Earthquake

I've been really bad at keeping this blog up the last few months. It would seem only something monumental could make me complete it. However something monumental happened a couple of days ago. Here is my account of what happend.

I’ve been living on Tokyo Bay for almost a year now and my time here is coming to a close. The end of the Japanese Academic year is upon us, which is why it was Graduation day this Friday at my Junior High School. The graduation ceremony went ahead as planned. The students sang songs to each other and thanked each other for their friendship over the last three years. It was a very emotional morning for many and many tears were shed.

After everything was packed up from the graduation ceremony, I waved goodbye to the students for the last time and for the first time, since I’ve been here, the students went home early at lunchtime. Japan has a huge culture of gift giving, and so many students gave small ‘omiyage’ gifts of food to all the staff. After the last student had left I returned to a small feast of treats in the staffroom and was asked to give a farewell speech.

Earthquakes are fairly common in my region. We get them about once a month but recently there had been a few slightly stronger ones occurring up north. So when the school nurse turned said something about an earthquake, my reply was ‘When?’. Her prompt reply was ‘NOW!’, at which point I noticed the, then gentle, rocking of the room. At first no one was particularly worried. We opened the doors, as is usual practise, and several of the teachers began to grab hold of objects that had the potential to topple over, such as the giant new Mitsubishi flat screen TV. At this point I looked above my head to assess if there was anything that could potentially fall on me and was disturbed to see a huge wobbling air-conditioning unit above my head. I decided I better move to the centre of the room. The staff room is boarded by large metal filing cabinets and cupboards, some stacked on top of each other; these were increasingly beginning to rattle and rock and, so a few more teachers came to join me in the centre of the room. Many of my colleges began to cry ‘sugoi’, which would be best translated as ‘awesome’ in that it can be used in a light hearted fashion to mean ‘cool’ or in a more serious nature to mean ‘formidable’. This time it was definitely being used to mean the latter.

For maybe 30 seconds me, and about 7 teachers, stood around getting increasingly shaken about by the quake. It was a bit like being on a pirate ship at a theme park that starts with a gentle swaying but gradually gets bigger and bigger. I could feel the fear levels in the room beginning to rise and the persistent call of ‘sugoi’ were being coupled with ‘abunai’; ‘dangerous’. At a certain point we realised that it definitely was getting bigger and definitely wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. One of the teachers decided it was time to evacuate and I followed suit. Unfortunately the staffroom was on the 1st floor, so we not only had to run the gauntlet of the corridors but also had to get down the stairs, which was a bit of a struggle at the peak of a magnitude 6. Thankfully there was a banister, which I held onto more than I’ve ever needed to. On existing the school we found that the small pond out the front was swashing around like a stormy ocean. Waves from the earthquake were displacing large amounts of water all over. It was a really strange sight. As we walked outside it felt like being on the deck of a boat or being a little drunk. What with the nervous excitement and the shaking I began to feel a little seasick. Many of us were finding it difficult to stand and so we all sat or crouched in centre of the car park, well away from the buildings. All the cars in the car park were rocking back and forth, the flag poles were swaying and the whole earth was rattling. It was pretty hairy stuff but I was glad to be in one of the most open places I know in Japan. The Head Teacher stayed in the school with a couple of other members of staff. It was as if he was the captain of the Titanic and he had to go down with the school. For minute after minute the ground continued to sway (and has continued to do so intermitted since) but eventually it lessened and lessened and finally it was safe to go back in the school.

On the way back in to the building, we noticed that the waves had displaced some tadpoles from the pond, which the science teacher attempted to save. Then we all went in and crowded around the TV, which immediately began issuing tsunami warnings. I was fairly unaware of the magnitude of the quake. Japan gets so many quakes that many don’t make the local news, let alone the national or international. However, I soon found out that it was the largest earthquake that most of the staff had experienced so I decided I better contact my family to say that I was ok and that as far as I knew, my friends were ok. I tried to get on the Japanese Meteorological Agency website, which gives the most up-to-date information on earthquakes, but it was so busy it was blocked.

About five minutes after we returned to the staffroom the first aftershock struck. This time I grabbed my camera, as we evacuated and I managed to film the pond swashing around the second time and the rocking of the cars. After the quake died down we once again returned to the staff room and gawped at the images that were beginning to appear on the TV screens. The true magnitude and horror of the earthquake began to sink in. What we felt as a magnitude 6 quake actually occurred almost 300 miles away and was an 8.9. And the worst was yet to come; there was a colossal tsunami fast approaching the east coast and about to hit the prefecture I live in, Chiba.

