Japanofiles Interview with Dave Carlson

In January I had the pleasure of sitting down with media master and long-time Matsumoto resident Dave Carlson. Dave, among his various involvements in the academic and social community, is also the producer of Japanofiles, a series of podcast interviews with local expats who share their broad range of experiences working and living in Japan.

Since I was living in Fukushima City at the time of the Great Tohoku Earthquake of March 2011 I expected Dave to spend a lot of our time talking on that. But that was just one aspect of our chat, which took several turns I didn't expect but thoroughly enjoyed.

At the time of this writing Dave is working on his 70th podcast. You can find them all at his site, The Japanofiles Broadcast. Our talk checks in at Number 69, which went live just a few days before the fourth anniversary of the quake.

And for those who do want to know more about what it was like to be there, on the ground, among the beautiful, resilient people of Japan during one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded, please check out my short memoir For Now: After the Quake - A Father's Journey.

NOTE: This past Saturday a Magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal, triggering avalanches in the Himalayas that have taken over 2,000 lives according to early counts. This New York Times article from a woman who has lived in Kathmandu for two years and was with her son in their car when the quake hit offers a heart-wrenching yet hope-inspiring account of what it has been like to be in the capital of Nepal during this tragedy. Please read. Please take a moment to ponder the images. And please, count your blessings.

In Support of Those Who Remain...

From my kitchen table in New York the events of March 11, 2011 seem a distant memory.

For those still living in Fukushima, for those displaced to other areas, some of them mothers and children separated from their husbands and fathers who remain in Fukushima to work, the rumbling has yet to stop.

Three years on, the rebuilding of towns, of communities, of lives continues - as it does anywhere disaster strikes. This is why I am grateful to be teaming up with Catholic Relief Services in the ongoing effort to give an assist to those who need it most.

Proceeds from the sale of For Now will be passed on to CRS, to help many thousands of people still in need.

So please, grab a copy, and a couple more for your friends. Help spread the word throughout your own circles. Influence others to help by sharing your thoughts on the book in an online review.

And please, keep those who continue to suffer in your thoughts and prayers.

Remembering, With the Help of Friends.

A college friend of mine emailed me yesterday. Considering my poor track record in keeping in touch with people this in itself should be amazing enough, but this was particularly special.

'When you were in Akita,' he began, 'you posted something on facebook...'

He'd dug up two posts for me from March 2011, when I was in the midst of getting my family out of Fukushima and out of Japan while the nuclear reactors were blowing up down on the Fukushima coast, fifty miles or so from where we were living. I was keeping my family and friends up to date on what was happening, where we were and what we were doing - or what I thought we were doing - and though I thought at the time I was doing it for them maybe I was really doing it for me. Either way, standing at a computer in a hotel lobby in Akita Prefecture, this is what I wrote:

"In a hotel in northern Akita, the boys are being total champs, tentative flights tomorrow to tokyo then new jersey, no guarantees. My wife to her mom over the phone - 'good-bye for now' - hit me with something i have never felt. I am wrestling not with the decision to get my family out of here but with leaving when so many people can not."

My friend's response:

"I am glad to hear you are still OK. #1 priority has to be the safety and security of the kids - but all will stay in prayers and thoughts. Travel safely. Reading you post up above makes me wonder if you just stumbled across the title of your next book. A thought for another day..."

With this, my friend brought back a flood of memories which, while they hadn't disappeared, were sitting dormant behind many others. So add to the dedication of this modest recounting the many good friends who helped get me through.

'For Now - After the Quake: A Father's Journey', is my story of the hours and days following the March 11, 2011 earthquake in Japan.

Download for free here.

Good bye, for now - tohoku earthquake part eight

On Tuesday morning all I cared about was getting my family out of Fukushima, far away from the radioactive mess that was percolating down along the coast. We didn’t know where we might end up when we jumped into Jun’s car. Maybe we’d go to Akita, I thought, or Yamagata – put some more miles and mountains between us and the reactors. If we really thought it necessary we could probably get to Osaka, or even Kyushu, where people had gas in their cars and the supermarket shelves were stocked and kids could play in the park without their parents worrying about what might be falling out of the sky. No place could be too far, really. We just needed to find a corner of Japan, a place we could go to be safe, where we could breathe the air and let our kids run around outside, and wait until things settled down. Then we could return home and get on with living our lives.

The long ride to Morioka – the stretches of quiet thinking time along a road through a country that seemed much more dead than alive – those four hours in Jun’s car changed all that.

Even if we went to Kyushu, far from any threat of fallout from the fallout, how long would we stay? How long could we sleep in a hotel room, living out of our bags before our kids started wigging out and the walls started closing in and the four of us finally just went crazy? When would we be comfortable returning to Fukushima, and did we want to live like runaways in the meantime, for two, maybe even three weeks? Or could it conceivably turn into months?

I didn’t consider going all the way to America when we were scrambling to stuff our lives into two duffel bags. By the time we got to Morioka we knew that was where we wanted to go. My wife, in her eminent wisdom and foresight, had brought our passports; she seemed, actually, more eager than I was to head overseas. Which made me forget what she was leaving behind, until she spoke with her mother on the phone while I played with our sons on the bed in our room at our hotel in Ohdate.

I half listened in as she asked her mom if she would consider leaving Fukushima, if only for a short while. But for her father, confined to a wheelchair since he went down with an aneurism two years ago, a trip to the bathroom was hard enough. Leaving home – a home he hadn’t been more than a few dozen miles from in God knew how long – was, in his mind, out of the question. Heck, leaving home for anything less than pure free will was unthinkable; home was home, where their whole life was…and, my wife’s mom said, where they would die.

My wife’s sister offered less compelling excuses to remain, but would remain just the same. Her son was starting high school in a couple weeks. And the government said things would be fine.

I spoke briefly with my wife about her family; I knew the answers already but I thought she might want to tell me anyway, like she needed to get her bad day at work off her chest. Thirty minutes later she was settling down with the kids and I was heading to the hotel lobby where I would spend the next hour on the Internet, reading messages of encouragement from family and friends, all praying for me and my family to make it out of Japan safe and soon.

In the morning the mission was simple: get breakfast and then get to the station in time to catch the bus to the airport. The six inches of snow that had fallen overnight was light and fluffy, the kind that feels like feathers underfoot. My son stomped along like Godzilla, kicking up white puffs and making three-year-old noises of utter destruction. I wanted to drop our bags and tackle him, play in that perfect blanket until we both collapsed from exhaustion and laughter. But this would have to wait for another day.

There were forty-two people in front of us, with more lining up behind us with each passing minute. Few had bags as big as ours; many had only a briefcase, or nothing at all. A few minutes before departure time a man in an official-looking windbreaker asked all of us going to the airport to form a new line, closer to the curb. Only about twenty of us stepped forward, which to me meant we were one step closer to home.

From a distance the airport seemed not much bigger than the house I grew up in. There was no line at the check-in counter, where a woman smiled graciously and spoke gently as she helped us through the automated check-in process. A smattering of people drifted through the main hall, gazing at travel posters and sipping coffee and seeming very much removed from the world unfolding 200 kilometers to the south.

From the plane we looked down on a snow-covered world. Mountains dominate the northern part of Japan, and from the air you see nothing but trees and valleys and water and serenity. But it was not long before we were passing over Miyagi and Fukushima. In places inland we could see towns and villages, appearing as they should from 25,000 feet. Further off was the coast, and while sun, moisture and distance conspired to hide any detail from us, we could see in that indistinct mass of brown and gray that things were as far from ‘should be’ as one could ever imagine.

