One Saturday night about a month ago we had a bit of a rude awakening here in Japan, even if most of us were probably still up. It was an earthquake, not unusual in itself, we get them all the time, but this one was a bit different. It came like a eerie spectre from the past, an unwelcome visit from an all too familiar and fearsome adversary. It happened on February 13th, at 11pm.. (what is it about 3s and 1s?), it was uncommonly strong with a side to side motion, it lasted for a good couple of minutes and was felt across almost the whole eastern side of the country. The rude bit was that it was uncannily similar in character to the massive earthquake that struck here on March 11th 2011, the infamous `311’ that brought the tragedy of the huge tsunamis, the destruction of the Fukushima power plant and all that, and brought untold misery with a loss of life that truly shocked the whole world. In fact, it was later categorised as an aftershock of that quake, 10 years on.

 

For many years in Japan, certainly ever since I first arrived - 36 years and counting, we’ve heard tell of the long-predicted ’big one’. Despite the havoc wrought by 311, that wasn’t it, we were told. That one is still out there lurking somewhere in our collective future. That’s not to say we’re all living on the edge here, even though in a very real sense we surely are. But for the most part we all just deal with it, partly through denial, partly through resignation. Whenever the shaking starts though and it goes on a bit long, all kinds of things start running through your mind. You start eyeing your dining table, should you be thinking about ducking down under there, or how long you’re going to wait before you make that mad dash for the door. 

 

As for myself, at 11pm the other Saturday night I was one of many still up. I had no intention of going to bed any time soon. I’d just resurfaced after a short nap and was gearing up to watch the UK football well into the night. A couple of hours later I went out for some fresh air between games and I quickly noticed that in almost all the houses in my usually early-to-bed neighbourhood there were lights on. Were people unsure whether to lay down and shut their eyes in case there was more, I wondered? Or were minds perhaps just a little too overactive to allow them to even contemplate sleep? Who knows. But what is sure is the tragic events of exactly 10 years ago traumatised all of us who were involved in them to any degree and it doesn’t take much for those feelings to kick in.

 

In early 2011 Facebook was already a thing and lots of family and friends in different parts of the world, mainly around Japan, Wales/UK and Hawaii, were on it. The whole world soon saw the horrific tsunami footage, many hours before I did as it turned out, since I was trying to get myself home from a city of 25 million where the infrastructure was paralysed. The cellphone network quickly went down, preventing us from posting anything in the immediate aftermath and indeed for several more hours into the night. For good measure too my own phone was soon battery-dead. Many were understandably concerned, unsure as they were exactly where in Japan in relation to what was happening and I was and unable to determine if I was likely safe or not. It was only once I got back to my place in the early hours of the morning and had wi-fi that I got to see and respond to the mountain of waiting messages.

 

In the days and weeks that followed everything became dreadfully uncertain, due largely to the precarious situation around the Fukushima nuclear reactor. There was the apparently imminent threat of serious radiation exposure, many foreign embassies were on high alert, giving daily bulletins and on the verge of distributing iodine tablets to their citizens, the vexing and deliberately obtuse approach to the issue on the part of the Japanese government meant that no reliable information was forthcoming. We were also being remorselessly hit daily, and nightly, by powerful after-shock after powerful after-shock. The worst thing about this was the actual alarm itself - a jarring, demonic tone eerily reminiscent of the theme from 'Jaws', perfectly designed to set nerves on edge and guaranteed to penetrate rudely into any level of sleep. With risks and tensions so high, it seemed this was invariably activated at the slightest of murmurs from the ground below us. It often caused more anxiety than the quake itself and many of them we didn’t even feel. Conversely though there were many that we did.

 

With all the attention that was on us, some friends from outside Japan asked if I would recount in detail my personal experience of that day. It was something I wanted to do but never actually found myself able to at the time, I don’t know why exactly. I like to write though and that for sure was a most, perhaps even the most, unforgettable day of my life. I suspect too though that despite my feelings that my life had been endangered, and with good cause, when compared with everything that happened just 250 miles north of here, the truth was I had got off lightly, and in the light of that it felt strange, almost inappropriate, to focus on just what had happened to me. So as well as triggering in many of us cellular memories that are the legacy of our experience of that fateful day, the quake the other Saturday night also triggered in me a desire to finally write about it. It’s still all very vivid, I remember it all.

