Rumble In Kashihara

It’s another rainy Japan Sunday morning. The crosswalk is clanging as the train rumbles by, a bird sings outside of the shutters, the dishes are rattling on the counter and my bed is shaking. Dishes rattling? Bed shaking? Oh my God, it’s an earthquake! Here! Now! It is 12:19 in the afternoon and I am just getting up having stayed up all evening chatting with some old school friends I’d been reunited with online. My legs were now fully healed from two weeks of constant power walking and I had decided that today would be a day devoted to rest, a few warm mugs of coffee and clearing up some of the clutter on my computer’s desktop. The person who was cursing the bad weather of days past was now welcoming the clouds that were being predicted so as not to feel guilty for remaining indoors when the sun was bursting down on so much more Japan left to discover. Sleep has not come easy the last few days as I am still suffering from this whooping cough the likes I have never experienced before. It really does appear that the Goddess In Green Flu Shoots did nothing to help ward off possible pandemics and were more of a detriment then a benefit as I have become a hub to all types of Japanese viruses wanting to sample a little Canadian Cuisine. This cough is very calculating in the times it can best burden me and it attacks at the precise moment I decide to go to bed. The tickle in the throat begins and suddenly I am exploding forth loud gaffs, spittle projectiles hurtling out into the darkness, as my stomach tenses and my sides ache from the wheezing. There are no other signs of sickness except for this cough that only hits me at night and sometimes first thing in the morning, both periods of extreme body vulnerability. These viruses have done their homework. My already late evening, now into morning, was extended somewhat by the cough and I imagine I didn’t get to sleep until sometime around four or five in the morning, just in time to beat the first trains of the day or else sleep may have never come. Such a late bedtime can justify such an early rising and I started showing some signs of life around 11 o'clock when I found a morsel of morning energy to motor me over to the window to see if the skies were gray as predicted. But of course, it is one of my days off, is it not? Having ascertained that the weather website this time was accurate, although let me be honest for the first few minutes after waking everything looks to be an old black and white movie complete with cinematic grain and the wear and tear of film stock in disarray. I was back under the covers for another hour of sleep, the cough deciding to save it’s strength for a full frontal assault later on that evening. I dreamed of old soccer games in snow covered schoolyards from my youth and of the faces long passed into old memories, some now returning due to the networking, or stalking power, of the Internet. Earlier this week I was introduced to Facebook, a place much like Classmates.com but Facebook is free. I signed up and have been addicted ever since the first few old classmates started trickling into my inbox. It has been wonderful catching up to some of these people and hearing about their families, travels, successes and failures all the while exchanging their reminiscing for my own tales of bygone years and current situations. They are always melancholy feelings when awaking from dreams of you being a child but I had only a few seconds to think of them, yawn and body cracking like forest twigs as I pushed into the day. My first thought was that a rather large train was going by, maybe at the same time as the garbage truck even though it wasn’t garbage day. Nostradamus was shaking harder than usual and I realized in my early morning comatose state that my bed was vibrating as well. Now it was not flipping and flopping about like a fish out of water or something out of the Exorcist but it was noticeable, like hitting the vibrate button on a Craftmatic Adjustable Bed, something that is said to sooth but only makes me nauseous. I wasn’t hearing the crosswalk. I wasn’t hearing the ice-cream truck chimes of the garbage collectors. There was no train and this wasn’t garbage day. Again, I reiterate, OH MY GOD IT’S AN EARTHQUAKE. I heard my dishes rattling on the steel countertop in my kitchen and saw my small alarm clock doing a jitterbug next to my laptop. I said a few entries back that the only thing that really slaps me into consciousness in the morning is a nice cup of coffee. I take that back. There are two things: a nice cup of coffee and a motherfucking earthquake!!! Pardon my foul tongue but all attempts to make this journal daughter frenzy get thrown out the window when one awakes in a bed that is rumbling as though it had a coin slot, stains and belonged in a cheap motel with the letters O and T blown out of the neon sign so that the place just reads M EL. I leaped to my feet narrowly avoiding crushing my camera on the floor and severely damaging a toe on the end of my coffee table. I paused for a moment trying to remember all the things I have ever heard about being caught in an earthquake. Stop, drop and roll! That’s it…no, wait, that’s fire. Find a large stick and hit it on the nose. No, damn it, that's for a shark attack. Silver bullet? Steak through the heart? I remembered a book my mother once purchased us out of the Scholastics book club my siblings and I joined in grade school. Normally we would use this club to further our literacy by purchasing Garfield comics but every once in awhile mom would find something that served a greater educational power and placed the book order under ours. This book was called Survive, Could You?, a title that could very well be a CNN news flash report what with the state of that networks “newsworthy” fearmongering. Within the pages were various fictional accounts of what one might do should they ever find themselves caught in life threatening situations. There was a chapter devoted to fire, another for finding yourself lost in the woods and the ever popular perilous situation young kids whose parents purchase these Weekly Reader books find themselves in: How to Survive Getting Stuck in Quicksand! Maybe the meant the mud pit you made in your backyard to toss your brother in and not, you know, actual quicksand. My brain now skimmed back through 10 years of mind pollution to find the memory of the chapter devoted to earthquakes. Of course I had read up on cautionary measures as early as two weeks ago when the Ishikawa quake hit but the mind does not functioning at full capacity when it is worried that a lamp, which just so happens to be attached to a ceiling, may come crashing down upon it. A doorway arch! Yes, you have to stand in a doorway arch because these foundations are stronger and although this protective measure did little to ease my paranoia (okay, so I am to believe that if the entire apartment complex were to topple down you would find me safe and secure under the still standing wooden doorway arch amongst the rubble with a big shit eating grin on my face and plans to write a letter of thanks to the authors of Survive, Could You?) but I scurried the few feet from my bed to the arch and stood there. And stood there. Annnnnnd stood there. I soon started to feel foolish. Where was the tumbling? Where were the cracks in my wall? Wait, was there an earthquake even still going on? I tried to stay perfectly still, my own trembling subsiding. Everything was perfectly still. It had been five minutes since I realized I was in the middle of a quake and I believe the actual tremor had stopped four minutes and fifty-five seconds ago. I wondered if maybe I had dreamed it or perhaps it was just a train passing that I, in my sleepy state, blew up to be the Big One. I mean, really, I’d had more jarring bowl movements. After a quick check that all my things were in order and unshattered I flicked on the net and started hunting. I was right. This was not a boating accident…errr….train passing by….it was, after all, my first firsthand experience with the Japanese earth shake, rattling and rolling.


