Quakes
I've been meaning to post something for the last few weeks. Hard to know what to say, really, other than to describe what's been going on.
Japan is still reeling from the earthquake on March 11. The death toll, the displaced survivors, and the unstable reactor are an ongoing tragedy that hasn't lost its momentum yet. The aftershocks just keep coming, in every sense.
For what it's worth, here's my experience of the whole thing. I don't live in the affected areas, but I'm close enough that I could drive to Iwate for a ski trip a few weeks before their coastline was wiped off the map.
The March 11 quake hit while I was at work. That was the day for junior high graduation ceremonies in my town. The morning was a pretty typical graduation ceremony; some dry Japanese speeches from the principal and PTA, lots of singing and tears from the 3rd-year kids about to go to high school, lots of parents snapping pictures in the parking lot afterwards, etc. The kids and parents had all cleared out by lunchtime. By afternoon, it was just the teachers sitting around the staffroom in graduation formal.
I was checking my email on the staffroom computer when the building started shaking. There'd been a semi-large quake a few days before, so I figured it was just an aftershock and tried to ignore it.
When it went on for 30 seconds in with no sign of stopping, I moved over to my desk and wait it out. Some of the teachers got up to brace the book shelves, in case things started falling over. I remember someone saying to turn off the computers. That was about two seconds before the power went out.
The quake just kept going and going. I couldn't tell you exactly how long, but it felt like a good three or four minutes. For most of those few minutes, it kept getting worse. Nothing was falling over - barely - but the hanging plants in the office were swinging back and forth so much that I thought they were going to smash a window.
Japan is an earthquake-prone country. People here are used to feeling jolts now and then. It wasn't even the strongest quake I've felt since I've been here (though it was definitely the longest by a good few minutes). But when the shaking finally stopped, and the power didn't come back, there was a definite sense that this one was different somehow.
The teachers all started whipping out their cell phones to check the news. Someone said something about a tsunami warning for Iwate prefecture. A few teachers went to check the school for damage. After what must have been the quickest end-of-the-term staff meeting in history, the principal told everyone to go home early.
The traffic lights were out while I was driving back to my apartment. In hindsight, I'm pretty sure the tsunami was crashing through the eastern coast around this time, and wiping all those towns off the map. I had no idea. The power was out, the cellphone network was down, and I don't understand enough Japanese to listen to the radio. The only thing I did have was my cellphone's email and crappy internet. I texted my parents to let them know I was okay, checked the Google News feed briefly - still no real news reports out at that time - and turned my phone off to save the battery.
You don't see much utility downtime in Japan. The longest power outage I'd had before this was a few minutes. So when the power didn't come back after a few hours, things definitely didn't feel right. I emailed one of my friends, and he said the power was out in his town as well. No one else seemed to know what was going on any more than I did. As far as I could tell, everyone was sitting around wondering what the hell was going on.
Thankfully, I didn't have to spent the evening sitting in my dark, freezing apartment. There was a knock on my door just as it was getting dark. One of my coworkers from the Board of Education was at the door, asking me if I was okay, and inviting me to her house for the evening.
She also had a TV in her car. Reception wasn't great, but enough to get a fuzzy news report on the driver over. I couldn't understand most of what the Japanese news anchors were saying, but in all the static, there were a lot of images of raging fires and giant waves. I'm not sure which was worse: sitting in the dark not knowing anything was going on, or sitting in the dark knowing only that something extremely bad was going on somewhere in the country.
Spending the evening at the office lady's house was nice. She had a non-electric kerosene stove, plenty of candles (including a foot-tall giant candle from her wedding, which was kind of hilarious), and a steady stream of instant ramen, snack cakes, oranges, and what must have been the last batch of food made before even the 24 hour convenience stores closed up shop. I chilled out on their couch for a few hours, watching her son light things on fire with the candles and her elderly parents making smalltalk. Every now and then, an aftershock would come and rattle the house. Her son had a TV attachment for his PSP, so we were able to watch the news for a few minutes. More of the same fire-and-tsunami images, some fuzzy videos of bridges and boats being swept away by waves, and a few shots of some buildings billowing white smoke. She pointed out that clip, and repeated a word a couple of times so I could look it up in my dictionary: "genshiro". Nuclear reactor.
I headed home around 11:00. Driving in the snow with no streetlights is like those bits in the first Silent Hill game where you have to run around in the dark world on the way to the evil school, minus the killer birds. Though that probably wouldn't have surprised me at that point.
When the earthquake happened, it was the middle of the night back in North America. Hopefully the first thing my family saw when they woke up were the "I'm okay" emails I sent, not the horrible images on the news. When I finally got to call my parents the next day (landline was still working, though very sporadically with a couple of million cellphone-less people trying to make calls), the power was still out. I didn't know the real scope of the whole disaster until they filled me in over the phone, and told me it was a 24-hour-coverage international news event.
