Friends,
Thank you for your concern, there is just so much to be concerned about.  Here in Shizuoka, we got shaken up a bit, followed by the horrific news of tsunami in miyagi Iwate and ibaragi prefectures among others.


I went to take out the trash yesterday morning and talked to the janitor lady on the way back.  'The Tokai earthquake is supposed to be much worse.'  I thought we would be talking about the horrific images on the screen of total destruction in Tohoku, northeastern, Japan.


This earthquake is called The Northeastern Area Pacific Ocean Offshore Earthquake.  (that is a direct translation of the characters used in the name, I don't know what it is being called in the west)  For us here in the Tokai, eastern seaboard, region, it isn't even the expected Tokai Earthquake.


The super markets are empty of bread milk and cereal like things, everyone is buying up.  That is here in the Tokai region.  You know what is going on in the Tohoku region, but it is all very confusing, the damage can't be measured, nor the loss of lives.  Just get news after news of more people on rooftops of hospitals, and wedding halls, the sturdier buildings, waiting to be rescued, It is likely that many patients haven't survuved.


What has proven to be relatively reliable, is text messaging.  Text messages are getting through even though telephone calls aren't.


And then there is the Fukushima atomic power plant....  Already  there are hibakusha.  It is impossible to know the extent of possible damage from there.   It is so very frightening, but I want to believe it can't be another Cheronobyl which I have read, but I don't beleive anything.  Specialist galore are on the TV going on about it but nobody is any more enlightened by it.  No more nuclear power plants EVER NO MORE PLEASE  NO NO! People have been evacuated within a 20 kilometer radius of both nuclear reactors.


What I've been saying on FB is that it looks like Tokyo withstood alot of structual damamge but few deaths (five at last count).  Tokyo is presently still a refugee camp for those who cant go home.  Universities have opened their campuses and thousands are staying in gymnasiums and lecture halls.


And there are the after shocks, or new quakes I don't know how they tell the difference.

 
There are 'warning messages' of doom being sent all over the waves, warning not to go outside and to beware of rain, then news that those are bogas.

Here in Shizuoka the sun is shining like a 'normal' Sunday afternoon.  I washed my hair and filled everything I could with water.  E is at her boyfriend's house, otherwise we sit and watch the news...

I am reminded of a TV program I watched when I was a kid in Japan called 'Nihon Chinbotsu'.  It was about Japan sinking into the ocean.  The hero guy stayed on the last available land space to help the last of the survivers into the helicopter.  Only this time the scene is real, not buckets of water poured over a plastic miniature  model of a seaside village.  No hero guy.

The TV has to be turned off periodically, escape to my books.