Earthquake : 2:46pm, Magnitude 9.1, 450 km NE of our location
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| Epicentre of the quake |
We were in Sagami Ono (near SW Tokyo) after looking for a new buggy for my son in Machida and failing, as the old one had chosen the exact moment that I was pushing him across some train tracks to fall apart. We'd basically given up and decided to separate - my wife would push my son around in the Dept Store buggy until he fell asleep and then go home, and I would go back to Machida by train to figure out some movie scheduling (Ripped).
I went down under the department store building to the platform and as I stepped on the train I noticed everyone was glancing up the carriage towards the driver's area. I thought the train had jerked a bit due to an electrical fault and they were looking up to confirm, but as I got on and sat down, the carriage then started jerking around as if it was a kind of fairground attraction. I thought at first the driver was doing something with the controls, but then it dawned on me that it must be an earthquake as trains don't tend to have 'sideways thrusters'.
Safer on train or off? I decided to leap off onto the platform and stand next to a pillar, although in retrospect it was probably safer to stay on the train to avoid falling panels etc, but fortunately nothing fell down from above. I waited for a while for the shaking to stop and then ran upstairs and out the gates to try and find my wife and son. It's funny, but I didn't feel scared or worried, I just thought right, this is it : find the brood and check they're all safe. So I ran around while trying to contact them by email or calling, all the while my cellphone flatly refusing to be any use whatsoever, like, 'you're having a laugh, right, mate?'
People had flooded out of the department store but others were still in the supermarket milling around finishing their shopping. There was hardly any damage except a water pipe had burst in the ceiling of one of the lower floors and on one outside corner of the building some of the decorative tiles had crumbled off. I wandered around both main exits, inside and outside the supermarket, and tried to think where she would have gone. The lifts had already stopped, and I hoped everyone had been taken off them but was unable to ask an official to confirm, as that would have been a nightmare. Still, I decided it was unlikely anyone was stuck in a lift as there were no-one panicking nearby any of them. I tried to gain access to an upper floor, but was then asked to go back down by a shop assistant. I told them I was looking for my family and he said that everyone was being asked to leave the building so they'd be outside.
I went to check if the tricycle was still where we'd left it, because if it was gone it would have meant they'd left and gone home already and I could stop worrying, but to my dismay it was still there. I ran back to the department store complex, where a tonne of people were still milling about outside. No-one was panicking, just waiting. Some talking on cellphones but mine was still nonfunctional. I went back up to the doors to see water dripping out of the ceiling from the burst pipe and wandered around some more trying not to panic.
Eventually I decided to check a wider circle and helped another woman with a buggy down some stairs to ground level (as I know what a pain it can be to carry them when there's no lifts working) and walked round trying my phone again, when finally I heard my wife call my name from near the convenience store. Thankfully she and my son were both fine.
We returned to our apartment talking about what happened, seeing the odd wall that had fallen down, but as yet still unaware of the magnitude or location of the epicentre of the earthquake or what would come next.
When we arrived at our small apartment which was on the first floor of a four apartment block, the rooms were a complete mess. Things had been thrust off the shelves and scattered around like it had recently played host to a poltergeist convention. Satisfyingly the anti-earthquake measures I’d installed above the tall glass cabinet to stop it from falling over during this exact kind of eventuality (four curtain rods screwed in between its upper surface and the ceiling) had worked and it was still upright and in one piece.
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| My room after the earthquake |
A year or two before I’d watched a Japanese disaster movie called Japan Sinks, in which thousands of people die by earthquake, flooding, tidal wave, erupting volcano etc as Japan is pulled under the sea by shifting tectonic plates, and I immediately went out to stock up on emergency equipment from Tokyu Hands including a white safety helmet. As we began tidying up I put it on my wife’s head despite her joking laughter, and soon enough when she opened an overhead cupboard above the sink a metal flask fell out and bounced off her helmet.
Fortunately we were far enough from the coast to be out of reach of any possible tsunamis but nevertheless I tried to keep an eye on what was going on in the media. Compared to many others, we were extremely lucky. We didn’t know it yet but we’d just experienced the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan and fourth biggest worldwide.
What we also didn’t know was that a 14m high tsunami had washed over the walls at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and knocked out their emergency generators whose job had been to continue cooling the reactors after their fission reactions had been automatically shut down on detection of the earthquake.