I was told that I was free to go but to take care crossing the river, as the tsunami might flow in and engulf the bridge. And so I said my final goodbye to the staff and made my way homeward on my bike. As soon as I got out of the school grounds I could see large black plumes of smoke rising on the horizon. I later learned that this was an oil refinery ablaze in Ichihara, two towns away and seemed to be the biggest fire of the quake. I didn’t have any trouble at the river and actually managed to cycle through a level 5 aftershock, without noticing.

When I got back to my flat I found several possessions had found their way to the floor but nothing had broken. My bedroom was utter mess but that had far more to do with me leaving it in a complete mess than the earthquake. After replying to a substantial number of concerned messages, more and more details of the scale of the quake and tsunami emerged. I didn’t ever imagine it would have been the largest recorded in Japanese history, or that it would have shifted the earth’s axis.

Details began to emerge about some of my friend’s ordeals, which made me feel quite lucky. One of my friends lives in Ichihara, very near the oil refinery that blew up. He rode out the quake alone, in his rickety old apartment, and was then thrown off his bike from the explosion at the oil refinery. After being told to evacuate his apartment, he found all the evacuation centres full and had to return home alone. I’m also worried about another friend in Ibaraki prefecture, where the quake and the tsunami were not only stronger but there are also potential problems with radiation.

Its Sunday morning now and things are beginning to get back to normal except the ground hasn’t stopped shaking. What used to be the biggest earthquake in three months, happens about every hour and smaller tremors are intermittent between them. After a long boat ride one sometimes feels the strange illusion of the ground moving like a ship, when you return to dry land. I regularly get feelings similar to that, when I’m not sure if I’m imagining small tremors or not. The earthquake alarm on my phone has been going off about every three hours and is not conducive to sleep but the nervous excitement has somewhat spoiled my appetite for sleep anyhow.

The eventuality of an earthquake has always been in the back of my mind while I’ve been in Japan but I would never have dreamed of being in the largest earthquake ever recorded in Japan. I was lucky to be somewhere rural, with company and somewhere unaffected by tsunamis. My thoughts and prayers go out to those up north that were not so fortunate.

New Music

I’ve been exploring a lot of new music tonight. I started out listening to Best Coast, a Californian girl that has an innocent voice, much like Alessi’s (Alessi’s Ark) and kind of reminds me of Camera Obscurer but yet her songs are much heavier and fuzzier in their production. The song writing style reminds me of the Vaselines, with some perfect little hooky lines constructed around the most economical use of 3 chords. Its not the kind of music that I could listen to for weeks on end but the girl had some really little pop tunes. The Best Coast Youtube videos led me to a band called Male Bonding, who are an East London outfit that have a similar fuzzy Vaselinezy sound but with a bit more punk than pop. Then later on the Guardian website I stumbled across a girl called Anna Calvi, who has just put out a record on Domino and seems to be the PJ Harvey of the next generation (without wanting to pigeonhole her too much). She had a really strong and powerful and confident voice and wasn’t afraid to experiment a little with her song writing, in a way that reminded me of Polly Jean. Being away from ‘home’ has put me more in touch with current affairs in the UK, as I browse the news websites daily but I have become increasingly out of touch with music, so I feel the need to catch up a little, especially in time for my arrival at Glastonbury. That catch up started tonight.

The apologetic January post

I apologise for not keeping up with this. My poor excuses are a mixture of being less enthused by exciting new things in Japan as I become increasingly acclimatised but also because I’ve been trying to pursue other goals, such as running more often, reading more and keeping in better touch with people at home.

December didn’t get a look in on here. There wasn’t an awful lot of exciting new territory to write about in Japan and much of the month was overshadowed by mounting distress about my trip home, due to the chaos that occurred across Britain because of snow, which eventually caused my flight to be cancelled. Needless to say I made it home, a day late but so much more grateful to be back. It was great to see people once again but a shame I didn’t get to see everyone. I enjoyed the homeliness of cosy centrally heated pubs more than ever and really appreciated a greater variety of beer, far more fresh fruit and veg and the ability to speak English to anyone I wanted. The family spent Xmas day around my sister's for the first time, which was a welcome change for everyone. The food was fab (Thanks once again Anne).

January went off to a good start in London and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get back into the swing of things in the capital. On returning to Japan, I’ve been blessed with extremely sunny but rather chilly weather, which I’ve really enjoyed. This month I visited my first Japanese castle (a small local one that Will and I had to ourselves) and the first visit of a helicopter to my school (a truly surreal experience). I had a fabulous night out seeing the Mystery Jets DJ and even had a brief chance to catch up with Blaine. I enjoyed attending a German party this weekend, in Chiba shi, where we were all serenaded by the charming Herr Alex Zeck. But on the whole January has been a fairly frugal, as I’m really trying to save for my trip to China. I’ve also bought some flights to Kyushu, where I intend to travel to Hiroshima from, just before I leave for China. Travelling around Japan isn’t cheap and so this really isn’t conducive to my saving but I don’t feel I can leave Japan without seeing Hiroshima.

