Wow, today was just PACKED with excitement.
Today was junior high school graduation. It was a nice ceremony, with lot of speeches and singing. They take graduation very seriously. I didn't realize just how serious until during the ceremony, one of the student suddenly collapsed, just SMACK! hit the floor... and only 5 people ran over to carry her out. Nobody else even moved; the speaker just kept speaking, the teachers didn't twitch, and even the students didn't even look in her direction. Bunch of robots! It was really kind of freaky...
Afterwards, we waved goodbye to the graduating 3rd year students and took lots of pictures. When they had gone, the parents came and gave all the teachers bags of bakery goods as a thank-you-for-your-hard-work present. As there were no students, no classes, and it was a day of celebration, the principal gave us permission to leave work by 3 PM (2 hours early for teachers, ~1 hour early for me).
At 2:45 PM, I was working on my computer and watching the clock. Suddenly the desks started shaking just a little bit, and the teachers kind of glanced up at each other with an excited, "Did you feel that?" It was just a little shake, nothing to worry about. We sat and waiting for it to end, as they usually finish quickly. After a few moments, when the desks were still shaking, people started remarking "This is a long one!" ... a few moments later the shakes grew more intense, "Wow, really a long one!"... and more intense, "It's still going!"... Suddenly, the shakes started getting much stronger, and the exclamations grew worried. The teachers next to me glanced up at the overhanging air conditioner with trepidation, "This is dangerous..." The shakes got stronger and stronger, past anything we'd ever felt before. Everyone watched the ceiling-mounted TV shaking violently, yelling now to be careful. We could feel the whole building moving, swaying unnaturally. The vice principal ordered everyone out of the building, and we ran for the door, not even bothering to stop and change to our outdoor shoes.
Outside in the parking lot, we watched the windows of the gym shudder and the tall cedar trees shake as the ground rolled beneath our feet. Remembering what day it was, someone said, "Thank god this didn't happen during graduation!" and the others groaned in agreement (though whether it was over the possible chaos or a ruined ceremony, I can't be sure). Several people had their cell phones out and were trying to get through but to no avail. One of the teachers exclaimed loudly and ran toward one end of the parking lot, pointing, "Look! Look!" Across the street, the old-style embellishments on someone's roof had partially collapsed.
We stood outside until the shaking subsided to a low trembling. By then, 15 minutes had passed since the first tremors. Like frightened deer, we made our way cautiously back into the building. Besides a few messy desks, there was nothing amiss. The teachers jumped onto their computers and immediately started looking for info on the quake, while someone else grabbed the school's land line to start checking on loved ones. The rest of us watched the news on TV, which was already saturated with quake coverage.
We found out it hit Miyagi/Fukushima/Ibaraki at a level 7 quake. By the time it made it all the way over to us in Ota, Gunma, it was a weak level 5. Even as we stood around watching the TV, we felt the aftershocks, "It's still going, it's still going!" One of the aftershocks was strong enough to send everyone back outside to the relative safety of the parking lot. There were no students in the building, but some were outside practicing sports on the playground; the vice-principal got on the intercom and told them all to sit down on the ground where they stood.
When it was finally calm enough to go back inside, we were all ordered to go check the building for damage. All the fire doors had closed, a basket of ping-pong balls was overturned, and there was some minor ceiling damaged in the annex walk-over, but everything looked pretty good. By then it was 3:30 PM, so I decided to head home.
The minute I opened my apartment door, I could see the place was a mess. Everything that had been on top of the fridge, cabinets, and shelves was on the floor. Even my convection oven had flipped off the microwave and lay upside-down on the floor. The space around the kitchen desk was a sea of papers. In the TV room, my books lay skewed but still mostly in place. Everything on top of the bookshelves had fallen off though; most interesting was my "fake" plant, which had somehow managed to land 3 feet feet away, without rolling, from its original location. I spent the extra time I got off work cleaning.
For me, the whole experience was pretty exciting and fun, since there was no real damage to speak of. I ran into some of my students on the way home, and we got into a shouting battle as we rode side-by-side on our bikes, with them yelling "Scary!" and me yelling "Exciting!"
For northern Japan, though, things look a lot more "scary" than "exciting". I'm watching TV right now and it's pretty amazing the damage that has been felt all over. The newscasters on TV are all wearing hard hats. In Sendai, a tsunami hit and washed in 10 meters of water, washing away cars, homes, and farmland. In many places, homes partially collapsed. In Chiba (above Tokyo), an oil refinery exploded. In Tokyo, a parking garage collapsed, and buildings were shaking hard enough to break windows, collapse walls, and knock off paint and brick siding. Inside buildings, people cling to desks and hold their computer upright, TVs fall off shelves and from the ceilings, cabinets tip over, and anything not nailed down spill their contents everywhere.
Even now, it's 7:50 PM, and I can still feel significant aftershocks.
Yuki told me that the news said to expect aftershocks to continue for a month, and that another large earthquake should be expected within the month as well.
Wow... what a a day.
Cheers,
earthquake Baer
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