Little earthquakes

[starlady]

Yesterday morning I dreamed that a major earthquake struck Kyoto while I was there. In the dream I was in some teahouse-type place down around Gojô-zaka, which slid partway down the hillside secondary to all the shaking--the earthquake was a 6 or a 7--with us inside it. In the dream I had that resigned nervousness of knowing that you're either going to live or die and there's nothing you can do about it either way so you just have to wait to see what it will be. Afterward once we confirmed our identities and being alive with the authorities (note: this is not how earthquake protocols actually go, in Japan) my primary emotion was annoyance that I was going to have to walk all the way home from Gojô to Matsugasaki.

I did feel a few earthquakes while I was in Kyoto this time; they were all 1s or 2s. I've at least gotten over my clueless habit of thinking, when I lived closer to the fault that runs under Kyoto University, of thinking the jolt quakes it throws off fairly frequently--a 3 or 4, lasting a second or less--were cars driving into my building.

---

I went to Tokyo for the weekend three weeks ago. I was there for about sixty hours, all told, and there were three aftershocks that I and my friends H & H felt, one of them large enough to wake us up from a sound sleep at three or four on Sunday morning (so a 3 or a 4). Worryingly, that one didn't send an alert to my friend H's smartphone. My friend H, who moved to Tokyo the week after the earthquake, still has an ancient cell phone that she bought used when we arrived in Japan four years ago, and can't get the earthquake alerts, but she was telling me how, in the weeks afterward when subway service was initially restored, they couldn't keep the subway to a schedule (!) because of the aftershocks, and how she'd be riding around and the cell phone of everyone in the compartment would go off with the earthquake alert ringtone and the train would stop and she'd just have to clutch the bar and hope that it wasn't a big one.

I suppose I'm telling this story to make a point about how much fortitude going about your daily life can require at times, in a place like Tokyo, and I do hand it to the people there who've endured blackouts, energy saving, and aftershocks for months on end. But the Japanese government recently confirmed what, I think, everyone had long known, that the 12-mile exclusion zone around Fukushima Daiichi won't be habitable again for a long time, if ever, and people who lived there won't be allowed to go back, and I've seen the photos and heard the stories from people who've been volunteering in or visiting the tsunami zone (Google Maps/Earth of Minamisanriku-chô is currently using satellite photos from April), and…Tokyo is so far from being the worst off it almost doesn't merit mentioning in the same sentence.

When the big one hits Tokyo, though, it'll be a different story.

Comments

[epershand]

Oh man, this post just hit me really hard--it's gorgeously written. And fascinating timing for the US east coast, I suddenly see in hindsight.

[starlady]

Thank you.

And yes, today of all days being the day I actually decided to write it down--kind of eerie, huh?

[rodo]

Your timing on this one was... curious.

[melannen]

+1. O.o

[starlady]

Yeah, now I feel prophetic. I take it all's well on your end?

[melannen]

Shaken up, but nothing worse than one broken pot! Though I've heard rumors of more serious damage in my area.

[starlady]

Glad to hear it!

Apparently in Jersey the earthquake actually shut my parrot up, which is a statement right there, but it sounds like it was just shaking, little if any damage.

[starlady]

Yes, it was, wasn't it? Quite honestly it doesn't make me feel any better about living on the Hayward fault.

[rodo]

Isn't the big one overdue too?

[starlady]

Oh yes, long overdue.

[zeborah]

Afterward once we confirmed our identities and being alive with the authorities (note: this is not how earthquake protocols actually go, in Japan)

It's a reasonably protocol, though. Not necessarily with the authorities, they'll be swamped, but my personal earthquake protocol is to a) get under something until it stops shaking; b) get out into a clear area; c) get the message out via text/twitter that I'm safe; and then d) start thinking about anything else.

I *so* want an earthquake alert system set up here. People have been working on it, but something's slowing up implementation.

[starlady]

I think towards the end of the dream I was thinking, in that semi-lucid dreaming way, that I should pull out my cell phone and email people that I was alive.

As one of my friends cheerfully reminded me the other day, most earthquake deaths (at least in advanced industrialized countries) tend to occur after the actual quake, which was not necessarily reflected in my dream.

I really need to get going on that evacuation kit/go bag. *makes list*

[zeborah]

I need to tidy my go bag from last time I used it. Most things are back in there, but one tweaks things between disasters, y'know? Like I think I've still got a pair of pants in there even though I've decided that I prefer skirts when hygiene is awkward. (I also prefer skirts when hygiene is not awkward, but for personal aesthetic reasons rather than practical ones.)

I do keep my go-everywhere bag tidy though (cellphone, wallet, keys, iPod with radio function, ereader, notebook and pen, asthma medicine, chapstick, mints), and have a good amount of stored water in both the pantry and the garage. Also a left-over chemical toilet. :-)