Yesterday was I day i'll certainly never forget. At 2:46 I was sitting in my Japanese Politics class on the top floor of B building when I started to feel my chair shake. Initially I thought my friend, Alanna, was kicking my chair and i turned around to tell her to stop. When i did, though, I saw she was also looking around in terror. At that point I noticed that the blinds on the windows were shaking fairly profusely against the window. It felt as though we were sitting in a boat on the ocean. The feeling of seasickness passed through everyone as the building began to sway. Though reportedly the earthquake only lasted a few minutes, i'm pretty sure our building swayed for almost 15 minutes. Now consider how far Nagoya is from the epicenter near Sendai. I can only imagine the feeling of the people who felt it there. Following the earthquake, an announcement came over the loud speakers at my University stating that it was only about a magnitude 3 earthquake (in Nagoya), and not to panic. We were able to feel the aftershocks for the remainder of the class, and I was all too happy to leave and get to solid ground when my class was finally over. One of my friends, Joe Blanche, was able to contact his girlfriend to get some information about what had just happened. Until his phone cut out, he was able to gather that the earthquake had indeed been a lot worse than we had thought, and that fires were ablaze in and around Tokyo.
Originally planning on going out that night, I decided instead that getting more information on this disaster would be a good idea, so I headed home. Once home, I immediately found tons of information about what had happened and promptly told my roommates. This was of grave concern for them because 2 of them were planning on flying through Narita (Tokyo's airport) the following day. Ben in fact was planning on getting on a train only a few hours later when I told him what had happened. Spending the remainder of the night trying to get as much information as possible, it was hard to think of what we should do. One of my Japanese roommates, Yappi, ran us through emergency protocol for our area if another earthquake were to strike. What people fear here is that the series of recent earthquakes will lead to the Tōkai Earthquake. "The Tōkai earthquakes are major earthquakes that have occurred regularly with an interval of 100 to 150 years in the Tōkai region of Japan. The Tokai segment has been struck by earthquakes in 1498, 1605, 1707 and 1854. Given the historic regularity of these earthquakes, another is expected in the near future."
As for now, all I can do is simply wait and see what will unfold in the wake of this disaster. My heart goes out to all my friends and the families of people affected by this disaster.
