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earthquakes ..??

Suki-Yaki

焼肉わが家が一番
22 Jun 2004
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What would you do if you were encountered by an earthquake ?? Or have you already been to one ?


As for me I have been to 2 earthquakes by now , but all were kinda small , infact , one was only the effects of that huge earthquake that's happened somewhere about a month ago.

So I was thinking , are we foreign people living in Japan really that trained for Japanese natural disasters ?? Would we act similary wise as a Jap, or even better 😌 ?? I personally feel that a Japanese person would act rather in instinct towards such a disaster and would probably do the right thing he's learned throughout the years of adapting to this land. But what about a gaijin who'se only read like a few booklets and heard some advices ..??


If a huge earthquake occurs , I'm gonna hold my kanji text book over my head. That for sure will protect me from all and any natural disaster !! :p
 
i was in an earthquake when i was there once. it was only a small one, and i was in an english class. everyone else wasn't hiding under their desks or anything. they all had a mixture of: :? ☝ :unsure: on their faces, same as me :p
 
personally feel that a Japanese person would act rather in instinct towards such a disaster and would probably do the right thing he's learned throughout the years of adapting to this land. But what about a gaijin who'se only read like a few booklets and heard some advices ..??


WELL... What about the gaijins that grew up in other earthquake prone areas? How about the millions of people living in Southern Cali, to name a few? Also, Japanese (and others) have been conditioned to react a certain way to earthquakes. It's not instinct.
 
I have never been in an earthquake, and living where I am at now it will most likely never happen. I would act in a manner to protect/save myself and anyone around me being I am a quick thinker but other then that I would be clueless to tell the truth.
 
From having lived in California for a year and a half, and in Japan for five years, I've been through several, and usually I just closed my eyes and went back to sleep.
 
mad pierrot said:
WELL... What about the gaijins that grew up in other earthquake prone areas? How about the millions of people living in Southern Cali, to name a few? Also, Japanese (and others) have been conditioned to react a certain way to earthquakes. It's not instinct.

Well, even having lived in so cal for 22 years, and japan for 7 months, my initial reaction is still "what the hell is going on?" That said, all major quakes that I've been a part of have either occured when I was outdoors, or in a building with few moving parts, like a basketball gym. Like Bob, the typical move is to calmly sit through it, and go back to whatever you were doing.

Unless you sit through a major quake, you won't react quickly enough to do anything. They last for a few seconds, the first of which I always spend trying to figure out if the room's shaking or if my neighbors are jumping up and down and causing a ruckus. Large quakes last longer, and you'll find yourself moving out of harm's way as a basic preservation tactic, I would assume.
 
yup, ive been throuigh countless quakes, most of the time i sleep through them, for some reason they like early morning. alot of them are too short and small to even worry about. the bigger ones though...
 
I'm always afraid...

That the next "big" one is going to happen when I'm....uh, using the facilities. Wouldn't that be horrible? "We found his body with it's pants down, it looks like he was reading a magazine..."



😌
 
Yeah, Earthquakes suck. What you're supposed to do:

-Leave shoes under your bed (very important!)
-Have lots of Water in bottles AND toilet paper for the love of God
-A Flashlight
-Know where your local hinanjou is
-Stand in a door way or the ofuro if you can.
-Don't place heavy things on shelves. My wife even took down some gachagacha figures I had up on my air conditioner. I guess you start thinking about it more after you're in a big one. She was in Osaka when Kobe hit... (the City, not the basketball player)
 
I have read on a brochure that you'll have to first look for the safety of yourself , and then the safety of your family/surroundings.

I don7t know if I could ignore my beloved ones and just look for the safety of myself , I can't see how could this be the correct thing to do ??
 
My wife, who grew up in Kyushu, tells me that, according to traditional wisdom, the safest place to be in an earthquake is in a bamboo forest. I guess that here in Iowa, since there is no bamboo we will have to run into a corn field. :)
 
This is gonna sound really heartless thinking of all the people that have died in quakes, but I really wanna experience a big one atleast once.
 
jeisan said:
id say the safest place to be in an earthquake would be an airplane. :p

It would be just my luck that if I was in a plane, it would be on a cloudy night and the control tower would get taken out by the quake.
 
little earthquakes are just kinda fun... unless you happen to be caught in a particularly delicate bit of painting... and the bristol board skitters under your brush dictating its own terms of brush-contact...
last couple of years though in so cal there's been more reason to be worried about forest fires than earthquakes!
 
Well, living here on the east coast of the U.S., I've never experienced an earthquake, and, frankly speaking, after everything I'd seen, heard and read about San Francisco in '89 (Right in the middle of the World Series!), Northridge (California) in '94 and the Kobe disaster in '95, I can live without it, thankyouverymuch!
 
Suki-Yaki said:
I have read on a brochure that you'll have to first look for the safety of yourself , and then the safety of your family/surroundings.

I don7t know if I could ignore my beloved ones and just look for the safety of myself , I can't see how could this be the correct thing to do ??

Same thing as an airplane. "Put your oxygen mask on first. THEN assist small children." The reasoning: You can't help them if you're unconscious/dead.
 
having been born in socal for 17 years earthquakes are kinda fun when you know what to do first and what to watch that only happens so often. i've been through probly over a dozen earthquakes and i lived in whittier during the famous whittier earthquake that reached a 6.3 i think. my first reaction to that quake was to crawl under the table (as with any quake that last atleast 4 seconds) but it was fun watching my 60 gallon acquarium tip and shake from side to side with the fish in it (luckily it didn't fall down).
 
Bob in Iowa said:
My wife, who grew up in Kyushu, tells me that, according to traditional wisdom, the safest place to be in an earthquake is in a bamboo forest. I guess that here in Iowa, since there is no bamboo we will have to run into a corn field. :)

Bob, my husband told me the same thing. He said that the bambo made the ground strong because of the massive root system it has. Is it really true?
 
Well here's one other thing to think about. One of the main killers in Earthquakes is objects squashing you. How many tall buildings are there near bamboo forrests? The only problem though, is that the fires usually kill more people than the Earthquakes (look up the states on the Kantou Daishinsai -- it's shocking). Last I checked, bamboo was flammable. Then again, I'm not a panda bear.
 
I get a picture of some guy standing in the middle of this bamboo forest, swaying from side to side, being flogged like a little monkey by the swaying bamboo of which he is beset on all sides.
 
kirei_na_me said:
Bob, my husband told me the same thing. He said that the bambo made the ground strong because of the massive root system it has. Is it really true?

That is the underlying logic, that with the intricate root system the ground is less likely to give way underneath a person. While I have no firsthand knowledge of seeking refuge in a bamboo forest during a big quake it does make sense, and I think that I would trust the accumulated wisdom of many centuries of people dealing with earthquakes on this one. :)
 
Bob in Iowa said:
My wife, who grew up in Kyushu, tells me that, according to traditional wisdom, the safest place to be in an earthquake is in a bamboo forest. I guess that here in Iowa, since there is no bamboo we will have to run into a corn field. :)

I think a corn field is just as safe though, as no tall buildings can fall upon people during a quake.
If I had to choose between a corn field and a bamboo forest, I think I would choose a corn field and have a snooze, although there are theories that bamboo forests are safe...:D 😊
 
Miss_apollo7 said:
I think a corn field is just as safe though, as no tall buildings can fall upon people during a quake.
If I had to choose between a corn field and a bamboo forest, I think I would choose a corn field and have a snooze, although there are theories that bamboo forests are safe...:D 😊

I'll take the corn field, Miss A! If but for no other reason than I can have something to eat after the quake....
:D
 
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