To all of my friends and family, thank you for reaching out to me during this difficult time. This blog entry is a little overdue (like so many of mine...), but it has been difficult to compose. I apologize, but I have had to include a lot of raw notes and free-association stuff that I will polish in the days to come. I am currently planning to go to Kyoto for a few days, so a lot's up in the air at this moment. The best way to contact me is dford@softbank.ne.jp--it will send a text straight to my phone. I should also preface this entry by saying that I am safe and comfortable and very grateful for all that I have. The aftershocks have been frightening and at times a little nerve-wracking. I do not really understand the nuclear fallout threat, and the news is surprisingly uninformative on that front. But I am not in a stressful or difficult situation. However, once or twice a day I tap into the news to see about the rest of Japan, and only then am I really grieving. But the weeks and months to come will bring a very profound sadness to all of us.
When the first shock hit, I was sitting in an empty second-floor classroom, avoiding my new ex and scrambling furiously to copy out a genkou youshi (unforgiving form of Japanese composition) and finish lunch before my next class started. It was about 2:45, and in 30 minutes I needed to complete the painstaking sakubun (essay) and also some last minute memorization.
I had begun to feel rather dizzy perhaps twenty minutes before it began, and I heard some strange sounds coming from the exterior wall--like someone trying to open the window.I later discovered that the walls always make this snap-crackle-pop sound right before a significant one.
When everything began to shake a little, I wasn’t surprised, because it wasn’t the first time. I’ve felt at least 3 or 4 little tremors since I got here two months ago. One startled me out of a deep sleep weeks before; another had come upon me at just such a time--when I was hastily preparing for a different class, another one of those mundane emergencies of the academic life. Except then everything had just trembled a little, swayed a little--I looked up and everyone else in the study room had their heads down, didn’t even notice. Only later did I find a few other startled students who had, similarly, watched an entire classroom full of people not notice that the ground was shaking.
I looked around the empty classroom as it began to really rattle, and when a shiver turned into a shudder and then a genuine, dizzying swaying, I quickly packed up my books and decided to move my studies outside. As I hurried into the hall, I saw a mass of students moving quickly down the stairs toward the front door. For a split second I considered trying to be clever and find a less congested escape route, but sheer sheep-willed panic pushed me forward into the crowd. Suddenly I was being pushed down a steep, twisty, trendy-architecture flight of slippery stone steps, hundreds of people crushing behind me. Like so many buildings in Tokyo, ours is entirely vertical, so the whole university was trying to get down those smugly stylish and utterly unsafe stairs. I tried to reach the railing but I couldn’t, and there were so many people...
Several fears chased each other through my mind, like schoolchildren playing tag. It started with a sad thought--a kind of resignation, like stepping outside the human race and mourning the senselessness of it all. Oh, so this must be how it feels, I thought. When you see devastation on the news, read about it on the bright computer screen, so far away… when you look at the 2000-year-old plaster casts of horror-stricken Italians, contorted by ash-inhalation… you have to wonder, how did it start? When did they know they were about to die? And in that moment all I could think was, oh, this must be what it’s like. Things start like this, an entrée of panic and the drive to escape; and then there’s blood and terror and the landscape crumbles around you, and if you’re lucky, you have cold and hungry and gut-wrenching grief ahead of you. I didn’t feel panic at that thought, nor was it so specific or articulated as that--just a blurred wave of sadness at the senselessness of widespread death, a kind of sympathy for the hundreds of millions of people who have had that experience.
Not that there wasn’t also panic. Remember the walmart incident? If people would trample a pregnant woman on solid, level ground just to get the latest gaming platform, what chance do you stand, in a major natural disaster, half thrown down this flight of stairs? About a split-second after that thought shot through my veins with some cold chemical force, the whole building bucked and everyone lost their balance for an instant. My foot failed to connect with a stair, and my whole body began to fall. I remember processing it like any other stimulus. Observation: gravity. Conclusion: painful death. But before I could think much else, a hand had grabbed the back of my shirt and my hand had found the railing and once again life was hitting me at a fearsome speed as I was washed down the steep stairwell.
Then I was outside, joining a mass of disoriented wandering students
Tree and light-posts, needles swinging back and forth--best way to gauge the quake because my whole body was shaking too
Panicked crows fluttering between the buildings; dark clouds rolling in, threatening us with a few drops of rain, bearing down with a swirling foreboding.
Terror on face of teacher
Scarf--offered earnestly by a kindly middle-aged Japanese professor because I had no coat. I objected profusely--a natural part of so many Japanese interactions involving offering and accepting/declining--and like an aunt she placed it around my neck.
Meeting peoples’ eyes across the crowd
Cells not working, some with internet gasping and murmuring something about an 8.9 magnitude
Streets full of aggressive cars and the sidewalk pressed full of people, bicycles, babies in backpacks, briefcases, etc.
