Friday morning March 11, I woke up to the news that there had been a record 8.9 magnitude earthquake off of the northeast coast of Japan. With three days left of Spring break, my family had planned to leave for the North Carolina mountains but instead spent the morning fixated on CNN and shaky, amateur videos of the tsunami wave, triggered by the earthquake, flooding coastal towns. My mom, who is from Izumo, Japan, was shocked and had been awake since 4 a.m. when she heard the news on the radio. For the rest of the weekend, she woke early to watch the news and checked the Internet when we returned to the hotel. She had been in no mindset to vacation, she said.
The disaster upset me less but hit closer to home than other international disasters like the tsunami in Indonesia or the earthquake in Haiti. Towns like Sendai looked much like Izumo, my mother’s hometown in western Japan where I had spent long, humid, lazy summers growing up. I felt like I had walked those same narrow streets that were now flooded, and the houses with shiny, shingled roofs that were lifted off of their foundations looked just like my grandparents’ home. I understood the panicked voices in the background of videos, including a woman who repeated in Japanese, “it’s getting swept away,” in a desperate voice as the waters rolled in.
Just a week before the earthquake, my mom had bought our plane tickets to Japan for May, but as the nuclear reactors melted down and radiation blew toward Tokyo, we deliberated whether or not to go. The Duke International Travel Oversight Committee put Japan on its travel advisory list March 15. International students in Japan left, as required by ITOC. One Duke student I knew decided not to do her internship in Japan. But by mid-April, our friends in Tokyo said the city was safe, and because I hadn’t seen my grandparents in two years, we decided to go.
In Tokyo, I met with friends and family and heard about their experiences. The afternoon of the quake, they had been scattered around Tokyo—my aunt at work, my friend, Haruka, at the hair salon, my mom’s friend in a bathroom at the train station, her son in the street nearby and another friend, Yuki, at a rickety old hotel in nearby Nagano. They said that when the earthquake, which was later upped to a 9.0 on the Richter scale, hit at around 2:46 p.m., the ground rocked more than it shook. Yuki described it like the rocking of a boat, nearly nauseating, which had gone on for about three long minutes. “Usually earthquakes are bad but quick,” the friend’s son explained. “But this one lasted longer and kept getting worse. That’s when I thought, this isn’t a normal earthquake. This is bad.”
After the earthquake, my mom’s friend left the station and was shocked to find so many others had evacuated to the street, afraid another tremor might come. Across town, Haruka had finished getting her hair cut and went to her part-time job at American Apparel. When the trains stopped running, she, like many others in Tokyo, spent the night in a back room of the store with her co-workers and boxes of clothes. With electricity and running water, she was better off than some other parts of the city where the earthquake had knocked out the electricity.
In Nagano, Yuki boarded a bus after the quake with the school group she was traveling with and headed back to Tokyo. She only learned about the tsunami at a rest stop along the way and worried about her family in Tokyo, which is not far from the ocean. But with cell phones out of service, she wasn’t able to get through and spent the next 12 hours on the bus, stuck in traffic, wondering if her family was safe. “That was the scariest part of the whole thing” she remembered. “Not knowing.” Luckily, her family was unharmed.
The day after the earthquake, people were shaken but things were fairly normal. Haruka was called in to work, and people went to shop. “It was only when news of the nuclear meltdown came in that things started getting crazy,” Haruka said. Partial meltdowns, explosions and leaks of radioactive gas from three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station caused the worst nuclear emergency since Chernobyl. After that, American Apparel closed for a week. Supermarket shelves emptied, and bottled water became scarce. My aunt went to my grandparents’ house to escape the radiation. Rolling blackouts began. Yuki recalled walking home in total darkness one night, noticing for the first time where all the street lights were along the way.
But a month and a half after the most powerful quake to ever hit the country, the city I saw had returned to normal. There were still some reminders of the recent disaster, like the small aftershock the morning after I arrived and the storefront notice of dimmed lighting to save energy in the café where I met Yuki and Haruka. In the city-wide effort to reduce electricity, escalators were stopped periodically, and some small neighborhood stores turned their neon signs off at night. Even so, the rolling blackouts had stopped. Radiation levels were lower. For the most part, Tokyo seemed much like it had been two years ago.
My mom’s hometown on the west coast was affected even less. My grandparents hadn’t felt the earthquake on the 11th, much less any aftershocks, and the radiation from Fukushima hardly ever reached the city. Water and batteries had sold out briefly when people sent supplies east, but now the only trace of the disaster in daily life was in conversation or in the news.
This normalcy was not what I expected. I had thought there would a noticeable shift in the country—some indication that this country had seen tragedy—but the places I went were too far from the hardest hit areas to see such a difference. It was a strange experience, almost uncomfortable, to know that at one end of such a small country more than 24,000 were dead or missing, and tens of thousands of people had been forced out of their homes and are now living in temporary shelters. People’s lives have been completely overturned, while here on the other side, these towns lay undisturbed. But this discrepancy drives home the fact that this peaceful life is not a given. That forces out of our control can sweep it away. That we are fortunate to wake up and expect our lives to carry on as normal.
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