I’m having one of those days where my head is a bit foggy, and everything spins from time to time.  I’m not sure what is causing the dizziness but Marty is also feeling a bit strange.  Brain fogginess and dizziness are not a good combination.  I discovered that today when I was swinging my legs wildly while trying to walk down the steps to the train station.  If I had just been dizzy I would probably have sat down until the dizziness past but since my brain is moving slowly it took me much too long to realise that the lurching and leg swinging could have made me fall.  My first thoughts were all about Monty Python and nothing about how strange it was for me to be behaving like that in public.  It also never occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t well and that I should have turned round and went back home.

When I got to the train station I saw a older women stop at the top of a set of steps with a pram.  There are steps everywhere in Tokyo and it’s really noticeable at the minute as most of the escalators have been turned off to save electricity.  I walked up to her and said “would you like a hand?” and then proceeded to help lift the pram.  In Northern Ireland this would have been a perfectly normal thing to do.  But not here in Tokyo.  For a start I completely forgot to speak in Japanese.  I wasn’t thinking straight at all, I was just falling into a pattern of behaviour.  For some reason people don’t stop to help people with prams or wheelchairs in Tokyo.  I try to follow cultural rules but at times I just can’t help myself.  I can’t see an elderly woman struggle with a shopping basket in the supermarket without wanting to help.  I have been told that it can be seen as insulting to offer help, that I’m suggesting that the person isn’t capable, but I feel so rude when I don’t help.   And I can’t see a women with a pram at the top of a set of stairs without wanting to help.

I have no idea what the women thought about my help.  She told me that she was fine, and that she didn’t need help, but by that stage I had already lifted the pram .  I set the pram down, she thanked me, and I climbed the steps into the train station.  It was only when I got to the platform that I realised that I’d forgotten to speak in Japanese.  I hadn’t even noticed when she spoke in Japanese to me because I completely understood what she was saying.

I managed to catch the train and get the shopping without anything else odd happening.  But I will spend most of the afternoon sitting down as I really don’t like the spinning sensation when I stand up.

I saw a man walking a ferret today.  Marty tells me that this isn’t a strange thing, but it seemed strange to me.  Mind you I live in a country full of strange things.  I still have difficulty identifying everything I see in the grocery store.  There are whole aisles of food that I have no idea about and I don’t know if I’ll ever work out the difference between the 10 different types of fish flakes.

My local grocery store sometimes has stalls set up in the grocery packing area.  This week there has been a women selling green goo.  It can’t really be a green goo or slime, but I don’t want to get overly close to it.  I was terrified that she’d approach me and offer a free sample of the goo while I was packing my groceries.  I’m not really sure how to politely decline.  I know how to behave if I am given a sample.  I smile, say thanks, eat the goo, say something like “so delicious”, and then try to escape without buying any.  At least, that’s what everyone else was doing.  Sometimes it’s good to be a scary foreigner.

I saw a new item in the store today.  It took me a while to work out what it was but I can now buy probiotic straws. I think that I’ll continue to eat yoghurt to get friendly bacteria and avoid the straws.

I arrived back in Tokyo last night.  I had a good time in Australia but I was more than ready to leave.  The flight home wasn’t great.  I had booked a direct flight from Perth but it was cancelled and I was re-routed via Hong Kong.  Even getting through immigration took longer than it ever has before.

Now I’m hoping that the city stops shaking and that I can stay in one place for a while.  At least until I leave for YAPC::NA in June.

I have a friend who works at an office that’s built on reclaimed land out towards Tokyo Bay.  On the day of the Tohoku Earthquake the ground around his office cracked and shifted.

Crack in Car Park

One week later and you can see that nature is filling in the crack.

Filling in the Cracks

It’s going to take me a while to adjust.  I no longer feel as if I am constantly swaying but I did have a lot of difficulty getting to sleep on the plane on the way here.  I kept waking up thinking that the turbulence was an earthquake.

I’ve read many criticisms about foreigners leaving Japan.  Odd that I hear almost nothing about the Japanese that have also left.   I was the only non-Japanese person in my cabin on the way to Australia.  The queues in the airport were also mainly made up of Japanese.

Australia is noisier than I remember.  Japan also has insects that scream at night but I wasn’t expecting the birds.  They start to make an almighty racket when the sun comes up and also when it starts to go down.  It can be hard to hear another person speak in the apartment.  Mind you, I’m on my own for a few days so for now it’s just me and the birds.

I’m currently at Narita airport.  I’ve said goodbye to my house guest and now I’m spending the rest of the day here as I’m leaving for Sydney this evening.

We left quite early this morning as we hadn’t been able to book train tickets to the airport in advance.  We didn’t have any problems getting a train but given the restricted schedule of the past week we thought it was prudent to give ourselves plenty of time.  Terminal 1 wasn’t overly full.  It had long queues but that’s mainly because everyone turned up before check-in opened.  We arrived 45 minutes before Virgin opened theirs.  I was speaking to one man who seemed to think that the queues weren’t normal and more people than usual had turned up.  But then I fly all the time and I have seen much longer queues than those, and the queues disappeared quite quickly once check-in actually opened.  I also noticed that the queues for security were the normal length.

