A Year Ago Today: The Tohoku Eartquake

A year ago today, we got stuck in a train tunnel after an earthquake had triggered an emergency stop of our commuter train. We were completely unaware of the fact that while we were waiting in the dark train, the biggest natural disaster to strike Japan in recent history was unfolding: a huge tsunami triggered by the magnitude 9 earthquake off the coast of the Tohoku region was washing entire towns into the sea, deposing large ships several kilometers inland. Even today, it is hard to grasp the sheer extent of the disaster: 15 854 people have died that day, with another 3155 unaccounted for, the coastal regions still an unrecognizable wasteland.
Although this event has rocked our world, it seems almost impossible to match our own experience to the pictures of complete destruction that came from the North. Our reality is a mosaic of our own experiences mixed with those of our friends and acquaintances. The accounts of window panes bending during the earthquake at IPMU, of standing without a jacket for three hours on the lawn in the cold after having evacuated the building, of watching a little crack form on the facade of a university building at Komaba campus and watching it creep down the wall, or even of queuing for drinking water after the water lines had been cut off in Tsukuba, these little pieces fit the picture of the reality we lived through ourselves. Our reality was one of interrupted train services and no toilet paper in the supermarket, something incredibly far removed from what people have gone through on the Tohoku east coast.

There is another point that deserves to be made. What happened one year ago, was a huge earthquake and tsunami. It was not “Fukushima”. “Fukushima” has not killed close to 20’000 people. While I don’t want to minimize the nuclear accident, it is worth pointing out that so far, the released radioactivity has not claimed any lives. Thanks to the international media, the March 11 disaster has remained in the minds of people around the world as “Fukushima”. The nuclear accident has been only one of the many tragic consequences of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and just focusing on this is not doing justice to the tens of thousands of real victims of a natural disaster.

Read Full Post »

The Summer of Power Saving (Setsuden)

Electricity usage on Aug. 24 (source: TEPCO)

Now that the worst of the summer heat is behind us, I guess I can safely venture to say that Japan has successfully taken on the challenge created by the power shortage created by the Tohoku Earthquake and its aftermath. With not only the nuclear power plants actually damaged by the earthquake offline, but many more which the worried population did not allow to come back online after regular inspections, the service capacities of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO in short, or in Japanese, Tokyo Denryoku) are below last summer’s peak demand. In anticipation of this situation, Japan has called on its citizens and businesses to make plans to use at least 15% less electricity than last summer.

Read Full Post »

Three Months After: Tokyo is OK

Almost three months have passed since Japan was struck by what is now known as the Great East Japan Offshore Earthquake and Tsunami. While the days following the earthquake will always remain in our memories with unusual vividness, things have since subsided back into normality around Tokyo. The aftershocks went from hourly down to daily, then to once every few days, and then to even more rarely. While two months after the quake, we would still receive our daily reminder, we are now allowed to go unperturbed for several days.

Read Full Post »

Aftershocks of Aftershocks (What’s an Earthquake Like?)

Since the Great Tohoku Earthquake exactly one month ago, we have gone through an enormous amount of aftershocks. This website has a pretty neat interface for visualization. Unfortunately, the data stops on April 4, thus missing two of the largest aftershocks of magnitude more than 7 of last Thursday and today. Even so, it counts almost 900 individual aftershocks, more than 400 of which had a magnitude of higher than 5. These days, especially tonight, we are having what probably should be called aftershocks of aftershocks.

Read Full Post »

Post-disaster vocabulary

There’s a lesson in everything, however small. Recent events have resulted in some additions to my Japanese vocabulary.
The word for earthquake – jishin (地震) is in the vocabulary of every resident of Japan. Of late, we have more specifically:

東北大震災 – Tohoku Daishinsai, literally: Tohoku (Northeast) big quake disaster.

This is short for the technical term, which is

東北地方太平洋沖地震 – Tōhoku Chihō Taiheiyō-oki Jishin, literally Northeast region Pacific Ocean offshore earthquake.

For obvious reasons, we have also a heightened interest in words such as

原子炉 – genshiro, nuclear reactor
原子力発電所 – genshiryoku-hatsudensho, nuclear power plant
which is often shortened to
原発 – genpatsu.

Daiichi (第一) btw, means simply “number one”. And since we’re at it, Fukushima (福島) translates as “island of good fortune”, not a case of “nomen est omen”, it seems.

As a consequence of the above, we also learn

節電 – setsuden, electricity saving.