If things had been different, I would have been at a taiko seminar that weekend. Instead, I spent the day cleaning my chilly apartment, and calling people back home to get some idea of what was going on. When the power finally came back in the evening, I could finally answer the pile of emails from people asking if I was okay. And see all those pictures and videos and news reports for myself. It still gets to me whenever I see those videos of towns being swept away under a wall of water. Or see those schools being used as evacuation shelters that are still decorated with red graduation banners, and wonder how many students those schools have left to graduate.
I went out on Sunday to pick up some supplies. Everyone else in town had the same idea. Most of the meat, milk, and frozen food had to be thrown out because of the power outage, and certain items - instant ramen, batteries, toilet paper, etc - disappeared fast. I've never seen a Japanese convenience store looking empty before.
The week after the quake was business as usual for the most part. There was no real damage in my prefecture, just a total lack of supplies coming in and almost no train service. Most of the week is a blur to me now; just a haze of classes, a constant stream of tsunami footage and news reports, and people trying to act like everything was normal, even while they were sitting through aftershocks and lining up for two hours to get 20 litres of gasoline. Most restaurants were closed for a few weeks after the quake, since they had nothing to sell. See the post-earthquake Starbucks menu: coffee, tea, or coffee frappechino (no milk).
A lot of people around here have family living and working in Sendai, but I only encountered one person that week who was directly affected. The principal at one of my schools had a son living in Sendai when the tsunami hit (he was able to get to safety in a hotel, thankfully). As soon the tsunami news came out, he jumped in his car and spent the weekend driving all the way to Sendai to bring his son home. With the death toll where it is now, he was one of the lucky ones.
By now, this have gotten back to normal a bit. There's gasoline and kerosene again. The stores are slowly getting restocked, though it's going to be a long time before we see full shelves again. Bread and milk are still hard to find, but meat and conbini food have made a comeback. The trains are still only running about half the time. There's no long-distance trains running from my prefecture, since most of them pass through Sendai and Fukushima on the way to Tokyo. There's a huge push to conserve electricity, so most businesses only have a few lights on. I never thought I'd see the day when those huge, obnoxious pachinko parlour signs would go dark.
Of course, all of that is nothing compared to what the people in Iwate and Miyagi are going through at the moment. Losing entire towns in one giant wave - and being displaced by a nuclear reactor meltdown - trumps any minor inconveniences I'm facing. No one is complaining here, but everyone is worried. At this point, I think people just want the reactor crisis to be OVER, so the country can fully move on to the recovery part rather than waiting to see if things get worse.
Japan is still reeling from the earthquake on March 11. The death toll, the displaced survivors, and the unstable reactor are an ongoing tragedy that hasn't lost its momentum yet. The aftershocks just keep coming, in every sense.
For what it's worth, here's my experience of the whole thing. I don't live in the affected areas, but I'm close enough that I could drive to Iwate for a ski trip a few weeks before their coastline was wiped off the map.
The March 11 quake hit while I was at work. That was the day for junior high graduation ceremonies in my town. The morning was a pretty typical graduation ceremony; some dry Japanese speeches from the principal and PTA, lots of singing and tears from the 3rd-year kids about to go to high school, lots of parents snapping pictures in the parking lot afterwards, etc. The kids and parents had all cleared out by lunchtime. By afternoon, it was just the teachers sitting around the staffroom in graduation formal.
I was checking my email on the staffroom computer when the building started shaking. There'd been a semi-large quake a few days before, so I figured it was just an aftershock and tried to ignore it.
When it went on for 30 seconds in with no sign of stopping, I moved over to my desk and wait it out. Some of the teachers got up to brace the book shelves, in case things started falling over. I remember someone saying to turn off the computers. That was about two seconds before the power went out.
The quake just kept going and going. I couldn't tell you exactly how long, but it felt like a good three or four minutes. For most of those few minutes, it kept getting worse. Nothing was falling over - barely - but the hanging plants in the office were swinging back and forth so much that I thought they were going to smash a window.
Japan is an earthquake-prone country. People here are used to feeling jolts now and then. It wasn't even the strongest quake I've felt since I've been here (though it was definitely the longest by a good few minutes). But when the shaking finally stopped, and the power didn't come back, there was a definite sense that this one was different somehow.
The teachers all started whipping out their cell phones to check the news. Someone said something about a tsunami warning for Iwate prefecture. A few teachers went to check the school for damage. After what must have been the quickest end-of-the-term staff meeting in history, the principal told everyone to go home early.
The traffic lights were out while I was driving back to my apartment. In hindsight, I'm pretty sure the tsunami was crashing through the eastern coast around this time, and wiping all those towns off the map. I had no idea. The power was out, the cellphone network was down, and I don't understand enough Japanese to listen to the radio. The only thing I did have was my cellphone's email and crappy internet. I texted my parents to let them know I was okay, checked the Google News feed briefly - still no real news reports out at that time - and turned my phone off to save the battery.
