Hidemi's Rambling No.307

Right after the earthquake hit Japan, the first worry I had was a fire. I looked around the outside of my apartment and there was no fire or collapsed house except for some damages of the roofs on neighbor houses. The electricity, gas and water didn’t go off. I turned on the TV and the news said the seismic center was 100 miles away from where I lived. Considering the strong shaking I had just experienced and the total mess in my apartment, it was too horrific just to imagine how nearby areas to the seismic center were. Big and small aftershocks kept coming perpetually and it was as if I were on a boat. I lost a sense of the solid ground and felt seasick. Most Japanese metropolitan commuters use the train system, but all the trains stopped running. Suburban commuters couldn’t go home and thousands of them stayed overnight at their offices downtown Tokyo, waiting for the train system to resume service. I was fortunate to have been working at home. I managed to clear the mess of fallen things in my place and secure the space to sleep by night, but couldn’t sleep because continual aftershocks kept coming at least every 10 minutes. I can consider myself lucky I survived the earthquake unscathed, and also unlucky I encountered a massive earthquake that was said to occur in Japan once in a thousand years...