Dizzy, disoriented--whole body shaking.
On the verge of all hell or part of daily life? If it turned out that Tokyo was about to crumble, going back into that building could lead to a panicked and mangled end. On the other hand, if this was just one of the hundreds of other minor quakes that shake Japan out of any sort of complacency...
Judging by the blank terror I saw in the eyes of several older Japanese hurrying past me with their bicycles and briefcases, this wasn’t something to scoff at. Still, while half of me felt that death and dismemberment were priority concerns, another half of me was actually still panicking about my Japanese exam. It was almost like my life was in the midst of a fork, and I wasn’t sure which road it was taking yet. Half of me was in the first act of a disaster movie, ready to cut and run; while the other half of me was cynically certain that I was in no way free of the hundreds of little obligations that make up daily life.
So I sat on a landscaping planter, balancing bookstack and my wrinkled genkou youshi sheet on my knees, and tried to force out the intricate strokes of the kanji with my clumsy foreign hand before my 30 minutes was completely gone.
A loudspeaker declared that the building had been inspected, that there was no structural damage, that we should return to our classes, and ignore every adrenaline-prickled cell in our bodies.
Then I found myself trudging all the way to the 6th floor... Like a deathmarch. My whole being shaken by that moment on the first flight, all my intuition told me this was a terrible idea. thoroughly frightened of an impending death in one of my lives and a bad grade in my other life. Thus, half of me thought I was insane to walk up five flights of stairs after my harrowing encounter with only one during an earthquake. But I did it. And so I was on the 6th floor when the second one hit.
Only four of us had bothered to show up... of course that included my ex. He had bought a coke bottle out of the vending machine on his way up the stairs--wouldn't drink it, set it on the table and watched the water sloshing, his own private seismograph. Our teacher stumbled in eventually, her facade of tough pragmatism cracking around the edges. "We're still taking the test," she declared, as though she were addressing a crowd of truants, and not the only four students who wanted to be there. But her eyes weren't in it, in the act.
The shudders began again, everyone tensing. But the pretense wore on until the magnitude escalated to about a five. "Alright, under the desks guys" she conceded, her reluctance heroically (but obviously) affected. These desks are horribly suited to the purpose--the useless under-desk bookrack that always stubs me in the knee when I try to cross my legs in class now rammed into my spine... well-oiled casters let them roll away from us, we hold them like turtles with wayward shells.
The girl who sits next to me every day now huddles next to me. "Oh god, please don't be angry with us! Please protect us," My friend murmurs with trembling voice. "It's okay," I say, every bit of me atheist, in the foxhole as it were. "He wouldn't do that. He's just shaking us because we weren't paying attention in class--shaking us awake!" I squeeze her hand.
By the time I was hurtling myself down those damn stairs again, the quake had subsided to a 3 or a 4. Again, the disoriented crowd. But this time I looked up and my roommate was running toward me and when our eyes connected our mutual relief slackened both our faces, but we didn't need any expressions to know how we felt--we were in the same boat, the same moment, the same adrenaline-ache and heart-flutter.
For forty minutes we waited for the speech that wouldn't come. No one addressed the crowd of startled kids, thousands of miles from a familiar world, most of us unable to speak the language and completely unfamiliar with earthquake safety. Not even so much as a "remain calm" or "return to your homes"--just the quiet murmurs of a disoriented crowd, waiting for the buildings to start crumbling so the sheep-willed panic could impel them to some other action--what, we couldn't know until it came.
Snippets of gasped commentary here and there-- "No, all of the trains are down." "But how will we get home?" "Better start walking now, dude." "I live in Chiba! It takes two hours to get there by train--If I start walking now, I might get there by monday..." "Where's Eliza?" "Texting's still down, and forget calling..."
When The Big One didn't come (as though magnitude 6 didn't feel like the sky was falling...) we collected a group of friends like leaves spinning across the surface of a lake... haphazard, yet instinctual decisions. I let myself drift to the people I trusted most, and was surprised to find that they weren't necessarily the first people I would choose to sit with in the cafeteria every day...
Our eventual party was headed by a couple of jovial ex-marines, sharp and aware, but still the life of the party. We all headed to a nearby bar, and negotiated with the owners until they agreed to start happy hour 45 minutes early. When I think back to the various faces in our party, I am filled with gratitude at my luck. All kind, warm people, ready to relax but still reliable. No anxious bravado or dwelling in the doom, a little dark humor but nothing upsetting or vulgar. No one edgy or antsy, just galvanized by the circumstances. Surrounded by smiles, the group enveloped me like an arm around my shoulders. And I needed it. The aftershocks kept coming, each one reminding us that it wasn't over, that maybe it was just beginning, that we had no idea when it would end. Indeed, each one reminded us that no one could truly tell us it was over because no scientist or politician can predict or circumscribe the restless earth. When would we know that life was back to normal? We wouldn't.