 

The red line shows the height of the tsunamis that hit the Tohoku area on March 11th, 2011.

 

Here goes.

 

That Friday, March 11th 2011, ‘three one one’ as it’s come to be known here, I found myself at the headquarters of the Japanese multinational corporation NEC. This is located in Musashikosugi, to all intents Tokyo but administratively in Kawasaki, but such is the relentless extent of the urban sprawl that just looking at it you couldn’t hazard a guess at where one ends and the other begins. That I was there at all was an odd chance. I hadn’t ever been there before and I haven’t since. I was taking part in a business seminar, definitely not my bag as just about anyone who knows me well will vouch. I’m not exactly a fan of the whole concept but nevertheless, on that day there I was. I was helping out a new acquaintance, Stewart, the seminar leader and former US marine with a history of service at the highest levels of the military but now based in Japan. He had found me through our mutual love of Celtic, in his case Scottish, music and had unexpectedly invited me to contribute, based upon what criteria though I can’t quite recall now. His 4-Day seminar was for employees of NEC who would soon, come April, find themselves flung into international postings across the outside world and this was part of their orientation.

 

The NEC complex comprises two 45-floor tower blocks. Built in the early part of this century, it is, or certainly was at the time, the very model of state-of-the-art building code construction, codes that are very strictly implemented since earthquakes occur here more than anywhere else. We, a group of 50-70 people, were gathered in a large, airy seminar room on the 7th floor.

 

As fate would have it, at lunch that day about an hour before the quake was to strike, the talk was about earthquakes, specifically a fairly strong one that had occurred just two days earlier on the Wednesday. I wasn’t there that day, I was down to partake just that Friday and the following Monday. Such occurrences are fairly commonplace in Japan, and even though it had been quite shaky shaky, when it stopped everyone just got right back on with whatever they were doing as they always do - no big deal. I listened as our team of Stewart, Brendhan - an Australian guy in a similar role to me - and a Filipino lady whose name I have unfortunately forgotten talked about how freaky it had been for them, exacerbated by being so far off the ground. I knew this phenomenon well. A few years earlier I lived in a tower block in Ikejiri in central Tokyo and up in our 13th floor eyrie we’d feel everything, even news broadcast helicopters passing overhead. We would certainly feel any tremors, many of which were barely perceptible at ground level. I understand of course that the building codes of necessity prescribe that structures must be designed to allow considerable movement and sway. Even so, I was always grateful, particularly in the light of what was about to unfold on this day, that we never had to experience anything major up there.

 

We had been back in the room for our afternoon session about an hour when, at 2:46 - a time that has gone down in infamy - the quake hit. It began like a fade in. I was sitting with Brendhan towards the back of the room, Stewart was standing and speaking at the front. The movement was noticeable side to side and concern amongst people in the room became quite apparent once the shaking passed the 20-second mark and was clearly intensifying. Plastic water bottles on the long tables we were all seated at soon began falling over and rolling onto the floor, heads began to turn every which way, particularly up. Stewart however was a very calm presence at the front. He put his arms up in the air then brought them slowly down, palms facing downwards, in a gesture to remain calm. Then he walked slowly towards the door to his right and opened it. Still in orientation seminar leader mode he remarked, “In an earthquake always make sure you have your escape route if you can“.

 

By now though the shaking was reaching a pretty violent pitch and showing no signs of letting up. Accompanying it, also reaching a crescendo, was an outrageous din that Animal from The Muppets would have been proud of. This had two aspects. One was a kind of a deep bass drum and floor tom rumbling with some high-pitched hi-hat creaking mixed in, the other a mad, impossibly loud brassy cymbal jingle-jangle flooding in through the now open door. At this point a dark suited, officious-looking little man, an employee of the company and senior in age, appeared in the doorway. Judging by his demeanour, chest pushed forwards, nose in the air, he looked like he was well used to wielding authority and wouldn't have looked out of place with a little Hitler moustache. Suddenly putting his arms out, palms facing us, he sternly bellowed the words, in English, ‘STAY! Going out, NO!!’, like he was talking to a dog. Stewart’s reaction was to just stare across at him for a moment, then turn back to us and calmly say “If this continues for another 10 seconds guys, we’re out of here, okay?”.