The Japanese press had not yet broken with the story and in these early stages after the quake I had no idea how large it was or if I was in the middle or outside of the epicenter. I was also ready to bolt at the first sign of an aftershock. The first website to provide an update on the quake was the Japan Meteorological Agency which was clocking this one in as a magnitude 5.1 although for my area of Nara it was only a 4. Within moments the image was updated to show that the entire area and outskirts had been affected with the center of the quake being the Mei prefecture which was right next to me. Two weeks ago it was two prefectures away and now it is one. These things are getting closer. They might not have taken kindly to my threats earlier this year.


To say I was shaken, pun intended, by this would be an accurate assertion of my emotional state this afternoon. Lots of coffee to calm me. I understand that some who have lived here for years may have laughed this off as though it were a misquote bite but as it being my virgin foray into quakes and shakes I was flying high on Air Paranoia. Each time a train went by I thought it was an aftershock and jumped a little bit ready to flee for the “safety” of my wooden door arch, my secret quake weapon. I had my crackers and water and should I be trapped under rubble I had a hundred Woody Allen quotes stored inside my head for emergency entertainment purposes. An aftershock did hit around four hours later although if I had not been sitting on the floor I may not have felt it. If the first quake was a 4 for me this one was maybe a 1. No rattling bed to ride and no potential for shattered dishes. Early this evening the online press had the story printing really wonderful easing lines like: “It was the first time on record that an earthquake measuring magnitude 5 or more has hit central Mie Prefecture since the agency started monitoring seismic activity in the area in 1923.” There have been no deaths and only 11 injuries, The Japan Times reports. The damage that was most costly happened in Kameyama where a 400-year-old castle wall was cracked. About 4,000 homes lost power and Mog had to wait longer to get to Osaka as his train was stopped but overall a mild tremor.


Mild or not, this was a pretty frightening experience to awake to a bid having an epileptic fit. I kept checking the Meteorological site for updates to find the tremors were popping up all around the country today a 3.1 hitting the far Eastern side just after nine and a 2.8 hitting the Kanto/Chubu area at 10. (NOTE: Recent updates for the next day had a 2.9 hitting Kanto/Chubu again at 6am, a 5.1 hitting a far off island at 9:55, Kanto/Chubu was again hit, this time a 2.9 at 10:59, a 3.8 in Tohoku at 2:30pm, the quakes in Kanto/Chubu are getting bigger with 4.0 at 3:30, Okinawa feels a 3.8 just before 5pm followed by a 4.8 on a nearing island an hour later… Oh yes, a whole lot of shaking going on!). I am sure today’s tremor will not make the press back home but again I am fine although a touch on edge with this one being close enough to actually feel. A few more small rumbles like this and I am sure I will have adapted to such rocky motion like most foreigners here but for now if my bed is a rocking it best be in the way I enjoy! (Me jumping up and down on it around the pillow and blanket fort I made…why, what did you think? Ohhh, you perverts!)