I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to get on a plane and fly off overseas when hundreds of thousands of people had in a moment lost everything they’d ever known, unable now to buy even a bus ticket out of town. I wanted to kiss my family and put them on that plane and go back to Fukushima and do something, anything, I didn’t know what but I could figure it out because there were people back there who didn’t have a credit card and two bags of clothes and a family on the other side of the world to take them in and a whole army of friends standing by just in case. I wanted to get to the gate and find that someone needed a small miracle - a mother with a small child, or an elderly couple, waiting on standby because they were one seat short. My family would be fine. I wanted to be useful.

The hell I knew was down there slowly faded from view.

My wife had prepared masks for all of us, to use when we got to Haneda Airport in Tokyo. Yet inside the terminal people seemed just as calm and unmoved as they had in Ohdate-Noshiro earlier that morning. No one was wearing a protective mask. Nobody was running anywhere. It barely seemed like Tokyo let alone Tokyo just now settling after more skyscraper-shaking earthquakes the day before and a growing nuclear threat up the coast. ‘Where are you going?’ The young kid with the orange windbreaker smiled, eager to point us to the correct bus stop. He was working, probably for not a whole lot per hour. His country, at least part of it, had been ravaged and the worst seemed yet to come. And he was happy, helping get us on our way to Narita.

Our bus would be full, as my friend Vid had warned us. This leg of the journey, from Haneda across Tokyo and into Chiba prefecture to Narita Airport, had also concerned me. Standing in that hotel lobby, staring at the indecipherable directions for reserving tickets online, I envisioned masses of people fighting to get on the bus to Narita. Our flight could be delayed too, I thought without wanting to. And it might take forever to get our bags. And what if the buses weren’t running the normal schedule? What if there was another massive quake and everything went down? If we didn’t make our flight how long would we have to wait before three more seats opened up? Flights were all but booked solid for the next week and beyond, after all.

Sitting on our bus, my eleven-month-old making funny faces with the woman behind us, it was almost hard to imagine why I had been so worried.

At Narita the line to check in was without exaggeration two hundred yards long. I heard a dozen languages as we walked along, our older son riding on top of our luggage cart. Mothers barked at their unruly (or not so unruly) children. People in a hurry stutter-stepped before shouldering their way through any small break in the line to continue toward the security check and the gates and the relief of knowing they’ve caught their flight. Groups of uniformed policemen stood and talked and watched. Announcements drifted through the air. The huge departure screen loomed high on the wall; somewhere in there was our passage out of here.

I spent the last minutes before boarding our plane texting a few important people. I let Vid know we were on our way, and thanked him for all he had done for us. After making sure we were alive, then offering to drive up to Fukushima himself to bring us to Tokyo if that was what we needed, then keeping everyone informed of our whereabouts as we made our roundabout way, all the while making sure we were set up with hotels and flight information and everything else he could possibly think of, he would end up staying in Tokyo to volunteer at a distribution warehouse, helping to get food up to the Tohoku area, the place I had just run from. Several other friends had mailed me as well, expats who had also taken off and Japanese who were staying put. And finally, as we stood on line to board, I sent word to my mom that we really were on our way. It was only at this moment that I believed that we truly had made it, that we were on our way.

I couldn’t see Japan falling away below as our plane climbed into the sky. But I thought about my adopted home; the people I had called neighbor and friend for the past nine and a half years; the places that, though not perfect, I had grown to love, not as one loves a thing but as one loves an idea. And I knew that no matter how dear Japan was to me, however I would adore her, my home would always be America. And today, I would go home.

I looked over at my wife, cradling our little one. She liked America; liked my family. But America was not her home. And her family was among those we were leaving behind. For our sons’ sake the choice was easy: get to where it is safe, no matter how far we have to go. For me, yes I have struggled with my decision to leave when there are still so many with nothing, so many that could benefit from another set of hands moving food, or bringing water, or clearing debris, so many who, in moments of clarity amidst the chaos, would want nothing more than a friend to lean on and an arm to cry on. That my boys need me too helps to ease this guilt. But it is my wife who is leaving her life behind, at least for now. While my family waits to receive us with outstretched arms her parents are left with one less daughter. While I get to see my nieces and nephews living in a blessedly normal world my wife is left to wonder what is silently raining down on her sister’s son and daughter, who have grown so much since I first met them. And as welcome as my wife feels, as loved as she is by my family, her family and her home are far away.

We know we will return to Fukushima, at least for a time. And perhaps we knew too back in our hotel room in Ohdate. But as I listened to my wife talk to her mother on the phone I knew what our leaving meant to her. ‘Good bye for now,’ my wife said, and gently hung up.

In our hotel room in Ohdate, it seemed like now was all we had.

And we were among the very fortunate ones.

Hope & Reliance - tohoku earthquake part seven

The ramen shop was flooded with light and familiar smells. My wife and I, our boys between us, sat across the low table from Jun, his brother Yu and his friend (girlfriend?) Miki. We ate as we would on any night, though the cooks couldn’t make a couple of dishes for lack of certain ingredients. We talked as we would over any meal – hometowns and high school memories, jobs and friends and the soft-boiled eggs Yu had this thing about. Yamato slurped his noodles, splattering his soup. Seiji fussed and laughed and ate and refused in turns. The radiation we had run from seemed far, far away.


Yet the reason we were there wouldn’t fade from my head. Not completely. Not for a moment.

Back at Yu’s apartment we would share snack food and drink a random assortment of beer in cans. Yamato was given his first taste of video games and Harry Potter. Seiji entertained before he started tiring; my wife would skip his bath tonight and try to get him down. We talked more, about all manner of things, though somehow – as it seems to happen in Japan – we never scratched too deep below the surface. This because maybe the Japanese are inclined on all levels to remain one of the group; tipping the conversational scales in any one person’s direction, particularly their own, is not the overriding inclination.

On this night we had all we needed to keep ourselves connected without anyone standing out.

As the evening drew on we fell fully back into reality. ‘Flights out of Akita are full for the next two days,’ Yu said, pecking at his laptop with one hand, thumbing his cell phone with the other. Jun coaxed what information he could out of a second laptop, looking for options for a family with no specific wants save one: get us out of Japan as soon as possible. ‘Tokyo might be overrun with people trying to leave.’ Herds of weary travelers sleeping on the terminal floors, waiting for a seat to open up – it wasn’t hard to imagine. ‘Do you want to try to fly to Itami and then transfer to Kansai International? Or maybe fly to Seoul?’ So went the conversation with Jun and his brother, accidental hosts to a family of refugees. They were calm and intense at the same time as they searched for better options, quicker options, for getting us on a plane out of the country. Their country, which they most likely would not be leaving, no matter what melted or exploded in Fukushima.

Outside the snow continued to fall.

I posted a note on facebook, first in English, later in Japanese, for anyone with a friend in Morioka to let me know. Staying one night in Yu’s tiny apartment after hitching a four-hour ride with Jun was much more than we could have asked for, more than a neighbor who hadn’t found a moment in the past year to ask someone his name deserved. I sent text messages to friends in Tokyo and Osaka, even Nagano, not knowing where we might end up, nor when, asking for small favors based on ‘if’ and ‘we might’ and ‘by tomorrow we should know for sure’. A friend who I’d worked with in Osaka seven years previous and was now living in Tokyo dug up some info on the shuttle buses running between Haneda and Narita, Tokyo’s two main airports, offering to reserve seats for us and even, if needed, go ahead and pay. ‘Get me back whenever, don’t worry about it, just get yourselves out.’ A former student of mine from Osaka who now lived in Yokohama had gone back home to be with her family, away from the aftershocks and rolling blackouts. She had a young boy close to Yamato’s age. ‘If you need a place let me know,’ she replied. ‘Our house is not very big but we will make room for you.’ She lived minutes from Itami Airport. ‘It would be no trouble to come get you, and even drive you to Kansai International if you need me to.’ The food and gas shortages hadn’t reached the Kansai area; still, if they had, I was sure my friend wouldn’t have offered us anything less.