 

The ten seconds passed, everything kept right on rocking, and despite the little man’s frantic protestations a substantial number of us leapt up and charged past him, out of the door and out into the concourse area. Here the jingle-jangling was twice as loud and almost deafening. It was coming from the wells of the multiple elevators, where 45 floors worth of heavy chains were doing the maddest crazy dance, just the visual of this was totally bizarre. All the while the floor was shifting crazily beneath our feet. Even with our arms now involuntarily out sideways to try and maintain balance, any attempt to walk in a certain direction proved futile. We were doing our best to steer a course for the stairways, dead ahead slightly to the right, but despite all best efforts we were actually going backwards to the left. Somewhere over the din I could hear the little man incessantly screaming and yelling like a thoroughly disobeyed Sergeant Major, his imaginary moustache dislodged and unscrupulously trampled.

 

Through all this craziness, one thing was very curious. There was no panic. I remember well feeling absolutely calm, awake and clear-headed, and in retrospect all those around me seemed to be too. I recall us laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of our predicament, particularly our near vain attempts to move forward across the shifting floor yet finding ourselves going the other way, like we were on a ride at some theme park. I didn’t cognise this at all even in myself at the time though. It all seemed perfectly natural, like things do in a dream. It only struck me later while sitting on a wall outside in the courtyard area, the quake having abated and my body now doing some shaking. 

 

I think this is probably a common experience whenever our very existence is threatened. Like a lifeboat the fight/fight response is launched and the adrenaline glands begin to pump, left-brain logical thought process becomes suspended, fear is temporarily banished and we suddenly find ourselves spontaneously able to perform almost superhuman feats of courage and daring beyond what would be possible in ‘normal’ mode. It’s almost as if we’re witnessing ourselves both experiencing and responding, rather than acting consciously according to our will. Maybe we’ve all had an experience where, without any conscious decision on our part, we find ourselves suddenly turning the steering wheel of our car sharply to avoid a possible accident scanario. We are strangely calm and surprisingly effective in that moment. It’s only afterwards, once we’ve snapped back into regular consciousness, that the reality of what just happened hits us and emotion comes to the fore. Like many people I’m sure, I’d experienced this phenomenon a few times in my life, but only in short flashes. This was the first time I’d ever witnessed it sustained over a period of several minutes. 

 

Back in that seventh floor concourse, our experience with the quake was only just beginning. Despite the mayhem of everything rocking wildly, a number of us had made it across to the stairwell and were going down. We followed in single file, holding onto the handrail for dear life with both hands. As we went, the noise all around us from the structure of the building was intense - the rumbling and shuddering, the shrieking, the high-pitched whines presumably of its huge metal girders grinding mercilessly against one another. It was one insane cacophony, an orchestra from hell. You’d have to shout loudly to have any chance of being heard by the person right next to you, like at a rock concert. To make matters worse, the main electricity supply in the building had evidently failed and though a back-up system of the kind you see demonstrated in safety videos on planes appeared to have kicked in, it was pretty dim. I noticed Brendhan, either behind or in front of me, I can't remember, as over a period of several minutes and with no let up in the shaking, we negotiated our way down, level after level, all with an eerie calmness, our normal emotional responses suspended or transcended, ever down and, hopefully soon, to the ground and then finally outside.

 

Though we were quite a throng, I later realised that our weird conga line was only comprised of people from our seminar group, who at Stewart’s bidding had left their stations. The protocol of the company, what the ‘door Hitler’ in his overly authoritarian way had been trying to enforce, was that in the event of an emergency like this everyone was to supposed to stay put, and that’s what the majority of the 5000-odd people working there had evidently done. Otherwise the scene on the stairs would have surely ended up a dangerous, heaving stampede.

 

The worst moment in terms of dread, indeed the only moment of dread, came right at the very end. When we arrived at the foot of the last set of stairs, there was nowhere to go. There we were gathered in the stairwell like a logjam, more coming in behind every few seconds pushing us forward. It was dark down there and, it appeared, the doors would not open. A sharp dressed executive-looking dude pushed his way to the front and with us all looking on he expectantly he held his ID card to the scanner, glowing an icy blue in the emergency lighting. It made bleeps in response but nothing more happened. After six or seven attempts his visibly mounting agitation got the better of him and, letting go a loud screechy yell of a battle cry, he suddenly launched a high kung fu-style kick at the glass of the eye-level scanner! It survived, but still didn’t open the doors. It was a shocking moment, on many levels. All the while, above us the 45-floor colossus of a building kept on rumbling and thundering, shuddering and shrieking, like some hulking underworld demon with us deep in its belly, tiny and insignificant. For the first time, there in that darkness, still with the same eerie air of detachment, came the thought.. ‘Oh God, this fucker’s surely gonna come down. So this is it then… is it..?”. For the one and so far only time in my life, there, before me, lay The Abyss.