Knowing my own frivolity at the time, I still couldn’t help wondering if this is how it felt when the Germans marched into Paris--what it meant to be a young person, just having fun in a beautiful, vibrant city, when the ground begins to shake. As I kneaded a bar-napkin into a twisty little pretzel, my stomach seemed to do the same deep inside. The first three or four large tremors we experienced there, everyone felt pretty tense, and eyed the roof with caution, forcing out casual moans or giggles, grabbing a glass and taking a chug, forcing a façade of normalcy onto the whole thing. But over time it wasn’t so hard--especially after the first round of drinks. Not that my club soda had much effect on the hysterical cocktail pulsing through my bloodstream. But being part of a group, and eventually numbing a little, I couldn’t say I relaxed… But the fear wasn’t fresh anymore, and we affected a comforting kind of normalcy. The arm around the shoulders...
Forget playing: those who hide together stay together. It is a unique bond.
When the fifth or sixth aftershock rattled our plates and glasses once more, emboldened by a kind of resignation, I turned to a friend of mine and began to singing that Carole King tune, and within seconds recognition and excitement sparked in his eyes and he joined in: we were sharing ostensibly our earliest experience with any sort of earthquake, reaching back into childhood to something amused and detached. You see, he grew up in Portland Oregon, a stones’ throw from my hatching grounds, and so we probably shared the same first experience with earthquakes: an exhibit at a Portland science museum, an earthquake simulator machine, always the highlight of the trip, in which a mundane living-room shakes (with about the same violence of those first two quakes) and a playfully ironic tune starts up in the background: “I feel the earth/ move/ under my feet…”
At some point the 5:00 song came on. It’s a sweet, nostalgic little melody meant to call children home when the sun sets. When I first heard it two months ago, I decided to set it aside as thirty seconds out of every day that I would spend thinking about how much I love Tokyo, and how grateful I am to be here. As its naïve tones drifted through the dark streets of an uncertain city, as always, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed with gratitude and gladness that I am here, that I was able to come at all, that I’m living my dream of studying in Japan. And a powerful thought hit me: I love this city so much, and I love its people so much. I am so lucky to have the freedom to live life on my own terms here, to spend six months just growing and experiencing new things, just learning about what it means to be human, learning about the world and my place in it. And as the tune ended, wide open, as it always does, in the middle of the second chorus… I decided that the whole city could be coming down around me and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
But the dread didn’t melt away until much later.
Meanwhile outside--mass exodus of commuters walking miles to get home--like shibuya crossing in the middle of minatoku
The composed chaos of a trainless Tokyo--everyone still moving purposefully in the right direction, just walking miles in their suits and heels
Grocery store--stocking for the apocalypse at the ritzy fru fru daimaru peacock-- our group spanning an array of responses, some casual and friendly, picking up party snacks, others solemn and quiet, scooping up giant waterbottles and packets of instant ramen. Everyone in our group was fairly level-headed and appropriate, but some were more skilled at that collaboratively-crafted affected normalcy that makes other humans tolerable in such a situation. -- A mini beer to take the edge off--my first and last drink of the night.
Friend and I walked ahead because he needed to use my computer to find some friends and be sure they were okay. As we rounded the last corner before my apartment building, we saw two businesswomen pointing at a map and peering at an address marker. Without even thinking about it, I approached them. "Excuse me--may I help you?" I asked in my clumsy Japanese. They stared at me almost uncomprehending for a minute. "I live around here--and I have a map." Then it dawned on them that I was actually offering help, and in exactly the same instant both their faces melted into relieved smiles.
OL’s-- "Office Ladies," the female counterpart of the Japanese loan word "salaryman" (yes, Japanese men unironically self-describe as 'sarariimang'-- and yes, 'ou eru' is used because 'office lady' is impossible to pronounce). Ever-composed, clicking down the backstreets in their skirt-suits and scarves. Cheerful gumption, sisterly camaraderie. So many times people had helped me with the same warmth and friendliness, walking with me for blocks to make sure I found a grocery store or an art museum, though they were in the midst of daily life, locked in by the pressure of a meticulously punctual culture. It was really moving to finally be able to repay this kind, kind city, even in the smallest way. I truly love Tokyo.
When I finally did sleep that night, I slept hard, but a few times I was shaken awake in my bed, groggily waiting out yet another tremor. Even at 10am the next morning, as I write this, my bed begins to tremble once again. So many have hit since the big one--I’m almost accustomed to them now. No longer that sick-in-the-stomach, oh-god-is-it-going-to-happen-again sensation.
Strange experience, sitting in my quite, sun-filled apartment, same warm soft comforter, my things only slightly rattled, a few broken glasses and nothing else--while I watch fires blaze on the news and hear that hundreds of people are dying.
