Once in a while in life you get to experience the unexpected. They aren’t always pleasant. There I was having a slow day at work, teaching a student in my lesson booth. It was just a sluggish afternoon or so I thought. Suddenly things started to move.
After being in Japan for about a year I was used to earthquakes and didn’t really get panicked. But this one seemed to be quite strange. It didn’t stop in few seconds as usual and my student started to panic. On to my left I could see that my fellow instructor who has only been in Japan for 2 weeks was turning red with terror. He didn’t know what to do. He was looking at me with the expression, “what the hell is going on here?”
Well, the only thing that came in to my mind was to go under the tables as I was told more than hundreds of times by my husband and we all did. We were clinging on to the steel bars of the table. My student started to scream in Japanese and I could hear a quite a lot of swearing on to my left. On the other hand I thought that it was ‘THE END’. Therefore as a Buddhist, I was recalling all the good deeds I have done in my entire life. Surprisingly it wasn’t really scary as I expected it to be.
I was in the 3rd floor and the Building went swimmy. The shaking got stronger in every second. Books and laptops started to fall down from the tables and it felt like an hour. Later from the reports I got to know that it lasted only for five to six minutes but believe me, it felt much longer than that.
After the two major earthquakes we all came out of the building from the emergency exits. Everyone was shaking with fear. I will never forget those facial expressions for a quite a long time. I think major disasters have the power to unite people, for that’s what happened on that day.
Trains and busses stopped operation for they were expecting aftershocks. Therefore all of my workmates and I went to the nearby evacuation center. Even though the Japanese insisted that the buildings are earthquake proof as foreigners we had doubts about staying inside a building therefore we went to the soccer field outside. Everyone shared their experience. For us it was bonding over an earthquake.
One of my friends has been in a bus and she had seen how the buildings started to swing and how her bus was rocking like a ship. Another workmate was really nice that he was in a restaurant at the time and he had run out of the restaurant keeping a 1000Yen note on the table. Isn’t this world full of beautiful people?
With the earthquake telephone network went down and I had no idea about what has happened to my husband. Surprisingly internet was available and I could put a status on Facebook. After trying so hard for about 5 hours I could finally contact my husband for few seconds and have never felt so relieved.
All this time aftershocks continued at least once in every ten minutes. It felt as if we were in a ship. The temperature was also near zero. It was almost impossible to stay outside and with heavy hearts we went inside the evacuation center. At the evacuation center there were more than thousand people and everyone was given blankets, food cans and water bottles. This level of preparation surprised us all. It was only after watching TV at the evacuation center that we realized the true impact of the disaster.
All of us who were travelling from trains had no choice but to spend the night at the evacuation center. I thought it was going to be a very long night. All by sudden my husband came to the evacuation center looking for me. He had been cycling all the way from home to the evacuation center. It was such a pleasant surprise. Both of us walked home for about 5kms.
It would have been wonderful if this was the end of the nightmare but both of us woke up next day to another middling aftershock to find out the real catastrophe with the nuclear plants. A lot happened within these two weeks. Most of our friends left the country. Radiation levels rose. Water got contaminated. With all these happenings it is astonishing to see the resilience of Japanese. They keep on working as if nothing has happened.
All this time it hasn’t always been easy to keep it all together. But there is one thing that keeps me going. That’s what I have read in the book “Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy”. In that science fiction there exists a guide which has all the information about the entire universe. The Guide is encased in a plastic cover with the words "DON'T PANIC" inscribed on it in large, friendly letters.