 

They say the darkest moment comes before the dawn, for almost at that moment the shaking suddenly stopped. A few more seconds and it was almost quiet, a silence that was suddenly deafening. All around the relief was palpable. Then, at what seemed like the next second, Stewart’s shaven head appeared over the handrail halfway up the stairs to our left. “Hey guys”, he said, calm as ever, “that’s the basement. The exit is up here”.

 

We trudged up the stairs, suddenly able to walk normally. The sunlight flooding in through the huge plate glass windows that comprised the front of the building was almost blinding and the big main doors were now open wide. I wondered how on earth we’d failed to spot them on the way down, they were big enough, but out we now gratefully spilled into the bright Spring sunshine. It truly was another world. As I stumbled out, I saw the ground was littered with many small pieces of masonry. I sat myself down on a nearby low wall and suddenly felt my heart begin to pound as I snapped back into, for want of a better word, myself. What had happened in the last 10 minutes had had a real dreamlike quality about it, in the sense that you lose most of your regular discernment in the dream state, but now it felt like I was awake again. I found myself shaking, almost like the involuntary shivering that accompanies a fever. A minute or so of some good deep breaths though and I began to feel better. I gazed around. There seemed to be no real damage to our building, or any of the others that I could see.

 

As I sat there it was like my senses were heightened. There were people standing in groups, some chatting away, even laughing. I could hear their conversations, and beyond that the distant sound of sirens and alarms. There was still a massive unreality about everything, it was all like a kind of daze, but the difference was I now realised it. I noticed a guy near me talking on his phone and with a jolt I decided to call Yuri. I got through at once, something that wasn’t to be a feature of that day for much longer, and was relieved to find she was okay. She started to tell me how she’d been in the beauty salon getting her hair dyed, and how the water supply had gone down and the staff had to go out and buy bottled water at a convenience store to complete the job. She told me she was walking home and that everything around her looked fine. This was a surprise to me but I was so glad to hear it. Despite how powerful the quake had been, at first glance at least, damage appeared slight. We laughed. It was such a relief to laugh.

 

While we'd been chatting Brendhan had appeared and we both sat there on the wall for a minute. Around us security staff were busy gathering people up and ushering them back into the building, rather like sheepdogs, and Stewart came over and said we should go back in and return to the room. Emerging from the stairs (the elevators were out of action) into the 7th floor concourse area and the panoramic view of the city it afforded, clouds of black smoke could be seen rising ominously from one location on Tokyo Bay.

 

No sooner were be back in the room though than a second equally powerful quake began and lo and behold, there we were we were up and out again. Less of us this time but still a significant number made for the stairs. This time was a totally different experience. The motion was completely different, up-and-down, which made it much easier to move any direction you wanted, and there was far less noise. There was no shift into any kind of autopilot mode consciousness either and it actually felt pretty damn scary in real time. My heart was beating out of my chest and all I could think about was getting the hell out of there. It was far easier to negotiate the stairs though and we fairly flew down them. At the bottom the doors at were still wide open and before very long Brendhan and I found ourselves outside once more, this time with loud alarms going off left and right. In our something approaching panic, we now reasoned we should probably try and get as far out of the range of the buildings as we could, since part of earthquake protocol is to ensure you’re not within range of possible falling objects, particularly glass. To this end we walked a full 100 meters over to a landscaped central area and sat ourselves down on a bench. Nearby a bunch of guys were standing around, all smoking. Looking back towards the two NEC towers, I could see them moving wildly, jiggling like jelly yet with a kind of spiral motion. It was one of the most surreal things I’ve ever seen. The water in the water ornaments scattered around us was rocking back and forth too, almost to spilling point.

 

At length one of guys spoke to us. “You guys aren’t smoking? You need one?”

