Tohoku Earthquake

No doubt everyone has heard about the earthquake that hit Japan yesterday. When it first hit none of us had any idea how devastating it would end up being. Luckily my area escaped without any obvious damage although we did experience quite the jolt.

I was not in school at the time because all of the senior high school JETs were at a meeting with the prefectural government. We had just started our "10 minute break" when it started. In the beginning we all thought it was rather exciting and no one was overly worried. Gunma is known as one of the safest prefectures in Japan because it is located inland, is surrounded by mountains and rarely experiences earthquakes. Our excitement began to turn into concern as the quake grew in strength and lasted somewhere between 2.5 and 3 minutes. It felt like an eternity as the occasional bassy groan could be heard. There were 25 foreigners and 1 Japanese man in the meeting room and I tip my hat to him for managing to stay calm as all of our eyes turned his way for guidance and to gauge how concerned we should be. We resumed our meeting as we were rocked by near-continuous aftershocks for the rest of the afternoon. It was a rather surreal experience.

At the end of the meeting we were told that all train service had been suspended until further notice and that we might be stranded in downtown Maebashi until the following day. A group of friends and I decided to go and grab dinner at the nearby mall while we figured out what was happening and what our game plan should be. After walking for 25 minutes we found that the mall had closed as a precautionary measure so we continued on to one of my favourite Indian restaurants. When we were shown to our table the waitress told us to duck under the table if/when we had another aftershock.

News anchors weren't taking any chances but if you weren't at the big desk you were SOL

It was while we were waiting for our food that we realised just how devastating and wide-spread the effects of the earthquake were. Many of us worried as we tried to contact friends in the worst hit areas and our distress was compounded by the fact that our cells were proving useless as the system was overloaded with people trying to get in touch with loved ones.

Lee, Jen, Sean, Alice and Grant

I ended up spending the evening with 3 other stranded JETs at Sean and Alice's and we set up our own little refugee camp in their living room. None of us got much sleep as we were rocked with aftershocks throughout the night. Two of them registered over 7.0 on the Richter scale. It felt as though I was woken up every 5 minutes as aftershock after aftershock shook us. The hours of shaking actually started to turn my stomach and made it even harder to get any sleep.

I managed to make it home around 8:30am and was relieved to find that the only thing that was broken was a picture frame.