Earthquake Diary 11

Saturday, March 19
This was the nearest thing to a normal morning that I have had in a 
week. I woke up early, as usual. After brushing my teeth, washing my 
face and doing my morning exercises, I made a glass of hot water 
with half a lemon squeezed into it. I drank that while reading 
through the news, my usual morning websites and my email. I heard 
my wife get up and start making noise in the kitchen. When I 
finished, I went out and discovered that she had remembered that 
we had some flour, so she used the last of the milk to make 
pancakes. The four of us had a leisurely and delicious breakfast. 
Then I returned to my computer and posted my blog comments 
for yesterday and wrote some of the longer emails that I had 
postpone yesterday.

I heard today that one of my universities is thinking about 
postponing the start of the school year until the middle of 
May.　It usually starts at the beginning of April. I have had no 
word from the other university about what they are planning 
to do. I am becoming more and more upset by CNN and the 
sensationalism that they are adding to all of their broadcasts. 
They are not helping anything. I may stop watching but they 
are the best place to get information about what is happening 
in the rest of the world. Saw an interesting short article in the 
newspaper. It said that the Jieitai (Japanese Self Defence 
Force) air base north of Sendai had been destroyed by the 
combination of the earthquake and the tsunami. Twenty-eight 
airplanes were caught on the ground and completely
destroyed. The value of the planes alone is 2000 oku yen 
(one man is 100,000,000) I assume that the facility must be 
worth a lot too.

On TV I saw pictures of the inside of Sendai Airport. The 
tsunami came right through the airport and all of the 
electronics (radar, radios, direction finders, etc) was 
under water, so it is completely useless. They managed 
to clear the cars and boats off the runway and set up
some sort of portable air control system so they are 
able to use the facility to a limited extend.

We just had two fairly strong aftershocks, but to be 
honest, I hardly noticed. My wife just came in and said 
that a public bath near here was open for 350 customers 
a day. If tomorrow's newspaper indicates that it is open 
again, we will go over and stand in line. I would dearly love 
to have a hot bath and be able to wash my hair.

We just got news that our friends who are shopping for us 
found some extra gas and will bring everything to our 
apartment tonight. This means that we will not have to 
schlep it for a couple of kilometers. This means that I can 
go out for a walk this afternoon and check on some
more of the area.

I started out on my walk by going about 2 kilometers north and then 2 west. Then I turned left and walked 2 kilos south, and finally walking the 2 toward the east to get home again - almost a square. The westward section was along the top of the cliff that forms the north boundary of the river valley that I live in. The eastward portion was more or less along the river. The two other sections were first up the cliff and then down the cliff.

At first and while still in the valley, I found quite a bit of damage. Walls down, tiles off roofs, occasional broken windows, and that sort of thing. However when I reached the top of the cliff, I found no damage at all. Well, almost no damage. There were a few concrete block walls that did not have metal reinforcement rods and which had lost one or two blocks from the top layer. There was also one wall that was down completely, but it had obviously been weak in that the foundation was poor. On the down hill portion, I saw a couple of house that had lost tiles from the roof. What I am trying to say, in a very round about way, is that there was very little damage from the quake. This leads me to believe that most of the disaster was caused by the tsunami. We are at least 15 kilo from the ocean so it did not effect us at all.

Most of the stores that I passed were closed, however, the number of barber shops that were open was surprising.

On my way back, I passed through Izumi Chuo and met a professor from my old university. He told me that the top two floors of the main building were extensively damaged and that the staff and faculty were not allow to enter. He could not even enter his office. He also said that there had been 200 students who could not get home after the quake and who had spent the night on campus. Of those 200, about twenty were still on campus because they could not get home or had no home to go to. He also said that they had decided to postpone the start of the new academic year until after Golden Week, so it would be the middle of May before classes started.

When I got home, my wife said that one of the other students in my art class had called to say that the building where the class meets was badly damaged and we could not resume classes. He also said that after things settled down a little we would get together as a group and discuss with the teacher if we could continue to meet. The teacher's home studio has also been damaged so that meeting there will not be possible.

Around 5 p.m. we received a phone call saying that our friend who was bringing the food was outside. It turned out that I was wrong about Yamagata. They had actually come from the south side of Tokyo, just passing through Yamagata. It was just like Christmas. He had four big boxes of stuff for us. One box was full of fresh vegetables. Another contained lots of flour and yeast as well as shampoo, dish soap and tooth paste. A styrofoam box held meat, yogurt, and milk. There was a big bag of candies and cakes. And finally, there was a large plastic bag of rice. This all accompanied the two loaves of bread that my daughter had found at a convenience store. It is amazing how happy something like that can make you.

In the evening we had a fairly strong quake and the TV said that it was magnitude six point something and center just inland from the ocean in Ibaraki Prefecture. Some friends posted a website of Facebook http://www.japanquakemap.com/. It shows all the earthquakes in Japan starting early in the morning on March 11. The quakes are shown as circles where the size indicates the magnitude and the color the depth. If you play it, it is worth clicking on the "Sticky dots" option. I just looked at it and it says that we have had 29 quakes so far today and that they have all been in the 4 to 6 range.

I am now going to actually post this on the blog, do my daily 40 minutes of Vipassana meditation, read until I get sleepy, and then conk out for the night.