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Published: March 14th 2011
Sandra:
We have been a little remiss in updating the blog. A lot has been happening the last few days.Tomorrow we will leave Tokyo for Kyoto and before we do we wanted to fill you in what has been going on.
Last Thursday afternoon , Charles and I went out to see a manmade island in Tokyo harbor. called Odaiba. On the way back we had to take a monorail into town which gave us a really good view of the city. The downtown skyline stretched out before me and all I could see was a vast jumble of buildings, all sizes and shapes, new and old, all packed tightly together. I said to Charles, "If there is ever an earthquake here all these buildings will collapse onto each other and the rubble will be piled so high they will never be able to dig anybody out." Well the following day an earthquake hit Japan, but the epicenter was not in Tokyo.
Friday, the day the quake struck, we were about 100 miles north of Tokyo, visiting a small mountain town called Nikko. Nikko which dates back to the middle of the 8th century, is
a UN World Heritage Site and one of Japan's major attractions. Without spending a lot of time on its history, I will just say that it became famous for its shrines and temples that are set in woods in the mountains above the city. They are spectacular.
Everyone that I know who has been there has said that we could not leave Japan without seeing them. So we went, planning to return to Tokyo that evening.
Well they say "man proposes and God disposes."
We did not return to Tokyo that day. On Friday afternoon at about 3pm we were walking back to town planning on catching the 3:59 train back to the city.
Something didn't feel right. I was standing next to a parked car and it suddenly started to tremble and then shake.
Charles and I looked at each other and he said to me "We are having an earthquake."
The people on the street around us stopped in their tracks. All the traffic stopped dead. People sat down in the street so they wouldn't fall over. People started streaming out of the surrounding buildings. I watched as buildings started to sway.
The ground under me kept shaking, then it started to sway, and then to roll. I watched the faces of the people around me. We all had the same expression. It was a combination of fear, and shock. This can't be happening, right? Will it get stronger, because if it does we won't be able to stand. And when is it going to stop? Well, after what seemed like a very long time, it stopped and we walked to the train station.
Everything around us seemed to be intact. Nikko is in the mountains and "almost never gets earthquakes".
We got on the train and waited. 3:59 came and went. Not a good sign. In Japan, if they say the train is leaving at 3:59 they don't mean 4:01. Announcements were made in Japanese and everyone left the train. The station was closed. We all congregated outside. More announcements.
English speaking tourists seemed to find each other. "Do you understand what they are saying? What's going on?" Cell phones came out, but they didn't work. I'm told that the epicenter of the quake is in a coastal city called Sendai about 100 miles north of here. The
quake is now rated as 9 on the Richter scale. When will the trains start running? is Tokyo still standing?
I'm standing next to an elderly Asian couple from Australia. He says he has to get back to Tokyo for a conference. He says that whenever he asks what is going on the station personnel speak to him in Japanese. "Why can't they just speak English?"
They sun starts to set. It's freezing here. It dawns on us that we are not getting back to Tokyo today. We book a hotel room near the station. We are crowding into the lobby with a lot of other travelers who have the same idea. Everyone lines up to use the one computer that is available and Charles eventually gets a message out that we are ok.
I look around and one fellow traveler from Malaysia is reading the latest news reports from his smart phone. Boy, are we out of it. Our North American cell phones don't work in Japan and we have been using Skype from our netbook, but we left it back in Tokyo.
The guy from Malaysia gives me a big smile. "I was supposed
to be in Sendai today but I decided to stop in Nikko instead", he says."If I had gone, where would I be now? Hey, life is good."
Charles:
We're secure for the night. News slowly trickles in over the Internet -- it's a bad one. Preliminary estimates are that 400 people are dead, and another 500 missing. And there's some trouble with nuclear power reactors located south of Sendai.
We get up the next morning. Our hotel room overlooks the train station -- no activity. We visit the station after breakfast -- maybe trains will run that afternoon, maybe not. Trainmen are walking the track, to ensure that there's no earthquake damage. We're old and risk-averse, so we book our room for another night, expecting that the trains will start up by Sunday morning.
It's a lazy day. We walk around Nikko's main street. and wander up to a little Buddhist temple dedicated to Kannon, the goddess of mercy. I perform the appropriate ritual -- a donation, and a ring on the gong, and a stick of incense -- and ask Kannon why she permitted the quake.
She gets back to me in a few
hours with:
. . . "Am I supposed to stop the plates of the Earth from moving?"
which is a very Maimonidean answer.
The trains do start running Saturday afternoon. We leave Sunday morning, and get back to Tokyo.
We missed some excitement. The Tokyo subway system stopped running on Friday night, and tens of thousands of commuters were stranded. Some walked home, some stayed in 24-hour coffee shops, some slept in the lobby of our Tokyo hotel.
Everything seems normal. The death toll, as of Monday night, is estimated at 10,000 -- the worst disaster since WW II. The earthquake didn't do much damage, but the tsunami was horrendous. 500,000 people have been evacuated in and around Sendai and the reactors. The guys running the reactors have averted really serious trouble (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl trouble), at the cost of wrecking the reactor cores by cooling them with salt water. One reactor crane operator is dead, and a dozen or so are injured.
We're going to continue our trip. Kyoto (our next stop) is south from Tokyo. We expect it to be a much quieter city.
We owe write-ups of Mt
Fuji and Odiba -- they'll be coming.
The photos here are a tiny part of what we saw in Nikko. We hope you enjoy them.
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Elizabeth M-C
non-member comment
Baruch ha Shem
We have just returned from a cruise in the Far East and left Japan about two days before the quake. I'm glad you two are OK. I'm looking forward to more reports. Maybe one day I'll learn to use this method to communicate Take care on the rest of your trip Elizabeth & Joe