The Tohoku Earthquake

 

At 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, an earthquake of magnitude 9.0 struck the Tohoku region of eastern Japan. Our area was rocked at about magnitude 5.0—strong enough for my husband to see out into the garden where the earthen walls of our house separated from the posts in the rolling motion of the quake. When the earthquake shook Tokyo at about magnitude 6.0 or stronger for six long minutes, the city came to a halt. All public transportation was suspended, and people poured up from the underground malls and rail stations; office workers emptied out from buildings into the already swollen streets; and that vast city of speeding trains and bustling streets slowed to a crawl.

By a stroke of very bad luck, I was standing on the train platform in central Tokyo’s Otemachi subway labyrinth at the moment the Great East Japan Earthquake hit. When the ground of the massive station structure stopped rippling and the initial terror had passed, the other commuters and I waited quietly, backs leaning against the station walls. All eyes were fixed on our cell phones in hand, trying unsuccessfully to get a signal. No one said a word.

At that point I still thought the trains would be running again because announcements were telling us there had been a “big earthquake” and to wait while the train lines were being checked. I dutifully waited forty-five minutes before realizing it was pointless. And so I made my way through underground walkways to Tokyo Station, unaware of just how long that distance is, and began to realize the enormity of what had just happened.

Student groups trapped on their way through Tokyo for their annual school trips were seated on the floor as teachers gave instructions. The bullet train would not be running that day or the next. Businessmen stood crowded around television screens, listening to news updates. But I knew time was an issue and kept moving, so did not hear of the horrific devastation wrought by the postquake tsunami.

I looked for a hotel right away but wasn’t quick enough. Everything took an inordinately long time—so many people were flooding onto the walkways and streets after the trains stopped. That night in Tokyo was kind of like an out-of-body experience. Just moments before the great earthquake began, I had been thinking about food. My iPhone battery was dying, I was getting cold, and I knew I needed to get to a safe haven to recoup my energy before the night ahead of me. I needed food, and I needed good food.

When I finally got my bearings, it was getting on toward 5 p.m., already two hours after the quake. All hotels were full, so I lined up for a public pay phone to call home and make a restaurant reservation. I waited forty-five minutes.

I also waited forty-five minutes (in vain) for a taxi. I tried to gauge how long it would take by talking to others around me in line—I’m not sure what we were thinking. We somehow believed that if we stood there long enough, a taxi would take us where we wanted to go. But what exactly was “long enough”? One hour . . . five?

The alternative was unthinkable. Walk. But I now had a restaurant destination and nothing would deter me from having a good meal. Nothing. So I walked–power walked, that is.

Thanks to a fellow map-toting “traveler” met early on in my trek, I got to the restaurant in about an hour and a half. We stopped one time on a pedestrian bridge over a main thoroughfare. Beneath us a massive river of automobile headlights barely inched forward. No taxis were getting through that night. Walking had been a good decision.

A flute of champagne in hand, my iPhone charging, I heaved a huge sigh of relief. I was “home.”

For the next two hours, a surreal dinner like I had never had before unfolded. It almost seems obscene in retrospect: tree bark, tree sap . . . bread baked before my eyes in a small stone capsule. Unusual and whimsical morsels from land and sea played together on the equally fanciful “plates.” I was the only customer that night. Perhaps I was the only one crazy enough to take refuge in such a place. Shut off from the outside world, none of us in that hushed room of Les Créations de Narisawa really knew or understood the gravity of the earthquake and the monstrous destruction it had brought. Nor had any of us imagined the unthinkable happening—the meltdown of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.

At ten o’clock, I stepped back out into the brisk night and started my return voyage. Long (useless) waits for trains, a night spent shivering on the marble floor of Tokyo Station, and more endless lines later, I finally got home late the following day. And for now we are safe, though 215 kilometers does not seem far enough from the Fukushima debacle. At the time of this writing, hundreds of thousands of Japanese are still in shelters, and many will not be able to go home for many years to come.

And in the aftermath, we try to pick up our lives. I am planting seeds for the summer and looking toward the future. We cannot control the amount of radiation that may or may not be in the environment around us, but we can control what we choose to put in our bodies. Now, more than ever, is the time to make careful and conscious decisions about the food we eat and to strive to find the cleanest, most chemical-free food we can. That is a choice we can make every day for ourselves and for our families.