PixlBit

Approaching the first anniversary of 3/11 in Japan.  Here's what I wrote a short time after the quake.

9.0 - using a Playstation to determine earthquake magnitude

I live in Sendai City, the largest city in Tokohu, the north eastern portion of Japan's main island, Honshu.  I was on the subway train going to work when the original 9.0 earthquake struck.  It was originally measured at 8.8M but upgrade to a 9.0.

The subway train made its usual stop at Kitayobancho Station, which translates as North Fourth Avenue station.  Then the shaking started.  I was underground and there wasn't much movement or shaking objects to be seen.  Nothing came crashing down, but it was loud.  That's one of the things most people don't realize about an earthquake, the noise.  Everything around for a few hundred kilometers is moving at the same time.  If you're in your own apartment, you can hear the wall panels cracking and nails being driven out from within. Or in the supermarket, glass bottles and metal shelves crash together like a possessed wind chime. If you're underground, it's the deep roar of the earth and dust falling through cracked ceramic tiles like an old, abandoned mine.

Most people panicked and jumped off the train to the exit.  I was afraid the tunnel might collapse and thought the safest place would be in the train car, so that's where I stayed.  I watched the lights carefully, expecting the power to go out, and it did.  Then the tunnel went dark.  I ran up the stairs and hopped over the dead ticket gates and into the aftermath of a war zone.  Hundreds of dazed salary men and OLs (office ladies) squeezed through the sidewalks, around smoking transformers, and tiptoed between shards of glass from broken windows and fallen lamp posts. The street lights were blank, and traffic was in gridlock. I saw one man with cuts on his fingers, probably from broken glass.

I've experienced strong quakes before, a 6.9 and a 7.2. Both times they just shut the city down for a day while construction crews walk along the train tracks checking for damage. Lessons get cancelled for a day or two and everything goes back to normal rather quickly.  But not this time.  The sirens started, the military police raced down the street and the fighter jets and helicopters began to patrolling the sky. Every building seemed to have some sort of damage.  The window displays of small shops had fallen apart, vending machines were toppled, and water mains were broken and flooding the street. The cell phone network completely jammed up, as is usual after the first few minutes of a quake in Japan, but this time it would last for days.

I went to my girlfriend's house and found her standing in the street looking up at the sky.  Her house was a mess. Most plates and ceramics in the kitchen were broken, and the TV stand had follen over on top of the heater table where she usually likes to take a nap. If the quake had happened at her usual nap time, she would have died, or so she believed. We collected her niece from the local elementary school, waited for gf's sister to return from work, lit up some candles and settled down to wait out the craziest week of our lives.

With no power, no water, no gas, and only a spotty, jammed cell network we frantically tried to contact everyone we could. My girlfriend tried to contact her parents without much luck, and I sent out a mail to my father from my cell phone, which I had never done before, I had always used Hotmail. It probably went into his junk box without knowing it, which set into motion a rather bizarre chain of news reports which listed me as a Canadian missing in Sendai for about two or three days. It was only resolved after a complicated Facebook networking cooperation to finally identify my email address.

It wasn't until the next day that we learned about the tsunami, and the quake magnitude, an 8.8 eventually upgraded to a 9.0.

I managed to check in at my apartment the day after the quake.  Everything was on the floor, including the PS3.  I consider myself a pretty hard-core gamer and badly wanted to power up the machine to check if Demon Souls hadn't been dislodged inside and was still in working order.  But my building had a big sign posted outside saying that it was unsafe, so I hastily cleaned up, packed some clothes and returned to my gf's.

It's been almost a month since the disaster.  The tsunami has taken out several towns that I used to teach at with my former job and one where my current job is, Tagajo-city, just north of Sendai.  Things in Sendai had almost recovered until last night.  We just had another 7.4M yesterday.  Or at least, by the Japanese standard it's a 7.4.  The US agency has listed it as a 7.1M.  8.8...9.0...7.4...7.1...it makes no difference anymore.  I now determine the magnitude based on whether or not my Playstation falls on the floor.  Any quake that doesn't toss it on the floor is nothing to worry about, anything that does might be natural disaster territory.  So that's twice now that my Playstation has made the trip to the floor, and it's still in working order.

Based on the shit month I've had and the lack of news about some of my students at the kindergarten that I was teaching at in Tagajo-City and the terrible disaster porn marathon the news has become about Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, I have turned to video games to keep me occupied and calm my nerves.  I consider myself a hard-core gamer, and now, because I have so much time on my hands, and to spite the media and that stupid leaky power plant that is only 100km away from my current location, I have moved on to Fallout: New Vegas.  In Japanese.  On a broken HD monitor.  But a working Playstation.

Ganbarou Sendai!  Ganbarou Tohoku!  Ganbarou Japan!