Tohoku earthquake 1 year later. What are your memories?

[Davey]

In about 1,5 week it will be 1 year after the devastating earthquake that caused an even worse tsunami. People have lost their homes, family members, dreams and hopes, and are not sure what will happen in the future. They say another big earthquake is likely to hit the Tokyo area or/and the Kansai area in the upcoming years.

Where were you when it happened, and how did it changed you? Did you or your community organize anything to support the people in the Tohoku area, and do you still want to visit Japan?

I was having a break at work and was sitting at a table in a food court. I thought I was getting sick because I felt my body moving from left to right and the other way, although I remember others were standing up I thought I was just getting sick and didn't care to much about them. When I went back to work my co-workers told me that there was an earthquake and that things fell of the shelves on the 7th floors 100 yen shop. I looked on my friends Iphone to see the size of the earthquake and thought it was some kind of mistake from the agency.

When I came home 1 hours later I saw my wife in front of the TV and she had tears in her eyes while she watched the tsunami destroying the houses as you would only see in movies or in dreams. The days after we watched the news almost 24 hours and made sure our family members in Tokyo were safe. We tried to buy batteries and a radio but even those were sold out for almost a month here in the Kansai area, we changed the way we slept by not sleeping underneath the TV and took the clock off just to make sure that if an earthquake would strike it wouldn't fall on our heads. My parents were worried even though we were so far away from the actual quake and the disaster at Fukushima, what if a Tsunami would come here, how about the nuclear clouds, etc... My dad almost ordered me to come home.

This is sure nothing compared with some others here on the board that have/had family members in the area or were a lot closer to it and are still suffering from daily/weekly earthquakes, but it's big for me because I have never been in this situation before that I have to care about these things. It is sure that another big one is coming in the upcoming years, so we should better prepare for it.

Please share us your stories and maybe even what we could do to reduce the damage/casualties.

 

[thomas]

I remember I was tutoring two private students that afternoon at our office in Ebisu. It was puzzling to watch the expressions on their faces, from initial surprise to increasing alarm to outright panic - mirroring my very own sentiments. The whole building evacuated, streets filled, agitation everywhere, and there were hundreds of mobile phones that wouldn't connect. When the second tremblor struck, I was next to the Ebisu Station building. It was terrifying to see those enormous buildings sway and creak for minutes. Surprisingly, we finished the first tutoring session after things had calmed down, and - even more astonishingly - my other student arrived by car.

By 6pm it had become obvious to us that this hadn't been your "ordinary big quake". Streets were still crowded, trains still interrupted and people started walking, walking, everywhere those moving crowds walking. My motorised student took our two staff members home by car, a good deed that would take him a few hours to accomplish. I blessed my bicycle, squeezing through endless queues of cars, scooters and throngs of shaken, but disciplined pedestrians. The general atmosphere of levelheadedness and discipline in the light of a disaster the magnitude of which hadn't dawned on anyone yet, was remarkable.

I reached home shortly after 8pm. My wife, on crutches due to a bad cycling accident, had gone out to visit her parents in Yokohama and wasn't able to return home anymore. Like in Davey's case I did receive the first phone calls from folks back in Europe that night, with increasing frequency and pressure to at least consider a "temporary holiday back home" once the dimensions of the quake and the tsunami became more visible and the Fukushima incident unfolded.

The next two weeks were surreal: no work, glued to the TV and the internet in shock and disbelief, familiarising with exotic units of dosage measurement - microsievert, becquerel and curie -, scavenging local and not so local combinis and supermarkets for staple food and cycling into a deserted Tokyo to pick up iodine tablets from the embassy.

It's almost been a year now, some things seem to be back to normal, others certainly aren't. We have learned, hopefully: to be better prepared next time, and to show more humility. Our lives can change in a wink of an eye.

 

[zoomingjapan]

I think none of us will ever be able to forget this day!

It was my day off. I was sitting in front of my laptop, working on something, sipping a cup of coffee.
It was a sunny and calm day.
Suddenly my inbox exploded with e-mails and Twitter messages asking me if I was ok.
I was wondering what was wrong, but being in Japan I already figured that there was probably an earthquake, so I turned on the TV to check what was going on.
I dropped the remote control when I saw the pictures of the tsunami .. taking away huge ships and whatnot.

I just stood in front of the TV for a few minutes, unable to do anything. At that time I thought it was just a small part of Japan that was affected and quickly replied to everybody that I was ok.
I kept watching the news and reading all the updates on Twitter. It became more and more obvious that it wasn't just a small part of Japan that was affected.
I started to worry about my Japanese and non-Japanese friends in Tokyo. Luckily I didn't know anybody in Tohoku at that time.
I couldn't get a hold of them. As we all know the phone net had broken down at that time. I had to keep worrying until much later.
Luckily all of them were safe.

Later I heard from a German friend that one of her friends in Tokyo had died, though.
Yes, she was one of the very few dead people in Tokyo ...

I have to admit that I was EXTREMELY lucky! Where I used to live was nowhereland, super deep inaka (countryside).
I always complained about living so far away from everything, but this time I was so glad!
We didn't feel ANYTHING at all. We were one of the few places in Japan that were totally unaffected by the earthquake.
Also, no tsunami warning for where I lived as there was no ocean nearby.

The big problem became obvious the next day: the radiation.
Being German I've been through this already once back in the 80s with Chernobyl!
I knew how this could end and panicked like so many of us did.
Yet, I didn't just pack my stuff and leave. I was prepared that if things would have gotten worse or super dangerous I could take action, bit luckily we didn't have to.

The few days when nobody knew what would happen in Fukushima were really, really HORRIBLE!
My friends and family back home asked me to come back home. They couldn't understand my decision to stay.


......


Over a year later I finally got a chance to visit Tohoku!
I recommend you visit it, too! It's so beautiful there!
I also went to Ishinomaki City ... one of the places that got destroyed very badly by the tsunami!
Even one year later it looks horrible and you can imagine how powerful the tsunami must have been!

The people there haven't seen many foreigners around in a long time!
They were very happy to see me and they told me a lot about what happened back then. Very sad!
But the people there haven't given up! Absolutely great! You should visit, too!

 

[Wardie1993]

i remember seeing it on news and wishing Japan luck and a speedy recovery