3/11
Thursday, March 11, 2021 was the 10th anniversary of the Big Earthquake, the Great East Japan Earthquake (“higashi nihon daishinsai”). Ten years ago, it was a Friday, but this year the 11th is a Thursday. When Americans say “9/11” it’s automatically recognized as referencing the terror attacks in New York City on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. In Japan, it’s the same way with “3/11.” On Saturday, February 13, 2021 and again on Saturday, March 20, 2021 we continued to have strong aftershocks ten years after the Big One.
I was at home in the afternoon watching the 2000 Tom Hanks movie Castaway. As usual, I felt the soft vertical P-wave indicating that an earthquake was about to happen before the horizontal S-waves started. Nothing unusual. But instead of dying out after a few seconds, the lateral shaking got stronger and stronger. And stronger. It just wouldn’t subside. The safety rule is to stay indoors until all shaking has stopped. But when the floor began to heave up and down, I disregarded the safety guidelines and scrambled outside and down to the street from my 3rd floor apartment. If I lived on a higher floor I would have stayed put because the distance to the safety of open ground would have been too great.
My partner was working. My daughter was at grandma’s apartment, and my son was at his nearby elementary school. Cell phone service quickly collapsed from the sudden rush of calls being made, but land line service was unaffected. School was just getting out when it happened. I went to my son’s school to check on him. Other parents had the same idea, and parents were crowded around the school’s gate, watching their children gathered by grade in the playground. Rather than handing children off to their parents at the school, teachers walked all their students back to their homes in packs. I mean, in groups.
Because of commuter train disruptions, some high school students (not all) throughout the greater Tokyo region had to spend the night sleeping at their schools, inside their gyms.
Within 30 minutes, I was watching the tsunami on live TV coming ashore on the Pacific coast of the Tohoku region. The scale of the tsunami disaster did not become apparent until the next day, and the nuclear power plant problem took a couple of days to sink in. I think it was on Sunday 13th that a build-up of hydrogen gas blew the roof off one of the containment buildings at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. To cool the reactors down, the government used military helicopters to dump seawater on the exposed reactors. That meant that the decision had been made to kill the plant, because seawater would destroy them. As a reactor cooling strategy, the seawater was a futile act of desperation. Most of it simply dispersed in the air as mist. Helicopters dropped the water from too high. Wary of radiation, the pilots feared flying too close.
The death toll from the tsunami was a little over 16,000 of whom 2,500 remain missing and unaccounted for. In early March this year some human remains were discovered and identified as a missing woman from the tsunami. So, human remains are still being found. I suppose human remains from the World Trade Center disaster in New York City are similarly still being found.
Residents near the Fukushima power plant were ordered to evacuate their homes immediately. Literally immediately. Don’t go back inside. Don’t pack a bag or grab bank books, computers, passports, clothes, medicines or pets. Literally drop everything, get in your car and follow the police vehicles out of town right now. And that’s what they did. Pets were abandoned. Farm animals were abandoned. Televisions were left on. Drying laundry was left on the poles.
Although I did not see it in person, there was some liquefaction down by Tokyo Bay in a large reclaimed land area called Odaiba. Major commuter hubs in Tokyo like Shinjuku Station and Tokyo Station, became temporary campsites for several thousands of office workers who could not make the trip home when commuter train service to the suburbs was suspended due to power blackouts. Again, I was unaffected by that - not by disrupted commuter train service, and not by electricity blackouts. I was lucky. I was at home when the quake struck, and my commuting is mostly done on subways which were largely unaffected by service suspensions. For people who depend on surface trains, however, it took several days to sort things out. Several months of energy conservation (“setsuden”) ensued. I remember that. The Japanese military - the Japan Self Defense Force, or JSDF - was called out for emergency response and body search and recovery. The U.S. military forces in Japan contributed to disaster relief - airlifting supplies in to stranded pockets of survivors. Increased petroleum imports to Japan to make up for the loss of nuclear-powered kilowattage. Prime Minister Naoto Kan - who in my opinion saved the country - was quickly blamed for government incompetence contributing to a slow emergency response and nuclear power oversight, and lost a general election later in in the year.
Slow response seems to be a Japanese thing. It’s happening now with the Covid-19 vaccination program.
Those were the days.