It was March 11, 2011, and I had interpreted for about two hours for a client located near Tameikesanno Station. The meeting with their overseas attorneys lasted for about two hours, and the attorneys were going to be left in the meeting room for a while after I departed. I imagine they might have had dinner with our shared client in store for them after I left, but what was to happen in just a few minutes would probably interfere with those plans, and I heard later it made them swear that they would not come back to Japan for quite some time. The quake hit while there were none of their hosts around to assure them that they were not going to meet their end during their trip to Japan.
I headed toward the Metro station, reached the platform several floors below ground level, and was waiting for my train.
It was around 2:45 pm, and the tremor that hit was undeniable and frightening, but nobody on the platform could imagine the much greater tragedy unfolding hundreds of kilometers to the north of us.
The platform, of course, shook wildly. The ceiling above the tracks and platform looked like a flimsy dropped ceiling resting on a flimsy matrix-like support, probably serving to hide pipes and cabling. I thought parts of it would come down with all the shaking. One waiting passenger hugged a thick pillar standing in the middle of the platform; others ran for the stairs.
I kept sitting still and looked at my Blackberry (it was 2011, you see), only to see an email reporting that a cement wall near the sender somewhere in the West end of the city had collapsed. A fellow peeking at my display was rather distressed to see this. About 20 minutes after the shaking subsided, no train had arrived, and a voice came over the PA system: “We’re terribly sorry to cause you inconvenience. Train service will be starting again shortly, so please wait a while longer.” I wondered whether the person making the announcement believed that, or was just reading from a prepared text to be used in the event of such a tremor.
The announcement turned out to be quite optimistic. No train was going to arrive, not shortly, and not until the next morning.
After hearing a more-realistic announcement that we should make our way up the stairs to the ground level, we all obediently made our way outside, up what seemed like more flights of stairs than we had descended.
Upon reaching ground level outside, there were numerous people in normal business attire but wearing white helmets who were urging people to “walk this way.” If they had done that in English, I would have been tempted to take them up on their straight line, but my concern over what had happened and just where it had happened stifled my desire for comedy relief, and nobody would have gotten the joke or movie reference anyway.
So what now? Silly me, I thought I could walk to the ANA Hotel to wait for a taxi to go to some station where a train would be operation. It was immediately apparent that things were more seriously disrupted than I had imagined. From the hotel taxi stand, I could see an elevated road with cars stopped bumper-to-bumper, and the sidewalks of the roads beneath that and running past the hotel were filled with people walking in the direction of Shibuya, although who knows where these people were headed. Home, I imagined.
After a wait of about an hour, it was apparent that there were going to be no taxis swerving into the hotel taxi stand to pick people up. I was getting hungry and decided to walk to Devan des PTT, an okonomiyaki place I had been going to for at least three decades. Upon arriving—it was already about 5:30pm—there were already other dinner refugees sitting at the counter. Some had been staying at a nearby hotel that couldn’t serve meals because of the gas supply being cut off.
After enjoying the usual good okonomiyaki served up by the owner, Onyama-san, I headed back to the ANA Hotel, again hoping that things had settled down to the point at which taxis would be picking people up at the taxi stand. No such luck. Several other refugees and I gave up and entered the hotel from the taxi stand. Not surprisingly, there were no rooms available, but I had not intended to get a room, anyway.
I pulled together three or four smallish chairs in one corner of the lobby, unfortunately in a location in which a cold wind would strike me for about 15 seconds each time someone exiting or entering caused the nearby automatic doors to open. That happened about every two minutes, but I managed to fall asleep. I awoke around 2am to find that someone had put a blanket over me, two actually. I don’t think this would have happened in a US hotel.
I slept surprisingly well, and felt so thankful that that I popped for a horribly expensive hotel breakfast for 3000-plus yen. It was worth it. The tables around me were occupied by people in diverse predicaments caused by the earthquake. There were people on business trips to Tokyo, including one from the affected area. Then there was a mother and daughter, in Tokyo for a school entrance exam. Would the exam be delayed? they wondered.
My mobile service was limited, but good enough to learn how tragically things had unfolded to the north of Tokyo.
And here we are, 14 years later, just after a wide-ranging forest fire hit one of the same areas struck by the tsunami that followed the earthquake. That forest fire would be called a wildfire in the US—and was called that in some English reportage of the fire—for sociopolitical reasons that some in Japan would probably claim don’t apply.
Japan is a resilient country with a resilient people living in it. This becomes clear every time a natural disaster occurs, although part of the aftermath of 3-11 earthquake was arguably made worse by lack of forethought by the bureaucrats and their friends running the Fukushima nuclear power plant that experienced a meltdown, a distressing term we tend not to use here in Japan. But I digress.
