This was what I had prepared for Monday:
Believe it or not, on Monday most of Narashino (and Tokyo) scrambled back to work wearing their poker faces. If you had been in a coma, and only just woken up on Monday without any knowledge of the megaquake, the first thing out of the ordinary that you might've noticed is that the number of two-wheeled vehicles had doubled. I suppose too many people had been stranded far from home by halted trains and gridlock traffic. I noticed as early as Friday night that many people were buying bicycles.
If you were a visitor from out of the country, you would assume that people were hurrying out of fear, perhaps rushing to the supermarket before going home to huddle with their families before another aftershock. Yes, their afraid...not of earthquakes, but of being late for work. The truth is, the morning commute in Japan is seriously hair-raising. People are pedaling madly on rattling granny bikes weaving through pedestrians and lines of cars waiving caution and courtesy to the wind to desperately avoid being even a moment late clocking in.
The Japanese are often characterized as being polite and docile. Whoever first said this never say a morning commute in Japan; he or she must've been a late riser or an unemployed sociologist working from home.
For some reason I can't well explain, I left the safety of my home to brave the sea of salaryman looking to arrive early and make up for lost time. Why did I decide to head to work? Wouldn't it have been safer to head to Kansai or Hokkaido? At the time, given the information available, maybe so. The truth is I wanted to help if I could, I figured the students would be visibly shaken, and I still felt relatively safe if I stayed within Narashino (i.e. within a 30 minute walk from my front door). I didn't think the day would last long, either. Narashino was scheduled for a planned power outage starting at 9:20 AM. I thought that I would say some encouraging things to the kids, swap stories and information with concerned teachers and head home before lunch.
I couldn't have been more naive. As it turned out, even the planned blackout didn't happen.
As I walked to school, I surveyed the damage in the neighborhoods nearer the sea. It seemed far worse than the area surrounding my home. Property boundary walls had collapsed and the roads and sidewalks had split and sunk noticeably in sections. Students I met along the road gave me sleepy smiles and cheerful greetings. They didn't seemed shaken in the least.
When I arrived at school, the first thing I noticed were the enormous cracks that splintered through the athletic fields. No one was practicing this morning. The entire area was fenced off. I was told that, unlike some of the other schools in the city, school seven's power and water was still functioning. The building's integrity was still reported secure, although there was some crumbling of concrete around the corners nearest the ceiling joints.
The weather looked like rain. At our morning meeting, no one seemed the least bit concerned about the situation we were facing. Given the conversations that followed (or didn't follow) I must have imagined seeing a teacher or two rubbing tears from the corners of their eyes as they watched live footage of a hydrogen explosion at one of the reactors at Fukushima's Daiichi nuclear plant. No one was interested in discussing the growing list of concerns begrudgingly confessed by officials. The teachers sort of ignored me, but I can't really take it personally. After all, they had more important things to worry about, one thing in particular: Tuesday's graduation. We needed to rehearse for the ceremony and clean the school. hoping that tomorrow's graduation ceremony will not be interrupted by a power outage or violent aftershock. "You see, the date for graduation can't be changed," one teacher explained to me matter-of-factly, "because we've already put dates on the students' graduation certificates."
Soon we were cleaning the school in preparation for Tuesday's graduation ceremony. I was helping students clean the second floor verandas around the gymnasium. While my back was turned, one student had straddled the veranda wall in order to better beat the dust from an old yellow rug hanging over the side. All I could think was, "what if that major aftershock were to hit?" I tell him to get down, and a perhaps ten minutes later or phones start to wail like sirens and before I have time to check the school is swaying as yet another quake hits. Everyone in the gymnasium is on the ground and the teachers look scared, so much so that I can tell by their faces and posture from the other side of the gymnasium. The tremor is over in another few moments and everyone is back to work as if nothing has happened. One of the students points at a crack in the wall of the veranda we're cleaning. I can't be sure whether it's new, "recent," old, or old.
At this point, I'm convinced that either I'm crazy, or the rest of Japan is. It just doesn't seem like a good idea to be back at work today when at any moment we could enter a planned or unplanned blackout. I'm getting messages from overseas all day on my phone urging me to leave for all sorts of reasons.
Many of the Europeans living and working in the Kanto area have fled on the recommendation of several embassies (France, Switzerland, and Germany). My French friend working in a Tokyo bank left for France this morning (along with most of her French co-workers). She (and many other friends have) been encouraging us to leave Kanto for awhile, but I think we'll bunker down for now.
The headlines Monday weren't too encouraging: confirmed deaths exceed 3000 (and expected to soar), more aftershocks (400+ across the country), millions of homes without power or water, and some sort of hydrogen explosion occurred at two of the three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant. There is another plant closer to Tokyo (Tokai) where they are trying to keep its last diesel generator running to continue cooling the nuclear reactor there. Luckily they were able to begin the reactor's shutdown process early into the disaster and temperatures there have been steadily cooling since.
As you probably know, various meteorological agencies around the world are predicting that by Wednesday (March 16, 2011) a 7-8 magnitude aftershock will hit Kanto. Of course, no one knows exactly where in Kanto such a quake would originate. The probability of such an aftershock was thought to be roughly 70%. This is troubling as the size (depending on depth) is big enough to potentially worsen everything (new tsunamis, more trouble with power/radiation leaks, etc).
Let's hope for the best. I'm realistically confident in the structural integrity of Japanese buildings.
I feel sort of powerless to do much of anything at this point, other than prepare as well as possible. I'm hoping to be able to help in the areas harder hit when transportation is up and running again.
As I mentioned earlier, we're now under planned power outages even here in Narashino, so I'll post this now while I still have a working internet connection.
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