I said Kamakitako and not Lake Kamakitako because ‘ko’ means lake and it would be like saying Lake Kamakita Lake.
That kind of language glitch pops up every once in a while. One of the bridges across the Sumida River in Tokyo is often listed in English guidebooks as the Nihonbashi Bridge. ‘Bashi’(or hashi) means bridge in Japanese, though, so they’re actually saying The Nihon Bridge Bridge. Then, too, a lot of times you’ll hear or see the river itself called the Sumidagawa River, but ‘gawa’ is river, so...
This little trick isn’t just found when going from language to language. Have you ever heard ‘ATM machine’ or ‘PIN number.’? Think about it.
I’m starting up again on my return to Japan after the March 11 earthquake. I was on break and in California when it hit.
Let me say at the start that it was and continues to be a tremendous tragedy for those in the tsunami area and for those around Fukushima. I, and everyone, I’m sure, hope and pray for progress in the recovery of the northeast coast.
My personal experience revolved around attempting to piece together information on the situation in order to determine when - and for a while, if - I would return to Japan. It took a month for me to feel it was all right to return.
I learned a lot about how news is reported.
What was supposed to be happening varied according to whom you were listening. CNN got on it right away, of course, and people like Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta headed for Japan. There was a while when it seemed we were really being informed about what was going on.
Then CNN came on with a story about radiation hitting Tokyo and made it so alarming that I emailed all of my friends in Japan and asked if they were going to be able to evacuate.
One of my colleagues at the university emailed me back immediately and asked what I was talking about. There was no mention of the radiation hitting Tokyo IN Tokyo. Soon another wrote back and said that he had just sent his kids off to school and his wife was outside hanging out the laundry. A third replied that his family had not even thought of evacuating.
I started checking out NHK, Japanese news, online. For every sensational story CNN ran, NHK seemed to have a quieter analysis. Of course, TEPCO tended to minimize the danger. I began to realize that the truth was somewhere in between the fear-mongering of American news outlets and the downplaying of the situation being reported in Japan.
Then, when Libya hit the headlines, CNN seemed to leave Japan entirely. They had put up a page for the earthquake, but went for days at a time without updating it. The CNN ‘This Just In’ blog’s newest stories were always a week or more outdated. The U.S. Embassy called for voluntary evacuation and then seldom posted anything new on their earthquake page.
Most news sites have links at the bottom of their articles. CNN titles the section “We Recommend’. The stories are not dated at the link. I would read something like ‘Another Explosion at Fukushima Reactor’ and click on the link to find out it was a story about the explosion from the week before. One link was titled something like ‘Massive Earthquake Off the Coast of the Philippines’ and when I clicked on it, it was dated last October.
Somehow, I gradually put together enough to decide to return, but my belief in a connected world is badly shaken.
When I got to Narita, it seemed a lot quieter than usual. It was a quick trip through immigration and customs. (We still had a long wait for our luggage, though.) My flight on Korean Air had been full, but it was a smaller plane with only two seats on the window sides of the aisles. It was headed for Seoul, so I don’t know how many passengers actually disembarked at Narita. I also heard that KAL’s daily service to Japan from LAX has been cut back to four or five days a week.
The trains seemed to be running normally. I got right on the Skyliner bound for Ueno. The train was more crowded than usual, but I don’t know if that was because of cutbacks in service or not. Since fewer people are coming in to the airport, more crowded trains would seem to indicate fewer trains running, I would think.
In Tokyo, many electric signs had been turned off. Many escalators were also shut down. There’s still an effort to reduce use of electricity, but in my area, anyway, the rolling blackouts have been discontinued. The nights seem darker from my apartment window, though.
I was able to get gas for my scooter with no problem. Well, I didn’t have a problem with the gas actually being available, but I ran into trouble at the pump. It was my first time at a self-service pump in Japan and using the pump involved choosing gas type, choosing payment type, entering blood-type and clicking your heels together three times. Luckily, self-serve in Japan means having an attendant close by to help if necessary. It was.
The store shelves still have some bare spots. Several brands and flavors of bottled water are not available. For some reason, a few varieties of canned coffee, of which Japan has a whole lot, have disappeared. And yogurt is being rationed.
I found that out by coming up to the check-out counter with four containers of yogurt and being told two was the limit. The clerk was very apologetic in explaining the situation to me, but I’m sure that the word has gotten around that the foreign guy is hoarding yogurt. It didn’t help when I went back two days later and brought up two containers of yogurt and two small bottles of a probiotic yogurt drink and found out that the same thing applied. Once again, the clerk politely informed me of the rule and confiscated one of each of my yogurts. I must really be getting a reputation around here.
When people get together, everyone asks each other where they were when the quake hit. There are lots of stories of spending that night in the office or walking for hours to get home after the trains stopped. One guy I know confessed that he stole a bicycle to ride home. Actually, he said ‘borrowed’ so he might have returned it. I, of course, have to say I was out of the country.
There’s a little bit of guilt involved in not having been here for the shaking. Everyone I know has this shared experience and I feel left out. Yeah, well, all the same, I’m glad I missed it. I’ll deal with the guilt somehow.
I’ve had a similar experience. I was in Japan on 9/11 and only knew of that day on the day from what I could gather from Japanese TV. I still hear new things about it now ten years after the fact. Living through September 11 was a shared experience that I did not participate in and it occasionally sets me apart from other Americans.
In Japan, there’s still the occasional aftershock to deal with. There have been four or five noticeable shakes since I got back - more than we experience in a few years time in California - but they’re always over before I have time to react. The day after I got back, there was an announcement over the town’s loudspeaker system and a few seconds later, there was an earthquake. I thought that the Japanese had perfected an early warning system on seismic activity, but my friend, Yoh-san, said it was just a coincidence. The announcements are just public service-type information and the one I heard had nothing to do with predicting an earthquake.
The fact is, though, that Japan is well-prepared for earthquakes. Think about it. A 9 magnitude quake hits the country and there is very little damage done. All of the high-rises in Tokyo withstood it well. The deaths and destruction were mainly due to the terrible tragedy of the tsunami.
The current problem, of course, has to do with the nuclear plant. TEPCO should have been, but, unfortunately, wasn’t prepared for the double event of a huge quake and following tsunami. If the company had done what they should have done in the way of safety systems for any eventuality, Japan wouldn’t be dealing with this on-going crisis.
I’m back in Japan and continuing with my job, with my life, as is everyone around me. It’s a strange feeling, though, walking around and really expecting the earth to move at any time. I’m sure that all of the people who actually went through the great shake feel that way a lot more than I do.
