Have you ever seen a paint-shaker in action? It’s really quite a clever invention. Like an oversized version of the mechanism your cell phone uses to vibrate, an off-balance weight is spun round and round by a motor. This creates a well ordered wobble and blends your paint without the sore shoulder that results from doing it by hand. The 9.0 magnitude earthquake that hit the upper-midsection of Japan’s Honshu Island on March 11th was nothing like a paint shaker. That is to say the comparison could only be drawn if instead of shaking paint you decided to shake landmines. It was catastrophic, it was violent, it was vertical, and I was 250 kilometers from the epicenter. God knows what it was like farther north.
That Friday began like many other late winter days around Tokyo; bland and depressing. The sky was the color of cement. However, keeping in mind that a wise man once said, “Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get” I was on the train in reasonable spirits. I had nearly reached the place I was to work when suddenly a shuttering emergency stop was made. The initial tremor couldn’t have lasted more than 2 minutes but time was whiplashed to nearly a standstill. I’m surprised to say that my first thoughts were not of imminent destruction but whether or not the person in the wheelchair across from me had her wheel locks engaged. A brief flash played out in my mind where she careened about the train car like a pachinko ball running a particularly complex slalom. Would she retain the politeness of Japanese train etiquette? “Sumimasen, I’m sorry a huge earthquake seems to have caused my chair to run over your shoes, I hope you’ll forgive me (many bows as the next tilt begins to take her in another direction).” Silently I cursed lonely planet for not supplying the necessary vocab for such a situation. “How to demand an apology from an earthquake powered collision with a handicapped person.” Actually on second thought, I doubt I’d have given it much attention. Undoubtedly the phrases wouldn’t be an accurate translation, that is unless I lost 40lbs, grew tits, and aged 20 years. In Japan, your language is always a reflection of your age, sex, and social position. So when faced with the task of creating a wide reaching phrasebook, more often than not the translators go with the super polite form. Meaning my words to that poor girl in the out of control wheelchair would come out as, “I’m terribly sorry to bother, but if you have a moment I’d be overwhelmingly appreciative if you might try to keep that roller-chair off of the tops of my feet. Much obliged.” However, she proved to have a death-grip on the stabilizer bar, and I didn’t have to say a word.
Not forming foreign words in my head freed up my eyes, and what I saw was the ingenuity of Japanese design. The buildings bobbed and swayed to degrees that I was sure God would be shouting “Jenga” on every successive tip. Even the lamp posts on the street approached 45, but nothing toppled and after a while the shaking grew less. That’s not to say that it ever stopped, even today, two and a half months after the fact, we have daily aftershocks. Sometimes I’m not sure if it’s just all in my mind, I’ve become so conditioned to it. I wonder if this is something I’ll be telling a therapist 10 years down the road.
After we hopped off the train and walked back to the nearest station, it was chaos. The line for taxis was already 3hours in length and word went around that the trains would be down for quite some time. I sat down and drank a beer, trying to figure out what to do. I was 40 km from home and there was no bus headed in any helpful direction. So I started walking following the tracks. At 3:30 in the morning I arrived home and exhaustedly fell into bed thinking the worst was over. Though, a few days later cries of “Nuclear Apocalypse!” reached Tokyo, and it’s been a rollercoaster ever since. But every storm cloud has a silver lining. I don’t look back thinking I’ve had 2 evacuations, six hours of walking, six hours of waiting in line, 700 aftershocks, and many sleepless nights. Instead it’s a chance for deviation, an opportunity to try something new, a temptation for vacation, experimentation, the option of seeing what happens to a paint shaker full of land mines. Here are some photos of the experiences I’ve had while having to escape…