Jun and his brother kept at it on their laptops, thumbing their cell phones at the same time though it all seemed to be going nowhere. Mayumi finally got Seiji to sleep. Yamato fought to stay awake, engrossed by a fantastic make-believe world of wizards and magic. I continued with the text messages, alternately please and thank you to friends from various times of my life in Japan while offering similar sentiments, over and over, to our two new friends who had assumed, it seemed, the role of caretaker. And here I began to understand Jun’s hesitation back in front of our apartment building in Fukushima as I stood in the street asking him if we could join him in his car.

So much goes unspoken in Japanese society. When there is a barrier – cultural, linguistic – even more is left unsaid. Jun would probably never say, and I probably would never suggest, but I think his momentary reluctance (as much as I perceived it) to give us a ride to Morioka had nothing to do with taking us there but what he could or couldn’t do for us once we’d arrived. ‘I can only take you to Morioka,’ he had told me. ‘And I don’t know where you can stay, the hotels might be all full, I’m not sure.’ A few minutes later, as my wife and I scrambled to get our immediate future into two bags Jun called his brother to ask if he would let two adults and two little boys move in for the night. For me a ride to Morioka was more than enough, more than we could hope for at that moment and beyond. For Jun, I think there was more to it.

In Hokkaido Highway Blues Will Ferguson tells his story of hitch hiking the length of Japan. I only got through the first few chapters but that would be enough for any reader to get a sense of the Japanese spirit. Invariably, after the person picking Mr. Ferguson up asked where he was going they would tell him they were only going to the next town or village or office building. And then, invariably, that person would drive far beyond where they said they were going – as far as time and circumstance would allow if they didn’t end up taking him all the way to his day’s destination. With Jun, I think the same mindset prevailed.

He could only get us to Morioka, and while that was fine with us I truly believe he wanted to take us as far as we wanted to go. He wanted us to be taken care of, he wanted us to have a place to stay and a place to go afterwards and a way to get to wherever it was we were going – which we didn't know, standing in the street in Fukushima just trying to get out of town, would turn out to be America. And, rather than let us go without a plan, he wanted to make sure, right alongside his brother, that we had a plan and the means to carry it out. Jun was not just giving us a ride. He was getting us to our destination, in whatever way he could. In Japan, it is not enough to simply give what is asked for.

It was midnight by the time I was able to convince Jun and Yu to stop searching and call it a night. We weren’t going to make it to Tokyo or Osaka the next day in any event; the only buses out of Morioka the next day would be leaving too late to make any flight out of anywhere a possibility. ‘We’ll find something tomorrow,’ we agreed. Then my family stretched out on Yu’s bed while he and Jun talked quietly and fell asleep on Yu’s L-shaped couch.

In the morning we all shared what little food we had between us while we got back to scouring the Internet for answers. I harbored more frustration than hope – proving to myself once again I am not the father my family needs me to be, not when we need all the strength and faith we can muster. The minutes wore on, and we soon had to accept the reality that we had only one option for the day: a bus to Ohdate, in northern Akita prefecture, in striking distance of Ohdate-Noshiro Airport should we find a flight out of there. ‘Fine, let’s go,’ I said as if I was making any sort of real decision. ‘So how soon can we fly out?’ I expected a three-day wait, maybe a week, before getting to Tokyo, or Osaka. Maybe to Korea, maybe all the way to Europe; my aunt from Germany was now digging around too, looking for ways to get us out of Japan. Friends sent their support; several were ready to send money. This I knew I would politely refuse. If nothing else I had the monetary capacity to take care of my family.

Yu found a website advertising flights out of Tokyo the next day. ‘Going to New York City,’ he said. ‘On China Airlines.’ I’d once sworn, for several reasons, I’d never fly another Chinese airline. But for six hundred and forty bucks a seat – the next day, in the middle of a mass exodus – I’d put my lofty principles on hold. I could deal with curmudgeonly baggage handlers and snot-nosed flight attendants if it meant getting my family out of there. ‘Or Continental to…Newark?’ Yu looked up at me. ‘New Jersey?’ On the same direct flight I’d taken to get home so many times before. ‘No way,’ I grunted, in an instant stuck between hope and angry disbelief. Now is not the time to screw with me I thought, focusing on the faceless entity on the screen now before me.

Ten seconds of scrolling and staring told me one of two things: either every flight had seats available or this was just a schedule and did not reflect one god damn shred of reality. I grabbed my cell phone; in the next breath Jun and his brother were also dialing up Continental. All three of us, dialing and redialing, trying to get through to a human being. At the same time Yu checked for a flight from Ohdate to Tokyo the next day – which he found, to everyone’s amazement. Where were all these flights yesterday? There were plenty of empty seats too. Moments later I got through to the miracle I still wasn’t banking on: there were exactly four seats left on the next day’s Continental flight to Newark.

Jun drove us to the bus terminal in downtown Morioka, his brother coming along to see us off. ‘No work today,’ he told me though I got the feeling he would have come anyway. The streets were clear of snow and glaringly devoid of traffic. We’d only seen Morioka under cover of night and through thick swirling snows, enough to make anything possible in the imagination, even normalcy. In the gray daylight we saw the incongruity that had befallen every other city, village and field between Fukushima and here.

Office buildings rose like concrete shells, ten and twenty stories above the streets. Ramps and overpasses hung overhead, useless appendages lolling from the surrounding train station and adjacent bus terminal. Yawning intersections and comatose traffic lights, and block after cold, gray, inanimate block of a city that felt like it had long been deserted. Jun parked and flipped on his hazards, which would now seem a signal not that the owner would be right back but that the car hadn’t been altogether abandoned. In every direction, nothing but cement and an absence of life, in any form, save for the occasional car, hurrying, seemingly searching. We walked up a set of steps and emerged onto the elevated bus terminal, a loop that one week ago would be bustling with people. Today there was one line, for one bus – fifty people or more, standing in orderly manner. Many of them had bags in tow, gym bags or overnighters or compact suitcases, the kind that can be carried on board an airplane. All these people, all going the same way. The only way, perhaps, there was to go. All around us the city stood silent, a thousand windows of a thousand offices staring blankly out over the grays and whites of the world.

‘There are two buses,’ I heard someone say as more people appeared, lining up behind me and my older son. My wife sat with our little boy in the crowded waiting room, taking comfort perhaps in the notion that he was too little to understand – though not too young to know things had been very different these past several days. On the surface, both boys were going along with us effortlessly, even though the older one knew there were still earthquakes in the ground, and ‘bad gas’ in the air where we lived.

Jun and Yu smiled in the cold and snow, all too happy to continue waiting with us, passing back and forth between them our heavy green duffel they insisted on holding. I thanked them again for taking us in, for helping us find a way forward, for making sure we were safely on our way even as they would be staying behind. This was their country – and I was being treated like a king, ushered to safety by those who would remain to withstand the quake’s after-effects that had already turned their existence upside down. And though none of us would mention, it was possible that the worst was yet to come.

