Earthquake Diary 03

Sunday, March 13
Another night of little sleep, but better than the previous night. The aftershocks were gradually getting weaker and farther apart.

Turned on the radio for news and discovered that the earthquake was now magnitude  8.8.

We had an early breakfast and then my wife and I decided to walk to a shopping center that is a few kilometers east of our place. We had to cross Route 4, which is a Sendai Bypass road. The traffic lights there were working; they have their own generator. I know because I could hear it. At the corner there had been a bad accident and an injured person was lying on the sidewalk, being worked on by some medical people, but there was no ambulance. It looked like the medical people were just passing in a car.. We wondered at the irony of surviving the earthquake in tact but then being severely injured in an auto crash.

We continued on the the Yorktown Shopping Center, entering from the back because it is the side we reach first. Actually there had been some tape stretched across the opening to keep people out but someone had torn it down so we went through anyway. Inside the center there was a substantial amount of damage, walls down, parts of the roof caved in, that sort of thing. We emerged from the other side of a covered area on our way to the supermarket, when a guard started yelling at us. He said get out because it is dangerous and pointed off to our left. We went that way but there was no way to get out of the area. We finally climbed over a temporary barricade. The guard paid no attention to us after he yelled, because he started talking to someone.

The supermarket was doing business outside. They had brought a lot of stuff out and put it on racks on the sidewalk. There was a long, long line of people waiting. I walked up as close as I could and tried to see what they had. I could not see anything that we might need so we decided to not get in line. Next we walked down the street to Yamada Denki, an electronics and appliance store. We were hoping to get some batteries. However, there was an employee outside, with fresh bandages on his legs, who said that they had opened briefly in the morning to sell batteries and a few other things, but they had sold out quickly. He also told us a story that we heard over and over from people connected to stores. The earthquake had set off the sprinkler system, or broken its pipes, and most of their goods were water soaked. 

We decided to go home and try shopping the next day at Izumi Chuo, where there is a large department store with a supermarket in the basement. Once home we ate, got more water from the admin building, but that soon stopped. We also went to the river and got two more buckets of water for the toilet.

Since my cell phone was not working, I decided to walk over and see if the AU Store was open I thought they might be able to fix it on site. The store was closed but the bakery that is across the street was open! I got on the end of the line of about 15 people and waited. I could see in the back of the shop, where five men were working as fast as they could to bake and decorate cakes. When I reached the front of the line, I bought eight pieces of cake. That was enough that we could give each of the two children who live on the first floor a piece plus have plenty for ourselves. I brought the cake home and my wife took two pieces downstairs and discovered that there were 13 people staying in the apartment. In addition to the four who normally live there, two families from the upper floors of the building were staying there. The kids were all friends and 10 flights is an awfully lot of stairs to climb to get to a messed up apartment. Later in the day, the downstairs wife brought us a dish of stewed vegetables which became my supper.

More trips to the river for more water for the toilet - only flushing when absolutely necessary.

In chatting with people in the space between our buildings and the admin building, we heard that they newspaper had been delivered in Yaotome, in the area around the station. So, we looked in our mailbox and there was a newspaper. It was about half the normal length and had nothing but earthquake news, but it was certainly welcome. The half size paper has been delivered every day since.

I spent part of the afternoon sitting in the sun beside a window, working on my latest drawing. After our evening meal, my wife and I each used a candle to read until around 8 p.m. We then went to bed, again sleeping fully dressed in the living room.


Monday, March 14
We got up, had breakfast and then walked to Izumi Chuo. When we arrived a bit before 7 a.m. There were already a couple of hundred people waiting in line.  Within an hour the line had disappeared out of sight around the corner of the building. Just before they finally started selling things there must have been over a thousand people standing patiently in line.

After we had been there a while, someone told us that we should go over to the Ward Office, just a couple of hundred meters away. My wife went and I stayed in line. When she returned, she had four bottles of water and eight mikans (a fruit like a tangerine). They were giving them away free.

Around 9 a.m., people from the store came out and asked the front of the line to move. This was done with no problem, everyone keeping their relative position without hassle. The employees roped off an area and started bringing out carts loaded with goods. They made an entrance point at the head of the line, with a U-shaped line of carts leading to a bank of cash registers. They announced that sales would begin at 10. About 9:40, they seemed to be organized and the employees waited with the line of customers. There was at least on employee for each cart of goods. I thought waiting was a bit strange. They could have started selling as soon as they were organized, but when I thought about it, I realized that waiting for the announced time was the normal procedure and that everyone needed normality after the stress of the quake.

At about 9:45, they announced that each person could buy one of each type of item. For example, one container of candy, one pack of paper goods such as diapers. They had fresh fruit and vegetables and you could buy, for example, either a single onion or a pack of three. They had obviously thought about what people would need and the only things on sale were things that were definitely needed. I did not see anything that we thought we needed that was not there.  The truly amazing thing was that all the prices were reduced, many as much as 50%. They opened sales ten minutes early and we bought as much as we could carry, thinking that, if we did not need it, some of our neighbors would.

The walk home was very slow because we had to keep stopping to rest and when moving walked very slowly. I had the backpack that I had taken on the Ohenro Pilgrimage and it was full of fruit and vegetable plus some other stuff. I also had a large and heavy plastic bag in each hand with a bag of diapers added on one side and five boxes of tissue paper on the other.

I really want to stress the orderliness of the whole process. Everyone waited in line without complaint. The store employees were extremely polite, apologizing for the delays and decorating all conversations with many pleases and thank yous. The contrast with what happen in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is truly striking.

During the late afternoon, a couple of trucks from the electric company came down our street and checked the wires at the top each and every pole. About 7 p.m. we noticed that the houses down the street had lights, so I turned on the main breaker for our electrical system and found that we had power. This meant that we had heat again, could charge the cell phones, and could get news from the TV.

It is interesting that in Japan all the power cables are at the top of poles, rather than underground as in most countries. I asked about this and was told that reason related to earthquakes. If the lines break during an earthquake, it is relatively easy to isolate and fix the problem. If the cable is underground, it would take construction work, digging up the lines, before the problems could be found and fixed.

We slept in our clothes but moved back to our bedroom where we have electric blankets.