I was surprised that the man I was talking to was so concerned.  He looked at the queue at said that he couldn’t imagine Virgin being able to handle it in the time-frame.  But there is only one Virgin flight a day and of course they can handle checking in the passengers for one flight in an hour and a half.  We are still in Japan.  It’s not as if they had one member of staff on or anything.  It was actually looking as if they would have everyone checked-in within 30 minutes.  I have waited nearly 90 minutes to be checked-in for a flight in America on a day when there weren’t considered to be any problems at all.  In that case it was caused by a shortage of staff.  It was almost as if they hadn’t realised that the people with tickets would be turning up for the flights.

I’m in Terminal 2 now and it is busier.  There are a couple of very long queues.  But I was still able to find a seat in Starbucks, so it’s not overly alarming out there.  Nothing like it would be during Golden Week, the big holiday during the year.

I have been asked if I’m fleeing the country but that’s not quite what I’m doing.  I have a Japanese friend who left for Perth on Thursday night and she would like me to join her.  She would also like to have someone to fly back to Japan with.  There is no doubt that if it wasn’t for the recent disaster that I would not be leaving.  There are issues with being in Tokyo at the minute, and I don’t mean fear of radiation, but rather the disruption of services and the possibility of another quake.  I also know that my family and friends are going to be happier if I am somewhere else.  Marty has no plans to leave at the minute, but I know that he will leave if he believes that Tokyo is unsafe.

There have been times when I haven’t been sure what the point of Twitter is, or if connecting to lots of people on Facebook was really worthwhile, but in the past week I have been incredibly grateful to have use of these free services.  It was Twitter that allowed me to get the message out that I was O.K. after the quake, and Facebook has allowed me to update my friends and family throughout the past week without having to contact everyone individually.

Thank you.

Once we were finally back on the ground we needed to decide what to do next.  I still had no phone signal and no idea how serious the earthquake had been.  The streets were full of people who had been evacuated from buildings or train stations.  We decided that it had to be a good idea to move to higher ground. We had come from Roppongi Hills earlier in the day and we walked back via the same route.  This was a good plan as I didn’t want to take an unfamiliar route.  I have absolutely no sense of direction and really didn’t want to get lost.

This did mean walking back by the supermarket that sold the beans.  At this stage grocery shopping was the last thing on my mind.  And even if I had wanted to the store, like many others on the street, had been closed.  Apart from some of the shops closing we didn’t see a lot of problems.  There was some broken glass and indications that people were worried but nothing overly alarming.

Once I finally had a 3G signal I managed to get to Twitter.  Then I started to see the messages from friends wanting to know where I was and asking me to get in touch with my family as soon as possible.  I have a sister-in-law in Australia who had already seen the news as I had been in the tower for quite some time.  I posted quickly stating that I had been in Tokyo Tower but that I was now on the ground.  I then went to the Japan Meteorological Agency website to get information about the quake.  I’m so glad that I wasn’t able to access that from the tower.  It told me how big the quake was and, given that I actually have read the information I’d been given about dealing with earthquakes in Japan, I knew that the quake was huge.

The site also also showed a red flashing tsunami warning.  Tsunamis are the reason I don’t live in an apartment by Tokyo bay.  There is something terrifying about huge walls of water.  Much as I love the sea I never want to see it come for me.

We kept walking and got to the Mori Tower quite quickly.  Some people have been surprised that after my experience in Tokyo Tower that I was planning to get inside another one.  But my husband works in the Mori Tower and he has assured me that it’s built to withstand earthquakes.  I also knew that his company would have food, water, and disaster kits.

I tried contacting Marty when Norwin and I arrived at the tower, but my phone still wasn’t making calls.  There were security guards standing at the doors to the lobby and I could see that it was already full of people.  At first I didn’t want to go in but since my phone wouldn’t work Norwin convinced me that the best way to get in touch with Marty was to get reception to ring him.  I went in and joined the long queue of people trying to reach other people inside the tower.  The quake meant that the elevator had been stopped and with the many aftershocks it looked like it could be hours before it started again.

We stayed in the tower for hours.  The elevators didn’t work and I didn’t think I would be in any fit state to evacuate if I walked up the 44 flights of stairs to where Marty was.  Once the elevators were working again we went up and sat in a rest area of the office.  There was a T.V. showing BBC world news and it was horrifying.  While sitting in the lobby we were aware that there had been a huge earthquake and aftershocks, but we had heard nothing about the tsunami other than the warning I had seen.  We also hadn’t been able to find out much on the internet as I was worried about my phone dying.  It was so hard to get a signal and all the searching for one was killing the battery. We used the phone only to send messages to other people to let them know that we were safe.

We considered spending the night sleeping at the office as it would have taken about 3 hours to walk home but trains did start again and at 11 o’clock we ventured outside.  If we hadn’t manage to get a train we could always have gone back to the office.  We tried the Hibiya line and they had a train going to Ueno.  This left us with a walk that we imagined would take less than an hour.