I kept thinking about Jun and Yu as our bus rumbled down the highway, taking us further north and west. The snow was blinding, the countryside awash in white. It was the middle of March, but winter was still alive and well and pummeling the land. We had our flights booked; our escape was lined up. Still, looking outside at a world that had never seemed so relentless I knew that any plans we had depended on the mercy of God and the earth. Everything was planned and paid for. And nothing was certain. Not in this place, not now.

The snow had abated by the time we pulled into the bus loop outside Ohdate Station. There were signs of life inside, though none of it had to do with the trains that weren’t moving. To the west, above the one-story shops and office blocks and houses in front of us, hotel façades rose up here and there. One of them was ours. It looked a mile and a half away.

Inside the girl at the front desk greeted us as she would greet anyone on any day. The hotel, I learned, was nowhere near capacity. Their restaurant was open, though the menu was extremely limited. We could use the hot spring bath until eleven. Breakfast would be available from 6:45 am – enough time to eat what we could before heading back to the station to catch the bus to Ohdate-Noshiro Airport. My boys wanted to play; they needed sleep. There was Internet access in the lobby.

I stared out the window of our room, over the town and the distant fields and the fading contours of dusk. My wife was giving our older boy a bath. My younger son sat in my arms, looking around at yet another new environment. The snow was falling again, hard as ever. There were lights out there, scattered and few, fending off the encroaching night. We needed to get to the airport in the morning. We needed our plane to take off. We needed to get from Haneda Airport to Narita, an hour and then some to the east, out in Chiba prefecture. We needed just one more day of luck and God’s grace, neither of which I felt certain of, even as - or because - we had already received more than our fair share. People had died in these days. Thousands and thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands had lost their homes, their livelihood, everything they had, past present and future. And these were the ones who would stay behind as my family and I took off to comfort ourselves on the other side of the world.

I didn’t deserve to be one of the lucky ones. No one deserved to lose everything, yet so many had. The people who had been so good to me, the countless kind souls who filled my life for the nine and a half years I made this place my home – I was leaving them all behind. Leaving them to face what I could not allow to hurt my sons. Leaving them to their shattered existence so I could pick up and create a new one in a place most of them could not go, or would not go, for this was their only home. I looked at my son’s reflection in the window. His face was blurred. He might have been smiling, thinking that everything was okay. He didn’t know how lucky he was to be here; didn’t know how lucky his father had needed to be, to compensate for his shortcomings. My little boy felt safe in my arms, because he didn’t know the truth. Right or wrong, this was what filled my thoughts, sank into my chest, forced itself up behind my eyes in a flood of emotion that had been building up for five days. My little boy would soon be safe, but only if things worked out. If the weather cleared; if the ground kept calm; if a thousand things his daddy couldn’t control somehow remained in our favor. I’d done nothing to get him this far; it was all due to people better than me, forces more powerful than my own mind and will. And so the rest would go. All I could do was hold him in my arms, like I had my older son at 2:46 pm on March 11th, and tell him everything was okay even though I had no idea if it would be. And whisper in his ear the only thing I knew for certain. ‘I love you, buddy,’ I said.

My head fell against the window, and I started sobbing.

North - tohoku earthquake part six

I recognized the woman at the door immediately, despite the mask that covered her nose and mouth. I knew her daughter too, as one of my son’s many pre-school friends. ‘Konnichi-wa,’ I said, trying in vain to recall either of their names. The woman offered a slight bow, awkward enough with her daughter on her hip, forget about the underlying circumstances. ‘Kevin-san, domo.’ She handed me a small, heavy plastic bag.

My wife had said she’d be dropping by, with milk formula for our little boy. In the intervening moments I’d forgotten her name, but I remembered very clearly one thing my wife said: she was going to be driving to Sendai.

‘I’m leaving tomorrow,’ she said in response to my casual query. I glanced over at her boxy car, already half-stuffed with blankets and bags. ‘Are there any buses running out of Sendai, do you know?’ I asked. She shook her head. ‘Maybe, but I don’t know.’ With this we both understood: I was looking for a way out of town, and while she really would like to help…

Even if we got to Sendai where would we stay?

I paid her for the milk, thanked her for her exceptional kindness – by now the common sentiment was that no one wanted to be outside any longer than necessary – and we wished each other luck.

My wife was holding our little boy at the top of the stairs. ‘What should we do?’ No gas in the car, no gas at the gas stations, no buses or trains and reports of rain clouds blowing in from the southeast. Damned if I knew what we were going to do – an answer that, for the first time in my life, wasn’t going to cut it. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have the option of passing for now, didn’t have the luxury of choosing my way, or saying screw it and choosing no way at all. Staying put, I’d be placing my family at risk – of something I didn’t even understand. I had to find an answer. I had to find a way where there was none. And it occurred to me that all my life I had been avoiding having to do exactly that. This time, for the first time, I couldn’t say screw it.

I called two friends; one had gas in his car but wasn’t going anywhere, the other would take off if he could. I wondered aloud if there might be any gas in my wife’s father’s truck, and if we maybe couldn’t siphon some out. Or maybe we could convince one of the neighbors to sell us the gas in their tank. Or do you think our car would run on kerosene? Do you want to try hitchhiking?

The idea surfaced in my head and I knew it wasn’t going away: I was failing my family.

‘Akita,’ my wife said, and I immediately felt something in me lift. I knew exactly what she was thinking.

Our neighbor, from downstairs and over one, was from Akita prefecture, a fair distance to the northwest. We only knew where he was from because of the license plate on his full-size Volvo wagon. We’d been neighbors for almost a year now, and while it was nothing out of the ordinary for Japan, I found it decidedly regrettable, on more than one level, that I still didn’t know his name.

I ran to the window and looked out at the parking lot. His car wasn’t there. I bounded down the stairs and threw open the door, expecting nothing but a deserted street.

There was his car, in front of his place. No one was inside, but the motor was running. Same with another car, waiting along the opposite curb. With my sneakers barely on my feet I jumped down the front steps. This, I knew, was the answer my family needed. The answer I needed. I eased over toward my neighbor’s open door. He plays soccer for Fukushima United, I reminded myself. He wears number six. Out of all the things to notice about a person I notice his laundry, hung to dry now and then out on his balcony.

‘Hey,’ I say as he appears from his darkened front hallway. He smiles. He always smiled when I said hey, as if inviting me over to trade a few words while wondering whether we’d have anything to say to each other. ‘Hey,’ he says back, and I hate that I don’t know his name.

He was on his way to Morioka, he told me, to visit his brother before continuing on to Akita and his home. His girlfriend wasn’t going with him; she’d be staying with her family, right there in town. The look in his eyes as he said this told me he didn’t think she was making the right decision but who was he to tell her to leave her family behind. This, I didn’t mention, was exactly what my wife had already decided to do.

In the next few seconds a silence hung between us. There was no room for small talk here, no time to get to know each other first before stumbling into the conversation we both knew was coming. And as helpful and generous as Japanese people are inclined or bred to be, I sensed a reluctance on my neighbor’s part – a guy I knew not by name but by a number – to let us into his car and his plans and his immediate future as our best friend and savior. And just for a moment, I hesitated.

To hell with pride, dignity and social graces. This was my chance to get my family out of town.

