Soba & meguro ishikawa-dai 750 yenes

10 march 2011 - SHAKING THE TREE

Encapsulated in my little tiny room, trying to figure out how could I help, what to do In Japans worst disaster in 140 years. I don’t know if I am lucky being OK and being here in Japan while this disaster occurred. So 3 things comes as a chain reaction!
1.- earthquake- Sendai city 8.9 quake power ( all Japan shakes, )

2.-Tsunami east coast of Japan, destroying villages

3- Nuclear alert, with some possibility of leak in japans’ main reactor.

This news definitely transformed my vision of life forever, I´m just kilometers from all disaster.

At 2.46 pm coming back from the supermarket and thinking how and what to do next to learn as quickly as possible Japanese, the shaking made my body dance, my body told me that I was feeling a main event; a strong catastrophe was on my feet. I grabbed firmly a light post, and as my whole world was spinning away ( Brian Eno song comes to mind) I just thought about TACOS, I DON´T NO WHY BUT TACOS was the first thing in my mind, later half of my life flashed in my head and finally . Where is Sevi?? , meanwhile, as the mighty earth reminded us how small and insignificant we are, I made some friends with Japanese neighbors, a 50 year old man and his wife, we were looking at each other, but we understood what was going on. The woman, grabbed me by the hand and suddenly the three persons where just one, surviving the biggest quake in japans history.

No phones, no communication whatsoever with the world outside, Sevi had gone to Tokyo. Not knowing what had happened, anxiety invaded my world; this was a new feeling for me.

My fellow colleagues in my guesthouse where all watching the TV , waiting for news about what had happened, what to do and what may come in several hours. At this moment japanese was no language barrier to understand exactly what had happened, 6 hours later, severine came walking back home. She came all the way from GINZA, the eastern part of Tokyo, all the way to the west side, 5 hours walking , that’s chilling, specially 3 hours at night and not knowing if the quake would hit again. Sevi, all dirty came finally back, a big deal of anxiety was gone, now I was just focused on Japanese people´s lives.

The whole night 10 people of my home were watching TV, looking earthquake after earthquake on the TV, feeling each 30 minutes a small movement.

As time passed, 6:00 am we went finally to sleep only to be awakened at 8 am Saturday with a strong but short quake.

Now the problem is the nuclear facilities, let’s see how this goes.