I promise I will keep you better updated for the following final months.

November

November has flown by incredibly quickly. I can’t believe I’ll be in England this time next month. It has been the mildest November I have ever known, which seems ironic in light of the unusually cold November England is suffering from at the moment. One weekend I was cycling into the heart of Chiba prefecture in only my shorts and T-shirt and even now I haven’t yet turned the heating on.

So what have I been up to over the last few weeks? Well as I mentioned I went on a longish bike ride inland towards to the Pacific with Sam. I was surprised at quite how nice the Chiba countryside is beyond my concrete town. And with autumn in its full bloom (as it were) the shades and colours of the woodland were stunning. We cycled half way across the peninsula, without realising it and have agreed to attempt to cycle the whole thing in the New Year.

I recently went on my furthest excursion in Japan and spent a weekend in Hokkaido, visiting a friend I met at training. I managed to get a window seat on the plane there and back and had an amazing view of the Tokyo night sky on the way up plus a perfect view of Kimitsu (the town next to mine) on returning. Hokkaido was interesting. It the most unjapanese place I’ve been to in Japan. It was only settled a couple of hundred years ago and so there are no ancient shrines, castles or temples, that you’d usually find in most Japanese cities. It was also settled during a time when Japan was really opening up to western ideas and so they invited western architects and city planners to help create the cities there. So there are often very western-looking buildings that seem out of place but more often than not the architecture is very experimental. Because there is no tradition that needed to be kept on the island, it seems architects often tried something totally new and different.

Jenn lives a short drive from the airport but we went into Sapporo for a day and stayed around one of her friends in the city. I had fun exploring the city during the daytime, and did a little xmas shopping and in the evening we went to a restaurant called ‘Cheese Cheese’, which was one of the highlights of the trip.

This weekend was my Birthday weekend, so on Friday I went out for a meal with friends that live in the area and on Saturday I went out to Tokyo, to meet up with friends from further afield. The second night involved excessive drinking, which meant today was a bit of a write-off. I received some nice little gifts and cards, for which I’m very grateful.

This doesn't feel like November

I’m really enjoying the weather at the moment, despite many of the natives constantly commenting on the temperature being cold. I cycled to work and spent the entire day in a T-shirt earlier this week. Something I could only dream of doing in an English November. For the most part I’ve still only been wearing one layer unless it’s raining, however this was the first week that I put a jumper on. Above all its just been really nice to get so much sunlight, something I’m going to miss when I get back to the UK.

As many may already know, I recently received news from Teach First that I’ve been placed in the North West region of the programme, which is good news because it was my first preference. I won’t know exactly where my school is for a good few months yet so I could be potentially teaching in Manchester, Liverpool or Burnley next year but given the ratio of schools, more likely, and hopefully, the former.

I’m just about to head off to the Design Festival, which a huge event that incorporates hundreds of Japanese artists and designers descending on a large conference centre in Odaiba. There are countless stalls where you can buy all kinds of arty artefacts. Meanwhile there’s also music, comedy, performance art and dance going on. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while and hope to come home with a couple of T-shirts.

Kabuki, More Temples and the Largest Buddha in Japan. A very Japanese few weeks

For the last three weeks I’ve been attending 5 new schools, one of which I am still yet to visit. On the whole the transition to the new schools has been very positive. Now that I’ve been in Japan and working as an ALT for half a year, I’m much better prepared to know what to expect. My level of Japanese is so much better, which really helps for making good first impressions and getting on well with both the staff and the students. My two new Junior High schools are about the same distance as the last ones, about 20-30mins away by bike but a couple of the Elementary schools are miles out into the sticks. Although I must be grateful that my new schools in the sticks are in slightly more picturesque settings.

Some of the schools that now attending are really rather small. Nakago, one of my Junior High schools has an average of 15 students per grade. The students there do seems to have above average English proficiency. You can really see the difference that the student to teacher ratio makes. I have to say that on the whole the smaller schools are a lot friendlier. There’s some social psychological reason that causes groups of 50 adolescent boys and girls behave quite differently to groups of 12. I’ve also begun to play football with the 3rd grade boys, at lunchtime, at that school. I must be becoming quite fit, what with the half an hour cycle there too.