Read Full Post »

What has changed for me after the quake?

Japan is a country at high risk of major earthquakes. This is a fact of life that you have to accept when living there. The Tokyo region has been bracing for decades for the “Big One” (such as recurrences of the Kanto and Tokai earthquakes). After the Tohoku earthquake, which happened on a different (and maybe unexpected) fault line, these are not off the table. But if this teaches us anything, it is that we are still very poor at predicting such events. While it is useful to be prepared, it is pointless to live in fear.

The experience of the quake has of course some very practical consequences for me. It has changed how I stack stuff in a cupboard. It has changed how close to an edge I’ll be putting things. And it has changed how much I’ll be filling up the aquarium.

Read Full Post »

Japan after the Earthquake – Looking Ahead

After the devastating Tohoku earthquake, Japan is faced with enormous difficulties. But based on my general experience living in Japan and the exemplary response to the crisis of the Japanese people, I am confident that if any society in the world is equipped to overcome a disaster of this magnitude, it is Japan. The frequency of natural disasters throughout history has left Japan much more prepared than other countries. And being disciplined, hard-working and efficient, and being ready to work for the good of society are qualities which the Japanese have cultivated and which will be a great asset in the following days, weeks and months. The Japanese are not complainers, they will do whatever is needed to emerge from this crisis.

I would like to stress that despite some reports abroad, the reaction of the overwhelming majority of people to the earthquake and its aftermath has been extraordinarily calm. In most other places, complete chaos would have followed. Here, people have been doing their best to carry on and keep everything running as smoothly as possible.
I have witnessed all of this in person during and right after the quake and during the week that has passed since, and I am very impressed. All of this makes me very optimistic for Japan’s future.

Read Full Post »

Narita one Week after the Earthquake

With sudden cancellations of train services being quite common these days, we decided not to take any risks with our Saturday morning flight to the US and to sleep in Narita tonight. When we passed by the airport to drop off our luggage, we were at first worried by a huge queue which wound itself out of the check-in hall and into the shop and restaurant area. But it turned out that this queue consisted exclusively of Chinese and ended at the counters of Air China, whereas the other counters were almost empty. This is the result of China evacuating its citizens from the quake-hit areas.
Apart from some people who looked like they were essentially camping in the airport, the situation looked more benign than feared. No screaming mobs.

Since we had time to kill, we passed by the Narita San temple complex, one of our favorite spots in the area. While the new buildings were in perfect order, older buildings seem to have taken the shaking worse. Most of them, along with essentially all vertical structures, such as stone lanterns and stone walls, were roped off. The park was completely closed. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that this was not uncalled for. Some of the lanterns had lost pieces or had even completely toppled over.
In Narita, there are more signs of earthquake damage than in Tokyo, but it seems confined to older buildings. Nor is the damage severe, mostly only damaged roofs or pieces of facade fallen off.
On the whole, the town was much more quiet than usual, with a number of shops being closed.

Some earthquake damage around the town of Narita

Read Full Post »

On whether the government is lying to us

Conspiracy theories abound these days. One often expressed fear, both abroad and here, is that the government is not telling us the truth.
The fact is that nuclear disasters are hard to hide. We have access to the figures for radiation measurements for all prefectures for the last two days, we have the figures of AIST (The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology) in Tsukuba (Ibaraki), and the figures of the measurements of the University of Tokyo for its three campuses (on top of which, we have our own data taken at home). And while a momentary increase in radiation has been observed on Monday (which was still an absolutely harmless figure and mostly proves the sensitivity of our measurement processes), the figures have been falling ever since. Since yesterday morning, we’re essentially measuring only the natural background here in Tokyo.

Read Full Post »

Life in Tokyo after the Quake

Tension has been high over the last few days.
While the almost constantly occurring aftershocks seem to be dying down slowly, stronger earthquakes still make our days more interesting. Yesterday evening, a strong quake originating from the Mt. Fuji region shook buildings in Tokyo.
Our first question in the morning has become “how many have you felt last night?” When we check the data of the Japan Meteorological Society, it usually turns out that there was a number of quakes we had slept through.
Tokyo has been mostly exempt from the rolling blackouts, but the Kashiwa Campus of the University of Tokyo is experiencing daily power cuts for several hours. Since also the trains serving the blacked out areas are obviously not running, we have been working from home these last days. Public transit is generally disrupted since power saving measures are being implemented throughout Greater Tokyo.

Read Full Post »