When we said no and no thanks, his response was ‘Then what the hell are you doing out here?!’. We said twice was enough thanks, that there was no fucking way we were going back inside. The man reacted with surprise and told us we were in the most dangerous place out there in the open. They were only there to smoke, he said, (since it was prohibited both inside and within a certain distance of the buildings) and once they were done they were straight back in. Those towers, he told us, were among the safest buildings in the whole city, like in the top ten, and we were lucky to be there. He gestured to the other buildings around us of similar height, mainly apartments, though older. In the likely, he emphasised, event of another quake it probably wouldn’t be safe to be anywhere outside, even at this distance.

 

We weren’t convinced though. Fuck this for a game of soldiers. Enough was enough, and we were out of there. We walked quickly back and went up to the room to get our stuff, where we found Stewart on his own sitting on one of the desks eating a sandwich. He said we were done for the day. He also had info on the quake and told us that that though the second one had been much nearer, the epicenter of the first was offshore off the north east coast and had been measured at a staggering 9.1. Even so, according to initial news reports at least out of the Tokyo area, despite how intense it had been it seemed damage was minimal. It was great news, we felt a real sense of relief. Amongst the NEC guys who were flitting in and out of there, the mood was the same, that now that it was kind of over and the overriding feeling was that we’d somehow dodged one. We wished each other a good weekend, said we’d see each other on the Monday morning and went our respective ways.

 

Uppermost in my mind was getting myself home for a music gig I had that night. It was St Patrick‘s Week and I had gigs coming up just about every night, right through till the 20th. It was kicking off that Friday night and our Irish folk band ‘Mutiny’ were coming out from Tokyo to a pub in Samukawa near where I was living. I couldn’t hang around. As I prepared to make my way out of the building though, I had no idea either of the actual magnitude of the overall situation or of the immediate crisis developing outside.

 

I stopped by the reception desk in the vacuous main foyer to hand in my day-pass ID. It struck me at once how cold it was in there. I asked them if there was anywhere I could quickly charge my phone. The woman replied not at the moment since the power was still down in the whole building, though they were working hard to get it back up. In what was no more than mere polite smalltalk, I said something like ‘Well, that was quite a shake, wasn’t it’. She replied that if initial measurements were correct, it was the biggest one ever recorded in Japan. Wow, I thought, some feat that. I asked if she’d heard reports of any damage, I wanted to confirm that. I had been in Japan for a major earthquake once before, the 1995 one that hit Kobe, and the immediate aftermath of that one had been horrendous. She coroborated what Stewart had said though, that were no reports of anything yet except for the Tokyo Bay fire that we’d seen earlier. She then enquired if I was leaving, I said I was. She asked how far I had to go to get home. When I told her she looked troubled and tried to dissuade me, reiterating the advisory given to NEC staff that this was an ongoing emergency, that the current situation was precarious and there could still be more quakes, so it was recommended that for the time being everyone stay put and monitor the situation from there. I wasn’t having any of it though. I had my gig to get to and I politely took my leave.

 

As I made my way away from the NEC complex towards the railway station, around me it certainly all looked normal enough. Everything was standing, it appeared to be no different in fact, all of which served to encourage my feeling that somehow things weren’t actually that bad. This turned to a familiar old chestnut for me, why do people always have to make such a fuss. Over the years in Japan I’d noted this tendency of Japanese to ere wildly on the side of over-caution in potential emergency situations. Hitherto it had been mainly typhoons, and okay, once I did get my ass unceremoniously kicked by one of those, but the exception that proves the rule, perhaps? In general, like many non-Japanese I think, I’d found the level of caution to be excessive, even verging on paranoia. There was a slogan used by an insurance company in the UK in the 70s that went ‘We won’t make a drama out of a crisis’, which I’d reapplied to ‘We will make a crisis out of a drama’, and it was this perception that had informed my default response in such situations as this.

