So, I was in the process of writing up a long entry on my trip to Bali, but it's hard to fondly recall vacations on tropical islands in the midst of potential nuclear catastrophe. So I've decided to just inform you all of life here the past however so many days it's been.
I was at work on Friday, preparing for the day. It was a little before 3pm. I was just thinking how I should probably vacuum the rooms before class started at 3:30 (and not exactly looking forward to it), when my coworker Kyle suddenly spoke up.
"Do you feel that?"
My Japanese coteacher Rika and I stopped talking. Neither of us had noticed anything, but in the silence I could hear slight creaking noises, as if someone were walking around really loudly on the floor above. Then there was a shake.
We looked at each other.
"Earthquake."
In itself, this wasn't terribly frightening. Slight shakes like these were fairly common. I'd been woken up once in the middle of the night when my apartment lurched a little bit many months before. This is Japan - earthquakes are pretty common. We waited for it to stop.
But it didn't. It only got worse.
After a couple minutes of intensifying swaying, we started to wonder what we should do. Nothing was clattering, nothing was moving on the shelves or anything, but the building was definitely moving, and it only seemed to be getting worse. Furthermore, quakes don't usually last for minutes at a time. Not faraway ones, anyway.
"Should we get under the desks?"
"...Should we go outside?"
We looked out into the hall. No one was there, but the elevator had shut down. We came back inside the classroom. The shaking continued, slightly, with larger tremors every ten or twenty seconds.
"Are we...are we really gonna get under the desks?" Even as we asked it, we'd begun crouching underneath.
For the next few minutes we sat there. The quake neither got better, nor worse, so we got back out and kind of remained there, paralyzed, wondering if we should move. Kyle, in his 5 years of living here, had never experienced such prolonged shaking before. Our 30 year old Japanese coteacher hadn't, either. We were unsure what to do, so we just kept our eye on the hall, waiting to see if anyone else in the building (we share the 5th floor with some other companies) was going to make a run for it. They didn't, and soon enough the shaking (mostly) subsided, though for the next 30 minutes the rumbling continued, on and off, at slight levels.
At this point - the main fear behind us - we started to laugh it off. The internet informed us that the quake was far away. It wouldn't be an issue for us, here. We probably only felt it because we were on the 5th floor. The building was designed to sway, a building manager told us. That meant we were safe. Another coworker had just come in, and said he hadn't felt anything while he was riding there on his bike. It was nothing. With every slight shake the rest of the afternoon, I laughed, enjoying the experience, as if I were bobbing in a pool without being in the water.
***
My American boss called work at around 8:30 that evening, after I'd just finished with classes for the day. A new American coteacher had just arrived a few days ago, and he was wondering if he was still there at the office with us. He wasn't, we told him. Why?
"He should use the internet there to contact his family back home, and tell them everything is alright."
I laughed. Poor guy - remembered how it took a month or so to get internet installed in the apt. I imagined my parents having sent me messages, as well. Any time anything happened over here, it seemed people back in America always freaked out. Even when it was hundreds of miles away.
I logged onto the computer to see if I had any. Sure enough, there was an email from my mother. And one from my father. And another from my mother. And a message from my brother.
Whoa, what?
My parents I could understand, but my brother? He wasn't the type to send me stupid "I hope you're safe!" messages over every little thing. I became dimly aware that perhaps this was big news over in America. I logged on to CNN.
DEVASTATION IN JAPAN
The CNN headline (I'm guessing as to the exact wording) was in all caps, blaring across the top half of the screen in the special size and font reserved for major catastrophic news. As I was still at work, I didn't stay to read too much about it, but I quickly gleaned that it measured an 8.9 Richter scale, and was the largest earthquake in Japan's recorded history. Larger than Kobe. Larger than the Kanto quake of 1923. The fifth largest in the world in the last 100 years. I giddily informed my coworkers of these facts, excited by the enormity of the day's events. Then I closed the browser.
***
When I got home, I found my computer screen flooded with gchat messages. I've never felt so cared for in my whole life. A ton of friends back home were concerned with my safety, and more messages continued to pour in throughout the night. It was a nice feeling, but when taken with a closer look at the devastation that had happened about 300 miles north, I began to really feel kind of bad about the whole thing. I watched videos of tsunami waves destroying fields and cities. Boats floating down streets, careening into buildings. A parking lot of cars washed into a pile. Buildings fallen down. Typical earthquake damage. And I read a little bit about potential nuclear reactor fears. Still, it's all so far away, and it was Friday night. I went over to my coworker's apt and got drunk while watching episodes of Bob Ross. The day's events had been bad, but seemed firmly in the past.
The weekend was pretty normal. Japanese lesson and band practice on Saturday. Went out with some coworkers that night. Nobody seemed particularly troubled, though mentions of potential nuclear disaster continued to occasoinally pop up in conversation. And despite CNN's sensationalist news coverage, a number of experts seemed to believe that the danger from nuclear meltdown was practically nonexistent. No worries.
Monday continued in this vein, though with every new explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, I began to grow a little more concerned. My friend in Tokyo had been flown home. Another friend left me a gchat message with the explicit warning: "Yo git out there's mad radiation." And suddenly the radiation fears began to spike. I also began reading about the potential for another large quake happening sometime in the near future...
A friend of mine had been scheduled to go back to America for a week, but she found it would be so difficult to get to the airport in Tokyo (with the blackouts and everything) that she cancelled her ticket. If we had to get out of here in a hurry, I wondered, would we be able to? There were closer airports, but if things were so bad as to require evacuation here, 300 miles from the power plants, would the entire country essentially be thrown into chaos?
Tuesday brought worse news. A fire had broken out at the plant, and radiation levels had spiked. Evacuation within 30 miles of the plant. The airspace overhead was ordered not to be used. By Tuesday evening, levels had dropped, but with word that the fuel rods had been fully exposed for much longer than previously indicated, the idea that perhaps things were much more serious than we'd been told began to take hold.
As I ate dinner, around 10:30pm, my apartment shook. Once, twice. My heart leapt to my throat. Such slight tremors would not have caused too much concern before, but now...who knows what trouble it could be. The "Big one," the Tokai earthquake that I just learned is long overdue to devastate the Tokyo region? Could it even be a potential nuclear plant explosion, rocking the atmosphere even here? Panic took hold for a minute as I tried to tell whether the shaking had stopped or not. It had. My friend told me it was another quake, a 6 over in Shizuoka, halfway between here and Tokyo. Pretty close. What if the next one hit even closer?
I'll be honest, I've got enough to worry about without this kind of crap, but it does kind of put things in perspective. It also makes me want to smoke a lot of cigarettes, though, and listen to the A-Frames' Black Forest. Speaking of which, you should go do that right now.
No people, no trucks, no cars
No movies, no TV stars
Humanity is erased
Black forest left in its place...
Ah. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go smoke another cigarette and fantasize about nuclear fallout. In the event that everything turns out alright, maybe I'll finish that Bali post sometime in the near future. Can't make any promises, though. You know how these things go. In the meantime, keep your fingers crossed - and for heaven's sake, don't send me any more messages about nuclear meltdown!
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