You don't see much utility downtime in Japan. The longest power outage I'd had before this was a few minutes. So when the power didn't come back after a few hours, things definitely didn't feel right. I emailed one of my friends, and he said the power was out in his town as well. No one else seemed to know what was going on any more than I did. As far as I could tell, everyone was sitting around wondering what the hell was going on.
Thankfully, I didn't have to spent the evening sitting in my dark, freezing apartment. There was a knock on my door just as it was getting dark. One of my coworkers from the Board of Education was at the door, asking me if I was okay, and inviting me to her house for the evening.
She also had a TV in her car. Reception wasn't great, but enough to get a fuzzy news report on the driver over. I couldn't understand most of what the Japanese news anchors were saying, but in all the static, there were a lot of images of raging fires and giant waves. I'm not sure which was worse: sitting in the dark not knowing anything was going on, or sitting in the dark knowing only that something extremely bad was going on somewhere in the country.
Spending the evening at the office lady's house was nice. She had a non-electric kerosene stove, plenty of candles (including a foot-tall giant candle from her wedding, which was kind of hilarious), and a steady stream of instant ramen, snack cakes, oranges, and what must have been the last batch of food made before even the 24 hour convenience stores closed up shop. I chilled out on their couch for a few hours, watching her son light things on fire with the candles and her elderly parents making smalltalk. Every now and then, an aftershock would come and rattle the house. Her son had a TV attachment for his PSP, so we were able to watch the news for a few minutes. More of the same fire-and-tsunami images, some fuzzy videos of bridges and boats being swept away by waves, and a few shots of some buildings billowing white smoke. She pointed out that clip, and repeated a word a couple of times so I could look it up in my dictionary: "genshiro". Nuclear reactor.
I headed home around 11:00. Driving in the snow with no streetlights is like those bits in the first Silent Hill game where you have to run around in the dark world on the way to the evil school, minus the killer birds. Though that probably wouldn't have surprised me at that point.
When the earthquake happened, it was the middle of the night back in North America. Hopefully the first thing my family saw when they woke up were the "I'm okay" emails I sent, not the horrible images on the news. When I finally got to call my parents the next day (landline was still working, though very sporadically with a couple of million cellphone-less people trying to make calls), the power was still out. I didn't know the real scope of the whole disaster until they filled me in over the phone, and told me it was a 24-hour-coverage international news event.
If things had been different, I would have been at a taiko seminar that weekend. Instead, I spent the day cleaning my chilly apartment, and calling people back home to get some idea of what was going on. When the power finally came back in the evening, I could finally answer the pile of emails from people asking if I was okay. And see all those pictures and videos and news reports for myself. It still gets to me whenever I see those videos of towns being swept away under a wall of water. Or see those schools being used as evacuation shelters that are still decorated with red graduation banners, and wonder how many students those schools have left to graduate.
I went out on Sunday to pick up some supplies. Everyone else in town had the same idea. Most of the meat, milk, and frozen food had to be thrown out because of the power outage, and certain items - instant ramen, batteries, toilet paper, etc - disappeared fast. I've never seen a Japanese convenience store looking empty before.
The week after the quake was business as usual for the most part. There was no real damage in my prefecture, just a total lack of supplies coming in and almost no train service. Most of the week is a blur to me now; just a haze of classes, a constant stream of tsunami footage and news reports, and people trying to act like everything was normal, even while they were sitting through aftershocks and lining up for two hours to get 20 litres of gasoline. Most restaurants were closed for a few weeks after the quake, since they had nothing to sell. See the post-earthquake Starbucks menu: coffee, tea, or coffee frappechino (no milk).
A lot of people around here have family living and working in Sendai, but I only encountered one person that week who was directly affected. The principal at one of my schools had a son living in Sendai when the tsunami hit (he was able to get to safety in a hotel, thankfully). As soon the tsunami news came out, he jumped in his car and spent the weekend driving all the way to Sendai to bring his son home. With the death toll where it is now, he was one of the lucky ones.
By now, this have gotten back to normal a bit. There's gasoline and kerosene again. The stores are slowly getting restocked, though it's going to be a long time before we see full shelves again. Bread and milk are still hard to find, but meat and conbini food have made a comeback. The trains are still only running about half the time. There's no long-distance trains running from my prefecture, since most of them pass through Sendai and Fukushima on the way to Tokyo. There's a huge push to conserve electricity, so most businesses only have a few lights on. I never thought I'd see the day when those huge, obnoxious pachinko parlour signs would go dark.
Of course, all of that is nothing compared to what the people in Iwate and Miyagi are going through at the moment. Losing entire towns in one giant wave - and being displaced by a nuclear reactor meltdown - trumps any minor inconveniences I'm facing. No one is complaining here, but everyone is worried. At this point, I think people just want the reactor crisis to be OVER, so the country can fully move on to the recovery part rather than waiting to see if things get worse.