 

On arriving at Masashikosugi station though, the scene that greeted me was a little irregular. The wickets were turned off and locked in an open position, I’d never seen that before, and we could walk freely in and out. On the platform a train was in with its doors open and some people sitting inside, but it was clear it was halted and going nowhere fast. All the departure/arrival boards were running a moving red band flashing one word, ‘suspension’. I asked one of the staff what was happening. In true Japanese style he professed not to know anything, that he had no information to offer me except that to say that all lines in the greater Tokyo area were suspended while the computer checked the system and no one could say when it would all restart. I wasn’t too bothered. Okay, fair enough, I thought. Of course it would need a thorough checking after something like that. The vast, complex train network truly is the vital life blood pumping through the veins of the metropolis, and with word already that actual damage had been minimal seemingly borne out, I figured it probably wouldn’t be too long before we were up and running again. Surely.

 

I noticed as I came out that with all the trains down there were now horrendously long lines for the buses. For me buses weren’t an option, I had too far to go, rather I just noted it as a symptom of the situation. Soon I saw that road traffic too was heavy, and pretty much at a standstill. Ever the optimist though, my gig, 8pm start, was the main thing on my mind. There’d be messages to exchange for sure and I knew I had to charge my phone. Up ahead I spied a fitness club. They often have a cafe area, often with a socket or two you can use if you ask nicely, so I made a beeline for there. The girls at the desk were friendly and one, in very fetching black yoga pants, showed me to a little sitting area where, lurking behind a potted plant, was a socket. I gratefully plugged in. There was a TV mounted high on the wall, and naturally the TV networks were in hyper-overdrive. There was footage of the fire on Tokyo Bay, an oil installation by the looks. It showed the pall of dark, acrid smoke drifting across the southern part of the city. In western Tokyo a wall had collapsed at a shopping mall parking facility that it appeared had crushed a killed a woman in her car. They were talking too about the dangers of tsunami and a banner on the screen said a high level warning had been issued. Living on the ocean as I do this is always a concern, however I could see from their map and the flashing red bars along sections of coastline that it wasn’t for our area but for much further north, on the other Pacific coast, the east-facing one. They showed live footage from there, a few cars were moving up and down seemingly unbothered along coastal roads. There were cameras pointed towards the ocean too, nothing much was happening.

 

It wasn’t long before the same girl came over and explained that in the light of the general situation they were going to close. It was a bit of a blow, it was warm and comfy in there. I must have looked down at the coffee their machine had just made for me, for she said they’d only just asked everybody to vacate the gym areas so I was probably okay for another 15 minutes, but that she’d have to turn off the TV. I managed to charge my phone up to about half, which didn’t mean a lot since the battery was weak and would quickly run down but it was something. I thanked them for the help and as I passed through the doors the girl yelled brightly after me ‘Ganbatte ne!’, a commonly used Japanese expression meaning ‘fight!’ or ‘give it your best shot!’. It struck me as an odd thing to say.

 

I headed back to the station. Another staff guy told me the exact same thing as before, though this time the tone was more sombre. It was by now close to 4pm and for the first time I was beginning to wonder ‘damn, am I going to make this bloody gig..’. Inside and out there were many people standing around aimlessly, some were on their phones, more it seemed were trying in vain to get on their phones, and all in all there seemed a growing sense of resignation that we might be in for a bit of a wait. I saw one guy break his phone conversation to shout across to his mates that it was likely the trains were going to be down the rest of the day. Yikes, I thought, please don’t let that be true. Whatever the reality of the situation, for now there was nothing for it but to find somewhere to watch and wait it out. Also, March in Japan can be cold, especially soon as the sun’s down, and that time was fast approaching. I decided the woman on the info desk at NEC might have been right after all so I retraced my steps. However, without ID now and despite my profusions that I actually had been working there earlier in the day, which of course I was unable to prove, gate security wouldn’t let me into the building.           

 

So once more it was over to the station area. I decided I’d better check in with my bandmates and see how they were faring. It connected, or appeared to, but there was no response. I tried again, leaving this one ring till it cut itself off. My tummy was grumbling by now and I decided I’d better find somewhere I could eat something. As I looked around I saw many more places were already closed. Without too much trouble though I found a little bakery with a small cafe area to ensconce myself in, bought myself a hot cup of coffee and a couple of very doughy white flour pastries, chosen mainly as something that would likely help stave off real hunger the longest, and for the next hour or so I sat contemplating my options. With the aroma of the coffee in my nostrils, it was beginning to dawn on me that maybe, just maybe, I was in a bit of a pinch here. But it was nice to be in the warm at least. I just wanted to stay there for a while. I was able to charge my phone too, though it had to go behind the counter for that so I couldn’t use it. Soon I realised I was the only one in there. I watched as outside of the window shadows lengthened. Then, shortly before 5.30, the lady informed me she was closing.