Two of the last three weekends I’ve been hanging around with Lois, an old friend from University and Alessi, her international singer songwriter friend, that I befriended about a year ago. Lois being a journalist that reviews theatre and music on top of her 9 to 5 suggested we saw some traditional Japanese theatre. And so we all attended a Kabuki at the National Theatre, next to the imperial palace. I refused to get a translation headset in order to improve my Japanese listening skill and as a consequence didn’t exactly understand all that was going on. Occasionally Lois would whisper an update of what was going on, which was helpful. I could understand a lot of the words. However, putting them together in a sentence where I seem not to be able to hear the most valuable information and process everything so quickly, I was at a bit of a loss. Nonetheless it was a really enjoyable experience and the sets were spectacular. I also feel its another Japanese cultural experience that I can tick off the list.

The second weekend we met up was in Kyoto, where Alessi was playing a concert. I arrived from a rainy day in Osaka with Anne’s old housemate Jamie and his girlfriend Helen (who it was delightful to see). And the first night we went out for Lois’s birthday; first to my favourite vegetarian restaurant/ cat café and then I took Lois and Alessi to an all you can eat cake restaurant, which they were over the moon about. Then on Sunday we spent the day being guided around Kyoto, by the promoter of the evening’s entertainment and met up with one of Alessi’s old touring partners, who’s recently moved to Japan. The concert was very intimate and at a really quaint little venue by the confluence of the river. A good evening was had by all and we were all sad to have to go our separate ways.

It was good to be back in Kyoto and early on the morning before I left I went to Sanjusangendo Temple, one that's been recommended to me by a friend. It has to be the best temple I've visited so far. It's a fair bit older than many of them and contains a series of over 1000 life-size statues, which are unbelievable. I strongly recommend it to anyone that visits Kyoto.

And for the last few weekends I’ve been meeting up with a New Yorker girl that I seem to be dating. Last weekend she came over to the ‘wrong side of the bay’ or ‘the peninsula of dreams’ (depending on how you view Chiba) and we headed down to Nokogiriyama, somewhere I’ve been meaning to visit since I got here. Just a few stops down the train line there’s a large park up in the mountains above the coast, with spectacular views and the largest Buddha in Japan carved into a cliff face. It really is quite spectacular. It was such beautiful weather when we were out there too and there’s a lot more to see in the park, including a trail with over 1000 Buddha statues on it and various other carvings into cliff faces that make you feel like you’re on an Indiana Jones set. It was really nice to get out into the country again. I had a really good weekend, good company, good weather and a spectacular day out.

All Change Please

Sumo wrestling is probably the most quintessentially Japanese sport imaginable and last weekend my town hosted a national championship. I was lucky enough to finish early at the elementary school I was teaching on Monday and I even managed to get a lift to the venue from one of my colleges, so I was treated to a good few hours of Sumo. All the prefectures were competing against each other and it must have been fairly early in the competition, as they hadn’t got to the knock out stage of the tournament. I was warned by a friend that had been to a Sumo in Tokyo, that it can be quite a slow sport to watch; it takes each competitor ages to get ready and then the match is over in seconds. However, because this was a national event and there were so many people competing (teams of three from each of the 47 prefectures) they had a lot of matches to get through, so it was actually quite fast paced. It was a nice and simple sport to become a spectator of. There seem to be very few rules other than no punching and whoever’s opponent hits the floor or is pushed out of the ring first wins. I just feel really lucky that I had it on my doorstep, and not only that but it was free! Usually you’d have to pay a lot of money and see a lot less action. I really enjoyed it and feel it’s another tick on the list of ‘things I have to do in Japan’.

I’ve had a few final days at some of my schools over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been really overwhelmed by the effort that’s been put in to see me off properly. At Iwane Nishi I was given a leaving ceremony that included a couple of speeches and the presentation of huge signed cards and some presents, all done in English purely for my benefit! Then I was taken to staffroom, where I was presented with flowers and a new hoodie for winter. I was utterly unprepared for all the fuss and was asked to give several speeches, which were a bit of a joke. So the next day I prepared a speech and brought some presents to give to the teachers in return and I was neither asked to give a speech, nor was given any presents. So it probably was right for me not to expect any fuss. It’s strange how different the two days were.

Every six months the Board of Education moves the ALTs around to new schools, which explains why I’ve had some final days recently. I’ll be off to a new school tomorrow, which I’m excited about. I’m quite optimistic about having a better time at the new schools because I think first impressions are very important, and I think now that I’ve learnt so much more Japanese (language and culture), I should be able to give a much better first impression and build a better relationship with the students and teachers. The change is also an indication that I’m halfway through my year here and after dreading that I’d either love Japan so much I’d never return home or hate it so much I’d leave early, feeling I failed, it would seem that neither happened. I’m happy here for the time being and am enjoying it but am also looking forward to returning to the UK. What more could I ask for.