‘I can only take you to Morioka,’ he said. That was fine. It was fantastic. ‘And I’m not sure where you can stay. The hotels might be full.’ He probably knew as well as I did the situation – in other words, he didn’t have any idea either. ‘We’ll figure it out once we get there…if you can get us there…’

In every other situation, in every other moment of my life, I would have felt like I was imposing and ended up offering the guy an out. If you’re too busy… If there’s not enough room… We can probably get a ride from someone else… But not today. Not now.

‘Can you wait ten minutes?’

For the next twenty-five minutes our new friend waited – ‘I’m Jun,’ he said with a smile – while my wife and I stuffed into two big bags everything we thought we might need for a few days or weeks or maybe a month or two. ‘Put a few books and some cars or trains in your backpack,’ I told my son. ‘Okay,’ he sang, grabbing his Thomas the Tank Engine book bag and picking out what he wanted to bring as if we were going to Grandma’s for the night. We packed a few plastic bags with what food we could eat straight out of the box or bag or can; my wife took care of the baby’s stuff while I took four of everything from my older son’s dresser and stuck it all in with mine. My wife grabbed our passports and her cameras (leaving the battery chargers behind). I slipped a notebook into my backpack, leaving laptop, flash drives and ten years worth of photographs for another day.

‘Switch your main breaker off,’ Jun said as I packed our bags into his car, on and among his own stuff. ‘And bring some blankets if you can.’ Blankets? ‘Yes, it is still very cold in Morioka and my brother doesn’t have many extra blankets.’ This sentence, simple and bloated with meaning, told me that I’d heard what I thought I heard Jun say into his phone as I was dragging our bags down the steps to our front door. Number Six was doing what I had seen so many people do in the past few days, and what so many people I would read about later would do. Jun was reaching out, helping where help was needed. My neighbor, whose name I’d never bothered to learn, was being, simply, Japanese.

I was tearing up and down the stairs, going back for odds and ends as I thought of them. ‘Sorry, I’m really sorry,’ I said, finding side pockets and empty spaces to cram things into. ‘No problem,’ Jun said as if we were not yet late for a picnic. His girlfriend too waited patiently, texting someone as she stood in Jun’s doorway. At long last we locked our front door, too much in a rush at this point to pause and wonder when we might be back. ‘Maybe you should put your masks on,’ Jun said easily as we drove off, raindrops dotting the windshield.

On the news I’d seen one structure in town – an old three-story school building – that had partially collapsed. Other than that I’d only seen toppled three-foot cinder block walls, old wooden fences leaning over into the weeds and a few new bumps and divots in the sidewalks. On the way to Jun’s girlfriend’s house it was a different if not entirely catastrophic picture. A lot of the homes in that neighborhood were of a more traditional type, with rooftops made of clay tiles. Here and there they sat broken now, in piles under the eaves and scattered in gardens, the holes in the places where they’d fallen from now covered with swaths of blue tarp.

I expected Route 4 to be snarled with traffic, half the city headed south toward Tokyo, half crawling toward Sendai and parts further north. But there were only a handful of us waiting at any given red light. Cars were scarce; commercial trucks were all but non-existent. As we passed through Kunimi and Koori and headed for the countryside the road population thinned to almost nothing.

The world itself looked no different. The road was the road, lined with buildings and stretches of forest and field. Cars were cars, and while there were fewer of them than usual this could be explained away if need be. No one was speeding or driving recklessly; abandoned storefronts – the only visible clues to the altered state of existence – were left undisturbed and alone. No sirens, not even a patrol car. Then we came upon a small one-story cement garage crumbling in on itself, waiting, it seemed, for the next big aftershock, or gravity or a piece of heavy machinery to put it out of its misery. Soon we were crossing into Miyagi; signs for Sendai began appearing. I felt like we were delving into the mouth of some kind of invisible beast.

Conversation came in gentle spurts. I learned that Jun had recently traded in his number six for a coach’s jersey. He was from Ohdate, where my wife and I had actually gone a handful of years ago, to see a huge fireworks display. He liked Fukushima. He knew he and his friends could be a bit boisterous at night sometimes and apologized for the noise. He asked where we were from, and asked if we were planning on ever moving to the States. ‘It might be a good idea to leave Japan for a while,’ he said, that smile still hanging around. I told him if we did he was absolutely welcome to come visit us someday, and stay with us for a while, wherever we might be living. Jun said that sounded great. And while we were both being sincere, it felt like a conversation you have with people you don’t think you’ll ever see again.

Traffic turned heavy as we neared the heart of Sendai. Still, aside from the occasional ramen shop or convenience store with all-but-empty shelves, doors remained locked, windows remained dark, parking lots sat empty. At a roadside gas station light fixtures hung low, metal framing bent like a witch’s accusing fingers over the pumps. In a gravel lot rows of tour buses sat in noticeable disarray; three of them had rolled off into the surrounding drainage ditch. A cement factory silo, twenty meters tall, leaned like the Tower of Pisa. The road cleared again as we left Sendai behind, heading back out into a landscape of trees and rice fields and rivers where the only signs of the quake came in the form of uneven joints in the road where earth and bridge surfaces used to meet with barely a wrinkle. We had to slow down a little more at each successive bridge as we made our way into Iwate.

Jun took his mask off. I’d stripped mine off long ago. I offered to drive if he needed a break. He smiled and said he was fine. We talked about stopping for a bite to eat, but we just kept on moving north. I dug out my cell phone and answered messages, one by one, left by friends who had taken off and friends who, for one reason or another, were staying behind, at least for the time being. The words we all used differed but the basic message was the same: Take good care, stay safe, and I’ll see you again when it’s over.

In the back seat my older son looked at picture books and fiddled with his toy cars. I wondered what he might say to his pre-school friends, if he only knew.

Things, We Didn't Know - tohoku earthquake part five

The subject of the text message was simple: 'Run!'


With this one word all the thoughts I'd fallen asleep to came crashing back into my head. My friend had spent the night thirty miles up the road in Yonezawa. 'We'll go further today, if we can,' he said.

If we can?...

In my head it sounded right out of a movie, too dramatic to be real. And he wasn't the only person I knew who was already heading west, away from the nuclear reactors leaking God-knows-what-if-anything into the air. A co-worker of mine, one of the sharpest and most level-headed guys I've ever met, had also hit the road. He too was with his family, making his way toward the Sea of Japan, unsure of their destination, living out of their car. 'Just to be on the safe side,' he said.

This made everything seem both more sane and more weird.

An explosion at a nuclear reactor is not welcome news, particularly when it comes from your own backyard. Holy shit I heard myself say as I stared at my computer screen, head blank except for those two words and a full-color apocalyptic image. But nothing else I had found made mention of anything like casualties, evacuation orders or even a general warning beyond a glib 'stay inside'. That a nuclear reactor could explode without frying the surrounding area let alone the entire hemisphere was news to me, and the thought crept into my head that either no one knows for sure what the hell is going on or else they're just not telling us.

'Those cars were there at six o'clock this morning,' my wife said as we congregated for breakfast. She pointed out the window and past the veranda at three cars parked along the stretch of visible curb. 'What do you think?'

'I want pancakes,' my son said, stepping carefully (more or less) past the dishes and glasses and appliances crowding the kitchen floor.

It was a little before nine. On a normal day the stores would still be closed; for the past two days nothing had been open. 'Waiting for something,' I said, not sure what they might be waiting for until finally it hit me: 'Gas.'

The closest station was easily three hundred meters away. I knew we didn't have much in our tank; we would have driven out to my wife's parents' place otherwise. Better fill up as soon as we can, I thought. Just to be on the safe side.

Three hours later I was out at the curb listening to a woman tell me she'd been waiting in line since eight.