The train journey wasn’t pleasant.  The train was mostly empty but it kept stopping because of frequent aftershocks.  At one point it looked as if the walls of the train tunnel were moving but it was actually the train moving about on the tracks.

Ueno station was filled with people sitting on the ground on plastic sheets.  I imagine that many people spent the night there as it was already after midnight and most trains were not running.  I was glad that we could walk from there as the station was quite cold.  We were carrying emergency kits and they had some sort of blanket in them but the floor of the station would not have been a great place to spend the night.

The walk home wasn’t difficult.  There were still lots of people outside walking home.  I think it took us just under an hour to reach the apartment and I was delighted to get home.  The elevators in the building were working, we had electricity and water, but the gas wasn’t working.  This meant that there was no heating and explained why the lobby of the building had quite a few woman and small children on the floor as it was warm down there.

Our apartment was mostly fine.  Some things had moved, a couple of things had fallen over, but it was hard to believe that there had been such a huge quake.  I lay on the sofa and Marty true to form started to hunt through the cupboards for food.  He opened the cupboard and asked, “Do we have any beans?”

This morning I wasn’t woken up by an earthquake.  I was feeling fine until I started to read my email.  It’s full of messages telling me that the UK press and media are saying that we need to leave Tokyo right now.  I’ve even been told that the Foreign Office are telling people to leave Tokyo right now.

This is not what we are hearing in Tokyo and we are registered with the Foreign Office.  They are certainly saying that there should be no non-essential travel to Japan:

We advise against all non essential travel to Tokyo and north eastern Japan given the damage caused by the 11 March earthquake and resulting aftershocks and tsunami.

They are also saying the following about the health risk in Tokyo:

The most recent advice from the UK’s Chief Scientific Adviser remains that for those outside the exclusion zone set up by the Japanese authorities there is no real human health issue that people should be concerned about. This advice is kept under constant review. However, due to the evolving situation at the Fukushima nuclear facility and potential disruptions to the supply of goods, transport, communications, power and other infrastructure, British nationals in Tokyo and to the north of Tokyo should consider leaving the area.

This information comes from the Foreign Office website and not from sources like The Sun newspaper, whose headlines are horrifying.

I would also say that the exclusion area is 20km and that we are more than 200km from the area.

As well as the Foreign Office we are getting information everyday from Marty’s employer.  At the minute I am listening to a conference call with a nuclear expert explaining what is happening and he has a very similar opinion to the British scientists.  The Foreign Office has stated the following:

The Chief Scientific Adviser said the Japanese Government’s advice is entirely proportionate and appropriate to the risk.

…

Those of you who are living in Tokyo, you are a long way away from the reactor, and although there have been reports that there have been slightly increased levels of radiation, this is trivial in terms of a health effect.  So we would like to reassure people that well away from the reactor there is not an issue for people living around there.

I’m getting fed up with being told that people in Tokyo should go about their daily life as normal.  I realise that this is probably being said to prevent panic but life in Tokyo at the minute just isn’t normal.  And people know that.  Why else would petrol and food be selling out? I had only started to write this rant when I received a notification about another aftershock.  Earthquakes are common in Japan but the earthquake on Friday has led to a large increase in the number of shocks.

I enjoy living in Tokyo.  It is an incredibly convenient city with a public transport system like no other I have ever experienced.  It has amazing restaurants, bars, and shops.  It’s a great place to go on holiday and I have a friend staying at the minute who arrived on holiday last week.  On a normal holiday I would take him sight-seeing, we would have hired a car and gone to see the snow monkeys, we would eat out, and we would probably have gone to karaoke.

Instead we stay within walking distance of the apartment.  We haven’t been on a train since the day of the major quake.  We aren’t going to hire a car and go sight-seeing as that would be a ridiculous thing to do.  We aren’t eating in restaurants as we haven’t seen any that are open.  We are spending hours looking at news channels.  We will consider going to the grocery store today but we are aware that we won’t be buying bread, rice, or dairy.

There are trains running but it is a limited schedule and we don’t want to go out only to get stuck miles away from the apartment.  Walking to the apartment after a major quake isn’t terrible but we’ve already done that in the last week.  We also don’t want to use the trains if we don’t actually need to as we would rather people who need to travel were able to do so.

My week also isn’t normal.  I’m still online but mainly to answer queries about how I am.  I’m not sleeping well because the aftershocks keep waking me up.  The language school has closed, my clinic has cancelled my appointment and I haven’t been able to visit my friends.  I’m not able to go to the gym.  We haven’t even washed the towels as it seems to be a waste of electricity and water.  We are expecting the power to go out on rolling basis and we are conserving electricity.

Marty has been going to work, but that’s not happening in a normal manner either.  He takes longer to get there and to get home.  (And the apartment is shaking again, this is another strong quake.  So I’m going to stop ranting for a while.)  His work is providing lunch because of the limited number of restaurants that are open.  Yesterday he attended a seminar on nuclear technology.

None of this stuff is overly important.  I am incredibly fortunate to be safe and warm.  But it just. Isn’t. Normal!