Spare your thoughts and prayers for the northern part of Honshu, about 350km north of us, where the loss of life and destruction of property is horrifying.

As for me, I am now working in an english conversation school. I know I had promised to keep the blog up, and I am planning to update in the near future on what my life is generally like at the moment, but for now I think I will just talk about what happened yesterday.

It was a pretty average day and I was on my way to work on the train when the earthquake hit. In Japan, everyone has a cool feature on there cell phones where an alarm goes off right before an earthquake is about to hit. On the train everyones phones started ringing simultaneoously and the train came to a stop. This is not unusual, I had experienced this several times previously. The earth shakes slightly for 10 seconds, the driver apologizes for the delay and you continue on with your day. This time however, the slight shaking did not stop after 10 seconds. After 20 seconds it started getting stronger. By 30 seconds the train was all over the place and everything outside was rattling and banging around. I was not near any tall buildings, but I am told they were swaying like pieces of tall grass in the wind. This quake lasted for a solid 3 minutes before it slowly weakened and stopped. In the lull, the driver told everone to get off the train, we had to walk down the tracks a short ways and congregated in a parking lot.

About 10 minutes later we had another huge quake, lasting about as long as the first. I waited in the parking for around an hour afterwards, frustrated by my lack of language skills in understanding the announcements from the train staff. After an hour, it was announced that the train service was terminated for the day and that everyone was basically on their own. I opted to join the exodus of people and walked to kashiwa, which is a main commercial and transport hub, where hopefully the JR line trains would be in service. It was a good hours walk and along the way I could see a little of the earthquake damage. Building codes in Japan are very strict and the damage was much less than I had expected. A few buildings had the facades fall down with bricks strewn across the street and most shops had more goods on the ground than on the shelves, but no buildings were in any danger of falling over.

In Kashiwa I got a taste of how big the earthquake actually was. All the train lines were shut down, and thousands of people were left standing around with no idea what to do. The large screens on the side of the buildings were all playing images of the tsunami and the destruction in the norther prefectures. Every building and business was closed, with the exception of a few convenience stores which were running very low on supplies. By this point the cell service was shut down and every pay phone had a line of 40 or 50 people waiting to call for help. If anyone has seen the news footage of the big tokyo stations they would realize just how important the trains are to this city. Without them, Tokyo works about as well as a spider with all his legs pulled off.

After hanging out for awhile and realizing that nothing was going to change, I decided to walk home. It was dark, and I got lost once or twice, so it took me about 3 hours to get back. I was luckier than many, most people were stuck sleeping on the streets and in train stations. I went to work the next day and there will stilll 1000s of people trying to get home. Yumi had to sleep overnight at the airport, she finally made it home around noon today.

Anyhoo, that's about it as far as my vaguely interesting earthquake story goes. The cool thing about today is that everyone has a story to tell. This is the biggest earthquake to ever hit Japan and the biggest earthquake in tokyo since 1923, or something crazy like that. Sorry for the lack of pictures, but my phone battery died on my pretty early on and I was left without camera. Also, sorry for the lack of spell check and proofreading, but i am super tired and going to sleep . That is as long as these tremors stop for long enough...literally as I am finishing typing this my cell phone alarm is just going off and we are hit by the 250th tremor of the day.

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Comments

[Aunt Karen]

Earthquake.
Thanks Brian for filling us in. The destruction is overwhelming, and I can't imagine how long the clean-up will take.