After breakfast, with my wife watching the news and my boys playing with trains and cars and noisy things made in China, I'd gotten back to googling for anything I could find. Reports about the reactor situation hadn't changed, but there was now a designated area within a certain radius of the Daiichi complex where people were being told to stay indoors. 'A precautionary measure,' or so went the story.

That vague fear I'd first felt on Friday night returned.

I did some research on the reactors - their construction, their innards and their age. I found out that the reported explosion had likely occurred and only impacted the upper chamber of the reactor; good news in that the main compartment remained intact, bad news in that this upper area was where spent fuel rods were being stored. Radioactive material was now leaking into the air. It might have been a disaster in the making. It might have been nothing, at least to us, fifty miles and one mountain range away. Maybe this will happen, maybe that won't. Stay inside and keep your windows closed within twenty kilometers.

Outside I saw two people, my neighbor from across the street and a girl riding her bicycle. They both wore white masks over their nose and mouth. I spoke with a friend on the phone: 'The wind will blow in from the ocean,' he explained in precise English. 'We will have acid rain tonight.' The television told us the same, in between reports of a rising death toll and clips of Yukio Edano, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary, saddled with the unenviable job of telling the nation and the world just what was going on and what they were going to do about it. I scoured the Net for information on the buses and trains running out of Fukushima; most pages had no updated schedules posted, a couple indicated all service had stopped. Nowhere could I find what I wanted to hear.

My inbox overflowed with day-old messages of joy and relief that we were okay.

A friend of my wife's stopped by with a can of baby formula she'd just picked up for us. She had a mask on, as did her three-year-old daughter. She'd be leaving for Sendai the next day, to be with her family. 'Are you staying here?' she asked.

The line of cars outside our balcony wasn't moving. I couldn't remember if the ones there now were the same ones I'd seen at breakfast. 'I'll be right back,' I told my wife and ran out the door.

Four hours the woman had been waiting. She looked equal parts calm and worried and resigned. Behind her the line of cars stretched out of sight; beyond the traffic light up ahead they disappeared around a corner. I started jogging, then running, cutting through the parking lot of the electronics store to the side street that ran past the back entrance to the gas station. The line of cars stood like a disrupted funeral procession; a quarter mile down, past the park with the sandbox my son loved to go to, the row of cars bent left, then left again to run back up the main road and into the gas station's front entrance. A mile of waiting cars, easily. Plus a crowd of people at the kerosene pumps. Men wearing the gas station's logo on their backs worked frantically. Two of them started scribbling on large pieces of cardboard.

申し訳ありませんが、ガス売り切り。We are sorry, no more gas.

Life had become a movie. The movie had turned into real life. The world I knew had ceased to exist, replaced with something that I did not feel a part of, even as I began wondering how the hell I was going to escape. I ran back down the road, across the empty parking lot. One of the lucky ones sped through the dead traffic light at the corner. My neighbor had gone inside. From the couch my wife looked up at me. 'What did you find out?'

I looked at her. I looked at my boys. I looked at Yukio Edano.

Home, Neighbors, Cake & What's Coming - tohoku earthquake part four

After faking his own death Huckleberry Finn hides in a tree outside a church window, looking in on all the townfolk crying at his funeral. 'I never had any idea so many people cared about old Huck Finn,' he says as the tears well in his own eyes.


Of all the scenes of all the movies, all the passages in all the books I've ever read, this was the one that came to mind as I stared at the screen of my laptop soon after returning home on Sunday.

The population of the shelter was about half what it had been the first night. In the morning air I felt a mix of restlessness and lethargy; the aftershocks had all but ceased, and though they'd probably keep the gym open for anyone wanting to stay, I knew it was time for us to go home - utilities or no.

First, however, we'd accept three rations of breakfast bread plus a sponge roll cake from the men in the windbreakers still working on all our behalf.

We weren't going to be able to fit all our futons and blankets and kids into the car at once without raising a few Child Welfare & Social Service eyebrows; I'd have to make two trips. The futons, much more relaxed and manageable than my sugared up son, would go first.

At home I found the electricity had come back. Five minutes later, with the old Model T laptop warmed up and my inbox overflowing with the thoughts and prayers and hopes and pleas of countless good people, I turned into Huck Finn in a tree.

--------------

My older son got right back to playing with his cars and trains; he didn't seem to even notice that half the apartment was now scattered all over the floor. Our younger boy, who just a few days ago had taken his first real steps, clung to his mommy as if he knew something bad had happened and might again at any time. My wife flipped the TV on, watching the images of devastation we now knew all too well while listening to vague reports of problems at the nuclear power plants fifty miles to the southeast. I set about putting our apartment and our life (so it felt) back in order. 'Maybe we should leave the dishes and the rice cooker on the floor for now,' my wife said. 'The microwave the TV and the hot water maker too.' Grudgingly, I had to agree it felt safer that way.

Across the street Mrs. Shishido tidied up her yard, picking twigs off the grass and sweeping leaves from the front walk into the gutter. She wore a white mask over her nose and mouth, common in Japan to fend off the germs and allergens of the season. 'Konnichi-wa!' she said, turning from her chores as I walked over. She was never short of words, and I hoped today would be no exception.

'Everything all right?' I asked. 'Yes, we're okay, how is your family?' And for the next ten minutes I stuttered through a conversation like none I'd ever had, in any language.

Mrs. Shishido was surprised the power had already come back on (I'd had no idea what to expect). She also said the water would be back on by Friday, maybe Thursday, and oh by the way we can expect a huge aftershock sometime in the next three days. 'Really?' I said, hoping she was just screwing with me. 'Oh yes,' she answered, a look in her eyes that I would soon be familiar with though I would struggle to understand. In her eyes was a look of resignation, of acceptance of something bad we can not control or predict and so we might as well just get on with the business of daily existence.

As she told me about a place I could get water - someone with a well was allowing people to come fill up their jugs at their outdoor tap - stout and hearty Ms. Ito came shuffling over from next door. 'Strongest earthquake I've ever felt,' she said. 'Strongest by far.' Ms. Ito was eighty-something, and smiled like she had faced the worst the world could give her and had come out on top. With neighbors like this, being home was a tremendously comforting feeling.

'Kevin-san,' Mrs. Shishido said, pointing at my face and then hers. 'You should wear a mask. Protect yourself from the radiation.'

-----------

It was long past dark when I headed out on my bicycle, eight or so plastic bottles of all sizes in my backpack. The people had put a sign at the edge of their driveway: 水. As I filled up two young men got out of their car and walked over, each with a large white bucket. Behind them came an older man carrying nothing. I asked him if he lived there; he didn't, then told us how there was a long line for water at a house fifty meters up the road. There were others too, he explained, offering their well water to anyone who needed it.

With neighbors like this...

On the way home I rode by the supermarket, normally open until 11pm. The hand-written sign on the door said they were selling bottled drinks and certain daily necessities and nothing else, and would be closing early every night for the forseeable future. All up and down the street, the restaurants and convenience stores and shoe and eyeglass and book shops were dark as vacant warehouses. The entrance to the gas station was roped off but there were no signs indicating a fuel shortage.

------------

'Happy Birthday!' My older son beamed as if he'd remembered it himself. My wife gave him a long, tight squeeze. ('Let go!' he squealed, squirming.)

'Sorry, I didn't get you a present,' I said as I dug out the pancake mix. (I want to help!' my son barked.) 'Oh it's no problem.' Which of course was true. Her smile told me, if I didn't already know, that she had everything she wanted right there among the dishes and appliances and face-down-on-the-floor picture frames.

