It began as a normal day
11 years ago today I was finishing up a one-week intensive make-up class for my university students in Japan. It was the final day of the session and my students were all sitting at their desks reviewing their notes to prepare for their final exam. At about 2:45pm, the building shook very slightly, and a few heads looked up at me.
“Sensei,” one student asked with a grin, “if there is an earthquake, will we be excused from our exam?”
I laughed and told him to get back to his studying.
If we were at home or anywhere near a computer or television, we would have seen the emergency earthquake alert that was broadcast over all stations.
Mild earthquakes were a regular thing in Japan. We had them so often that we barely thought about them. They always settled after a few shakes. Sometimes they felt like a slight swaying, and sometimes they were a brisk rattle. The string hanging from a light fixture swaying back and forth would be the only confirmation that we’d felt anything at all. I’d experienced so many of these that I wasn’t the slightest bit alarmed when our classroom shook ever so slightly.
And then it wasn’t slight.
No laughing matter
About 30 seconds after the student’s ominous joke, the room began to rattle and shake more vigorously. All the students looked up now. I stood at the front of the classroom wondering what I was supposed to do. Then the shaking got worse and I shouted for everyone to get under their desks. We were on the 3rd floor of a concrete building, and luckily there were no shelves or other objects in the room to fall over. The overhead lights swung and the power went out. The shaking went on for many minutes – much longer than the usual 30-60 seconds that we were accustomed to for smaller tremors.
When the shaking finally seemed to calm down (I don’t think it really stopped completely) an announcement came to stay where we were until someone came to direct us to a safe gathering area. Shortly after that a school administrator came and directed us to one of the large central courtyards. It was officially a semester break at the university, so there were only about 100 students milling around. Everyone was in shock. Cel service was down. We didn’t know where the epicentre was. The ground shook with aftershocks every few minutes. Some were strong enough that students felt safer sitting on the ground. The constant rocking of the ground was making some people feel nauseous.
I received an email from my brother in Canada – it was the middle of the night for him but he’d just seen an earthquake alert on the news. He thought that it was too far from me to be of concern but he wanted to be sure. When he learned that I was within the ‘severe’ range of the quake, he stayed up and sent me regular updates of what he was seeing on the news. Nobody else around me had any information, so I was letting my colleagues and students know that the epicentre was further north. Then the news of the tsunami came. Then we heard of a fire at an oil refinery not far from us. Without local cel service, my intermittent link to my brother was our only source of information for the first couple of hours.
Settling in
After a couple of hours, what little light we had from the cloud covered sun was fading. We were ushered into one classroom that had been cleared as structurally safe. I noticed that some of my students were still studying for their final exam. I let them know that as far as I was concerned, they had all passed their course and I would not be issuing a final exam. Honestly, I had no idea what the school would decide on that point, but I didn’t want my students worrying about anything other than their safety and their families.
As the sun set and it became clear that the aftershocks were not going to stop, the trains were not going to start running, and the power was not going to come back on, the school announced that all students who did not live within walking distance of the school should remain on campus for the night. Staff were all asked to stay as well, to help supervise the students and also to show support for them.
The school had a fairly new Pharmacy Department which had the newest and thus most structurally sound building powered by a generator system to maintain the medical equipment and refrigerators used by the program. We all moved into the building and found some space in whatever rooms we could to set up for the night. Each of us was provided with an instant noodle ‘dinner’, soft drink, and sweet bun from the school convenience store. I joined a group of other professors in an office room where we each had a cubicle desk to sleep under and a small television was set up so we could monitor the news broadcasts. The building shook with the aftershocks all through the night.
Anxious night
Some time around 7pm I managed to get a hold of my father-in-law to confirm that he had my sons with him. They were 8 and 10 years old and were still at school at the time of the quake. I knew that the disaster protocol would keep all students on the school grounds until they were each picked up personally by a parent or guardian and my father-in-law was the designated pick-up person if neither parent was able to be there. They had returned to the house but within hours were given evacuation orders by the town.
Our home was in a small coastal town and the tsunami alert was high. All residents were sent to either the community gymnasium, located on the second floor of the building, or the elementary school gymnasium which was further inland. My kids were at the community gym with their grandparents and all our neighbours. Their dad was out on patrol all night with the village volunteer fire department. I didn’t get to speak to him until the next day.
None of us slept that night.
Assessing the damage
In the morning we were given the all clear to enter other campus buildings and I was finally able to retrieve my belongings from the staff lounge. When we confirmed that the roads were clear and the flood waters had subsided, I was able to drive to the gym and find my kids.
We all stayed one more night at the gym and were able to return to the house the next day.
Being quite a bit south of the main disaster area and somewhat sheltered by a small peak of land, the tsunami wasn’t as devastating in our village. Still, the waters crossed the forest break that separated the town from the beach and invaded a few blocks inland. Our house was 2 blocks inland from where the water stopped. One of my son’s classmates had fish in the street in front of her home. Houses closest to the beach were flooded half way up their ground floor.
None of the town had power for the first few days. Half the town had water. We had water. My father-in-law spent each day driving around the neighbourhood checking on everyone and delivering water to anyone who needed it. Gas stations rationed fuel and everyone lined up for their share.
Aftershocks
Aftershocks remained strong for days. Nerves were on edge as our ‘earthquake warning alarms’ sounded regularly from our cel phones. We slept in our clothes. Twice we were given evacuation orders again, but both times we were able to return home a few hours later. My father-in-law drove me through town to show me the exact route he would take if we needed to evacuate further than the local gymnasiums and head inland to higher ground. We agreed with our friends and neighbours that any and all children encountered in such a situation would be picked up on the way out of town, and we would worry about finding parents and families later.
It was weeks before I was able to sleep in pyjamas. I wore a waist pouch containing my ID, bank card, emergency cash, and car keys at all times for the next year or more.
In the days following the quake, we followed the demise of the nuclear power plant north of us. I sent the kids to school in masks. We ate a lot of seaweed. (A famous doctor in Nagasaki discovered that he and his nurses were the only residents who didn’t suffer from radiation poisoning after the nuclear bomb attack, and it was attributed to the diet heavy in seaweed that he fed his staff).
Coming together
Through all of this, we never had a feeling of doom or hopelessness. We were much more fortunate than the towns and cities near the epicentre that were wiped out by the tsunami. Shops in our area ran low on supplies but nobody hoarded. Everyone worked together to get through whatever we needed to get through. In Tokyo, a friend was less fortunate, as the shops there completely ran out of food and supplies, so I sent him a box of food, toilet paper, and a hard hat.
It was a horrible experience, but we were fortunate. I hadn’t realized how much it affected me until years later when I saw video footage of the quake. Even now, the videos bring me back to those days and I can feel the anxiety returning. Any tremor of the ground (including when the ground shakes from the roadworks currently going on in our street) cause a momentary panic. And yet I consider myself lucky for having survived when so many lost their lives.