The Tohoku Quake

[NB: For continuity's sake, I've arranged the entries in chronological sequence from earliest to latest]

This Just In: Self-Important Blogger Attempts to Make the Leap to Print
April 3rd, 2011

Addicted to the notion that I actually have a (slowly) growing readership online, I offered my school's newspaper, the LMU Loyolan, a deal they can't refuse: a first-person feature from someone who was 'there,' sorta. They asked for 6-700 words, and I was *gracious* enough to give them 1000, and therefore a minor headache a la carte. Here it is:

Everyone asks me what it was like in Tokyo the week of the Tohoku quake. Some people ask if I felt anything at all, and affronted, I want to tell them everything. I want them to know the panic and the fear, that there was nowhere to run, no way to escape, and that the world seemed to come apart at its seams. Dozens of times that weekend, the earth shook me from my sleep in a cold sweat, knocked over books and glasses as I tried to study, whispered incessant apocalyptic threats. Then the reactors began melting and five different people would give you five different stories about whether or not you were about to die. For days on end we lived in suspense and uncertainty, wondering if the disaster had already passed or if it was only just beginning.

Some people ask me if I ‘felt it,’ and I want to tell them everything. But more people ask if I’m okay. Their eyes fill with sympathy and the assumption that I have suffered a great trauma. Even more uncomfortable, I want to assure them how lucky I was. Some of my friends walked seven or eight hours in the cold night to get home, others were stranded altogether for days. My roommate and I live 20 minutes from school, only took in a handful of refugees, and never lost electricity or water. We got to the grocery store before the aisles were bare, and lived comfortably enough on PB&Js and pre-packaged soba. We were hardly even inconvenienced by the whole affair, while hundreds of thousands of people across Japan are still homeless and grieving.

But mostly, I think people just wonder what it felt like. So I’ll tell you. When the first shock hit, I was sitting alone in a vacant second-floor classroom, avoiding my new ex and scrambling furiously to prepare for a difficult test. At first I was unsurprised; I had experienced several small tremors since my arrival in Tokyo two months before. But then the rattling shiver turned into a shudder and then a clanking, dizzying swaying, and I quickly stacked my books and papers and swung out into the hall. The shaking just kept getting worse, the floor shuddering and bucking like a plane in turbulence. A mass of students was thundering down the stairs toward the front door. Sheer sheep-willed panic pushed me forward into the crowd.

Suddenly I was being shoved down a steep flight of twisty, slippery stone steps, hundreds of people crushing behind me. A headline flashed through my mind: “Pregnant Woman Trampled in Walmart.” If the release of a new gaming platform could cause such a thing on solid ground, what chance did I have? Then suddenly the whole building jolted and everyone lost their balance for an instant of screaming and grasping. I tried to reach the railing but I couldn’t, and there were just so many people. My foot failed to connect with a stair, and I began to fall. The thought of my own dismemberment hit my bloodstream with a cold, chemical force. But then a hand grabbed the back of my shirt and I found the railing and once more, and shaking as violently as the earth itself, I was poured out into a frightened crowd on the street.

Lamp-posts and trees swung back and forth like furious seismographs on the sky. Drivers actually honked and darted almost as erratically as Angelinos; flocks of startled crows shrieked and flapped between the office buildings.

After about 20 minutes, the shaking began to subside, and administrators announced that we needed to go back up the stairs and resume our classes. So when the second shock hit Tokyo just as hard, I was on the sixth floor, and could only crouch helplessly under my desk until it passed, holding a friend’s hand and listening to her frightened prayers. Then once again I was catapulted down those awful stairs, and joined the shivering herd outside.

One of my professors walked toward me, her face slackened in a blank look of shock. She stared vacantly into my eyes for a moment before she recognized me. I watched other older Japanese people hurry past on the sidewalk, the same look in their eyes. Tokyo has felt many earthquakes, but not something like this, not in their lifetime. A middle-aged colleague joined us, touched my professor’s arm. Then she saw me and began to rummage in her bag. “You must be so cold!” she said in Japanese. She produced a scarf, and when I objected politely, she simply began arranging it on my neck, like an aunt. An irrepressible smile spread across my face. To live in Tokyo is to suddenly have about two million long-lost aunts.

When people ask what the Tohoku earthquake was like, it’s hard to know what to say. But I always want to tell a very different story-- a story about Japan, and not its earthquake. These people rallied miraculously in a time of crisis, it is true. But most people are capable of that. You could even call it instinct. What I want Americans to know about Japan is that, even as an outsider and a nuisance, I was treated with the same warmth and kindness in daily life, long before we were all galvanized by survival. It would take hours for me to recount all of the little acts of kindness I witnessed and received in Tokyo. And so perhaps the most wrenching experience I had in Japan was one that I shared with all of you. I could only watch helplessly while so many people suffered--people I had come to love. I don’t need to reiterate the horrors we all saw on CNN. But there’s something CNN probably won’t show you: hundreds of thousands of individuals picking themselves up and rebuilding their lives one day at a time, with the same dignity and generosity that defines Japan as a culture. The adrenaline, the panic, and the blood have subsided. All that remains for that nation is a long, hard, uphill path, with nothing but the chill of grief for company. I can only hope that our sympathy is genuine, and that the global community continues to support Japan through this long process.




Warm Beer and Cold Nights: The Weekend 'After'
March 14th, 2011

 Oops! Still working on it...