Her 40th birthday would be memorable at the very least.

She'd spend the day playing with our boys and keeping an eye on the news, by now almost entirely devoted to the growing concern about the situation down along the southern Fukushima shore. I sorted our clothes, putting away anything that could pass for clean - then emptied two large plastic drawers of my clothes onto the floor and went out to fetch more substantial stores of water. I began the wonderful, consuming task of responding to the literally hundreds of messages and facebook posts from both before and after I was able to say 'Hi we're okay.' I stared at all the tea cups and glasses and semi-fancy souvenirs arranged safely on the throw rug underneath the kitchen table and decided - without knowing quite why - to pack everything away in boxes, as if we were about to move out.

We celebrated with home-made pizza that night (okay frozen pizza crusts from the supermarket topped with chopped vegetables and tuna from a can, baked in the microwave), and afterward sang Happy Birthday around a sponge roll cake decorated with leftover cookies and slices of a single kiwi fruit. This indeed is the stuff of memories.

Like a kids' movie miracle the water came back on, making the those two big drawers of water in the bathroom seem not so much a waste as a luxury. Still, I'd dump it into the washing machine rather than down the drain. Meanwhile my wife, showered and sporting fresh pajamas for the first time in days, thought her birthday just couldn't get any better.

She'd fall asleep right along with the boys, back home on our own tatami floor and loving it. I, on the other hand, would be up until the wee hours trying to make sense of the stream of conflicting reports on the seriousness of the nuclear reactor situation while texting back and forth with a couple of friends who had already packed their families and some clothes in their cars and begun heading west.

The Morning After - tohoku earthquake part three

Morning arrived in the form of the generator's low hum; a murmur of voices; the footsteps, discernible somehow, of people at task. I crawled out of my futon (everyone I'd offered it to - elderly women, infant-coddling mothers, even the girl who literally fell asleep on her knees on the bare hardwood - had declined in favor of their own measly blankets) and looked around at a gymnasium filled with sunlight. People were up and about, moving not so much with purpose as with a desire for purpose. A few still reclined where they had slept, or not slept. Many stood in a line that stretched halfway around the room and ran right past the edges of my comforter. In shorts and a t-shirt I folded everything into a less obtrusive pile. The people at whose feet I'd just been sleeping pretended not to notice or care.


At the long tables against the far wall men and women handed out rice balls and tea. My wife was already on line, both our boys hanging onto her. I caught her eye and she motioned for me to join her; food was being carefully rationed out and they might not have given her any extra rice for a husband she'd claim was still asleep in that oversized lump of bedding over there. Although with our own leftover rice from home, along with some crackers and bread and peanut butter and juice, we weren't living on the edge of survival. Not yet.

Overnight the sheltered masses had sat nervously, clutching their blankets and murmuring louder with each successive aftershock.
Some were like angry growls of warning, a couple lasted much too long for anyone's liking. Many amounted to mere shivers, like the earth was shaking off its own unease. Into the wee hours I'd been up, watching with sordid amusement a scene reminiscent of a Monty Python skit: with each new rumble a half dozen bodies would spring from slumber to startled; they'd sit straight up, wide wary eyes peering into the dark corners of the room and beyond; the rumbling would stop then, and as if some kind of switch of consciousness had been turned off, they'd all collapse like rag dolls back down onto their makeshift pillows.

In the course of the evening I'd run into Lee, a British guy I knew from the Japanese class we both attended on a strictly irregular basis. He lived not a cricket batsman's fair effort from the Shimizu learning center with his wife and her family and their unusually dense and heavy baby boy. He told me their house was fine, no apparent structural damage - 'a real testament to the quality of Japanese construction,' he noted - but they decided they'd rather not have to deal with the sudden lack of water and electricity. Not that things were much better there at the shelter, but having the choice was something of a luxury.

We'd heard from people who had spotty Internet access through their cell phones that the massive (as suspected) earthquake had originated off the coast of Miyagi, north of Fukushima. 8.8 they said. Or 8.9. All that meant to me and Lee was that there had to be some pretty serious damage somewhere up the road. 'If we have to be anywhere close to that monstrous a quake,' Lee added, 'on solid Fukushima ground is a good place to be.' Neither of us thought much of the vague reports we'd heard of a tsunami.

With the coming of daylight the atmosphere in the shelter changed dramatically. It was as if we could now look around and see with our own eyes that things were still as we remembered them. That despite the unsettling suspicion that we were wrong, perhaps we could go on believing that life would continue on as normal. People seemed a bit lighter on their feet; voices sounded less grave. Still, the occasional tremor reminded us - reminded me - of an earth still very much alive under our feet.

Sixteen hours had passed since I held my son, telling him everything was okay as I prayed for the world to stop, and still I hadn't been able to contact anyone, to let them know we were fine. After hours of trying, Lee had been able to get a text message to England through his mother-in-law's phone. She let me try, to no avail. The pay phones couldn't handle international calls, or even calls across town at times. The men in the office-cum-crisis management center told me (without, oddly, offering to try) that I wouldn't be able to get through using the phones there either. But no worries, I figured, assuming everyone back home knew I lived on safe, steady ground. (The absurdity of anyone back home understanding this somehow did not click with me.)

With the tremors growing fainter and less frequent, with the sun shining down on a beautiful day in Fukushima City, people slowly began packing up their blankets to go back home. Lines formed outside the building on both sides, folks toting jugs and buckets and garbage cans to fill with water from the spigots that had already come back to life if they had ever even died at all. Cars moved easily up and down the street. An old man and his granddaughter walked their dog together. I watched as my older son played on the jungle gym and the swings, along with a handful of other blessedly naive souls. I spoke with a few of the parents, but only in the context of our kids; I wasn't sure what to say about the quake and wanted to let them bring it up if they wanted. None did.

On the playground and in the buildings and houses all around not a brick, not a tree branch looked out of place. Mount Shinobu, Fukushima City's grand natural centerpiece, rose up into the bright blue sky as it always had, lines of her hilltop temples visible through the naked branches, radio towers standing straight and tall. Snowmelt ran down the concrete gutters. Birds chirped and flitted overhead. Down at the edge of the river my son and I flipped rocks into the water. The world indeed felt at peace. 'See what happens when you throw a rock in?' My son watched intently. 'It sinks. It goes down to the bottom, right?' He smiled and threw another of his own in and watched it disappear. 'Now watch this,' I said, picking up a thick, weather-beaten stick. 'This is going to float on top.' And I tossed it into the current.

My son and I watched silently as the stick splashed into the water, drifted along a few inches under the surface, then slowly sank into the murky depths and disappeared.

'I guess that was a really heavy stick,' I said to my son. Like everything else going on it didn't mean much to him. Thank God.
A loose crowd around a large flat screen television in the front hall of the Shimizu building told me the electricity was back, at least here. Tonight, if we did stay, we wouldn't be hanging around in shadows. We wouldn't have to bring a flashlight to the bathroom. We could now recharge our cell phones and try once again to reach the outside world.
Staring at the images coming across the screen, reaching the outside world was suddenly a much more urgent and pressing matter and at the same time nothing more than the most trivial of matters.
Fishing villages reduced to fields of splintered wood. Cars and houses and debris packed in surreal heaps. Who knew what everyone back home was seeing? Who out there knew what the situation was where I lived? Who knew where I even was? These thoughts were washed away though; I was fine, and my family would know this soon enough. Right now, though, right up the road, were scenes so terrible, so horrific, they barely made sense even as I stood watching them, over and over. It felt like watching planes fly into buildings on TV. It hit me like having to listen to my sister tell me over the phone to come home to say my last good-byes to my father.
For the rest of that crisp, sparkling blue Saturday I kept returning, with the others, to stare at those images. I went home, to check if by chance we'd gotten electricity back - and looked around at the pictures and knick-knacks that had fallen to the floor, the bottles of cooking oil and boxes of curry mix that had been shaken right out of the cabinets, the papers and toys and crafts from pre-school, scattered all over an apartment that, despite its appearance, was safe. Still, we would sleep in a gymnasium one more night.