 

Back outside again, it was getting chilly and soon it would be dark. I had a bit of a scout around to see if anything was happening and soon got my answer, nothing. If anything it was getting worse. Just like the health club and the bakery, most shops and other businesses had now closed, hours before they normally would. I didn’t really understand why this was. A glance at the roads showed they were still gridlocked, they looked more like parking lots. Back at the station again, still as it had been before, a third conversation with staff confirmed that nothing had changed. The entire network was still down, with no light to report at the end of the tunnel. This guy was a little more chatty than the others though and the alked quite freely, however one thing he said was disconcerting - they (Tokyu, a private network) would assess it line by line, whereas the whole of JR, Japan Railway, the national company, was likely down for the day. Damn, this was bad news indeed, since the JR Tokaido mainline was my train home from Yokohama, a 30-minute ride. Perhaps clocking the look of dismay on my face he then kind of backtracked, emphasising there’d been no official statement, even suggesting the Tokaido might still run as it’s one of the major ones.

 

There wasn’t much there to hang onto though and I trudged out of with, for the first time, a heavy heart. It was looking more and more hopeless by the minute. The gig was surely already toast. I decided I’d better try and check in with my bandmates again but to my dismay there were not even any signal bars showing now. In terms of getting home at least, there was no need to panic just yet, at just 6pm. I still had time on my side, I reasoned, it was only an hour or so after all, provided the trains started up again of course, though that JR news was a worry. As a last resort worst case scenario I began thinking in terms of a hotel, but that bubble soon got burst too. A guy I got chatting with clued me in on why all the businesses were shutting early.. in a word, liability. I asked him about hotels and he said they would most certainly close for the same reason. With the real threat of further quakes, no hotel would want to take the risk of guests getting crushed in their collapsed buildings. That made sense, but below me my safety net had now gone.

 

I didn’t really know what my best option now was but I was getting cold and I knew I needed to do something. The only thing I could think to do was start walking. Dark was quickly approaching and that would be warmer than standing around, for sure. So I began walking down the main road parallel to the Toyoko train line in the direction of Yokohama. And when the trains started up again, I figured, I’d be right there. And if they didn’t..? Well, I was some 50km away from home, so it wasn’t that I was embarking on a walk all the way, I was just.. well, I didn’t know what I was doing really. For now I was just walking.

 

The road was totally gridlocked, all three lanes of it. Along the pavement (sidewalk) a stream of people were doing the same, walking, all in the same direction, most in silence and with no little resignation. A grim procession it was, and I joined it. It wasn't long before it was fully dark. I saw several women walking in stocking feet, carrying their heels. I began to think just in terms of making it to the next station, and to updates on the train situation. It’s a quick enough journey on the train this, just eight minutes on the express, but I can now attest that it really is quite far. As I walked, I realised in the growing darkness that suddenly there were no lights anywhere anymore and concluded that the area must be in a power outage. The next major station, Hiyoshi, as the only lit building in the whole area, could be seen shimmering white and beacon-like up ahead long before I actually got there. The image it brought to mind was that of the Sacre Coeur Cathedral in Montmartre, Paris, and how that would shimmer white atop its little rise. I concluded the station must have its own generating system.

 

Inside there were quite a lot of people sitting around on the ground across the main concourse. Some had flattened cardboard boxes to sit on, many looked miserable and lost, even a little scared. It looked a bit like a homeless camp, for upmarket homeless maybe, but the demeanours were the same. I asked the staff again what the situation was. The guy gave me the same line, I could almost have ended his sentence for him. It must have been easily 7.30 by now and though my hopes of playing the gig were long since abandoned, I did fancy getting home to my own bed, if at all possible. I decided to try and level with him and asked directly if he thought any trains would actually run again that night. In response he broke what eye contact there was and sucked in through his teeth, a giveaway in this culture that the person has been placed in an uncomfortable position and cannot answer positively or give the response the questioner wants to hear.

‘Aaa, muzuksashii desu ne’. ‘Ma, chotto taihen kamoshiremasen’, (it’s hard to say, it might be a little difficult). As good a way as any of saying ‘I wouldn’t bank on it if I were you, mate’.