After I finished university I lived in Tokyo for a year. I taught English and wrote stuff for a PR company, saving up enough money to travel around Europe for a while. I slept on futon on a tatami mat in a room in a Gaijin house with nine other foreigners and ate cheaply at the local tonkatsu restaurant. And each morning I’d put on a suit and join all the other salarymen being manhandled into a carriage on the Kiba line.
I still get ‘homesick’ for those times, especially when the cherry trees are in blossom. So the footage coming out of Japan at the moment is hitting me pretty hard.
There were plenty of ‘little’ earthquakes when I lived in Tokyo. Around this time of year there was a rumble pretty much every single day. I remember lying on my futon, being swayed from side to side, wondering if now was the moment I should get up and stand in a doorway for protection. Thankfully, the big one never came.
Being the resourceful people they are, the Japanese are better prepared for this kind of disaster than most. That’s what makes the scale of the devastation all the more frightening. I mean, if carefully crafted Japanese nuclear reactors are melting down, imagine what kind of catastrophe the world would be facing if this happened somewhere in the former Eastern bloc. Or even Chile, where there are reactors built close to faultlines.
Let’s hope that never happens. But in the meantime my thoughts and prayers go out to the Japanese people affected by this terrible disaster.
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Well written Pete – while I have only graced Narita airport and surrounds on an overnight stop to Europe I am sure everyone can’t help but be touched and saddened by the images coming from out of Japan.
I was just in Japan for 2 weeks at the end of last year and absolutely fell in love with it. Couldn’t believe what I was seeing on the TV on Friday when it all happened. If there’s one nation in the world though that will re-build and be stronger coming out the other end of it, then that’s Japan and I’m sure we’ll all be back there in the years to come in absolute amazement at what they’ve achieved after something so tragic.
“Most ticket collectors were too polite to say anything, but not the guy at Nihonbashi.”-No shitting in the toilet.
Dude, your books have inspired me/ and also scared me. They are some of my most prized possessions. I recently rode my bike from Tokyo to Nara (was hoping to get to Osaka) to raise money for the Japanese earthquake victims but I got lost in the mountains of Iga. Fortunately a vending machine in a rice field talked to me there when I had run out of water, and it made me feel much better.
Cheers mate, keep travelling.
Luke