Slight though they were, there will still tremors out there.

Separated from our haven by thirty miles and a range of mountains, just over there along the coast, the world we knew and had been to many times, and as recently as four days ago, had suddenly ceased to exist. That our building, that Lee's home, that my son's pre-school and Fukushima City were still standing was indeed a testament to the world man had built around us. But my wife and I felt better, for now, having others around us. Just in case.

Calm Amid Calamity -- tohoku earthquake part two

I walked into the dark front hall of the Shimizu Learning Center. A man in a blue windbreaker approached, moving with an efficiency that told me he was at work though in what capacity I had no idea. What was the situation here, or anywhere else? What had really happened, and what needed to be done? I hadn't seen any damage. A distant siren bled through the hum of a single generator; outside the glass doors a circle of men dressed in shadows watched over a huge pot of water, slowly warming over a propane flame.

I suppose I expected to be received in some way, for someone in a dark blue windbreaker to ask me my name, if I was all right and did I come with any family. I waited for direction but the man kept walking, by my shoulder and out into the wind and the returning snow. More figures appeared, out of the black corridors ahead and the blustery darkness behind. A couple of them held flashlights. They traded scant words as they passed each other. No one spoke to me. No lines, no people with clipboards. Barely a sound besides that generator. The siren in the distance faded and died. Something was going on here - but what? I wondered if we had come to the wrong place.

Yet the parking lot outside was full; my wife was waiting out there with our two boys, along with enough food and blankets, we hoped, to get us through the night. There had to be others. I walked down the left corridor, drawn to a softly-illuminated doorway and a murmur of voices. At the bottom of a single step a dozen pairs of shoes lie in semi-disarray. I kicked off my battered sneakers and stepped inside.

Three hundred people I would guess, the majority of them families and elderly couples, took up most of the gymnasium floor. Most were spread out on blankets, staking their orderly claim on some space for the night. Others sat up against the walls, in chairs or on the floor, out of reach of the glare of the two sets of spotlights focused on the middle of the room. Folks walked in slow motion, toward a long table with silver urns of hot water and tea, to the side a mishmash of half-empty jars of instant coffee. Others roamed with bald aimlessness the narrow makeshift walkways, careful not to step on their new neighbors' blankets and bags and shoes. A few just stood in place, looking out over the scene as if they had already resigned themselves to something they had yet to understand.

Squares of empty floor still remained; a family of three edged past, clutching blankets to their chests, scanning the room with tired eyes. I ran back out to the car. The snow had begun to stick to the windshield. 'You take him,' I said, pointing to our little one. 'I'll bring everything else, let's go.' My older son was fast asleep in his car seat. He'd be all right for the time it would take for us to spread out on our temporary hardwood home. We'd brought two heavy blankets and my wife's futon; with a little creativity we'd be able to stave off the chill seeping in through the walls but for me, for my family, this was not good enough. I'd go home and grab what more I could. 'I'll be right back. Do we need anything else?' Before my wife could answer the world started shaking again.

With the added blankets we had, for the four of us, more comfort than any other ten people in the room. And there was still my futon in the car. The amount of food we had with us was also, at least by comparison, obscene. My wife went about settling in, as much as one can settle in on a gymnasium floor among three hundred other people. I began scoping out the place, looking for someone to approach.

Among the mass of people and blankets were several small clusters of older folks, sitting in chairs, blankets over their shoulders, quiet conversation floating up from the air around them. In the shadows their faces showed nothing that could be called fear. Some spoke calmly; others listened, waiting their turn. A few smiled or nodded casually to things I couldn't hear. Along the edge of the room too they sat, in chairs or on thin blankets. Up close I saw lines of worry in their faces, though something in there told me their worries were older than today.

Men in windbreakers, and a few women too, continued moving among the people. People who, once here, had nothing to do except wait. Wait for clean tea cups; wait for the next tremor. Wait for the light of morning. The clock high on the wall read 11:30. It felt much, much later than that.

I wiped a used mug with a damp cloth, made myself some coffee and leaned against the wall, sipping slowly as I tried to wrap my head around the day. At 2:45 I was thinking about the surprise birthday party I was planning for my wife. At 2:46 I was holding onto my son, listening to him giggle as I prayed over and over for the shaking for stop. I'd been through earthquakes but nothing like that, not even close. It wouldn't be until the next day, with the power partially restored and the first images appearing on the news, that we would all begin to understand just what had happened.

But for the moment there was no urgency, no desperation. Save for the lack of electricity and the occasional aftershock this was just an assortment of people gathered in a gym for a night. Then a man in a dark blue jacket entered the room, speaking someone's name. He called out three times, waiting in between, only to be answered with silence. This would occur intermittently throughout the night, bringing with it the underlying and palpable sense that somewhere things were very, very bad.

I walked among the people, eventually picking out an elderly couple sitting quietly on the floor. Their legs were crossed and wrapped in brown wool blankets. There was a hint of sleep in their eyes. 'I have two extra futons in my car, would you like them?' They smiled and slowly shook their heads. 'We are fine, thank you,' the woman said. I asked again. Again they politely, quietly declined. I nodded and bowed slightly (as I figured I should) and gently turned away, wondering what was really behind their outward desire to sit on the floor all night.

I asked several more people, old folks and older folks and couples with small children. Each of them refused, offering the same assurances that they were okay. I hauled the futons in from the car; maybe no one wanted to have me go outside and carry them in on their account. Sitting on the gymnasium floor in a pile they looked nothing less than a pot of gold in a field of rubble. Yet still I could find no takers. I spread them out, hoping to make them seem more attractive, more inviting, at least more available. But really, this just made them seem more out of place among the hundreds of people making do with the scarcest of warmth. And with each demure refusal to accept such luxury when others had so little I began to sense the collective spirit of a people facing a shared disaster.

I listened to the calm words floating in the air around me; under the quiet concern I could hear no complaining. Three hundred people, thrown together through stressful circumstances, and not once did anyone raise his voice. I glanced over the urns of tea and hot water. I stared at the spotlights taped in place on metal racks. A woman walked past carrying a tray of clean tea cups. Men in the hall dragged large plastic trash cans filled with water into the bathrooms. Outside in the elements men prepared dozens and dozens of packets of instant rice; others brought them inside in cardboard boxes, handing them out to people lining up briskly, eagerly and in perfect order. Three elderly women smiled in understanding when my little boy next to them woke up and began crying.

I would speak the next day to a woman in her eighties; she'd say she had lived through a thousand earthquakes but never anything like this, thought she knew what an aftershock was until sitting up all night, listening, witnessing the ongoing drama. And so it was for everyone else that night too, in that shelter and across town and all up and down eastern Japan. Yet at least in Fukushima, at the Shimizu Learning Center, all everyone knew was to take it in peaceful stride. To gather in a gymnasium. To rig up lights and make instant rice. To share space and trade words. To spend the night on a blanket.

And to say that they were okay.