In March 2011 I was living in a Japanese city called Fuji. The famous volcano rises to the north of the city and the streets and ugly buildings sprawl up its lower reaches. To the south is the sea; from that direction comes the foul smell of paper production.
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I lived on the rural eastern edge of Fuji, in a tiny apartment near a bullet train line. At night the frosted front window would be illuminated by the lights from super-express trains making for Tokyo or Osaka. Then the blackness of the countryside would return.
On March 11 that year I went home early from my job. I was washing dishes when I felt a shudder. It was almost imperceptible, and I asked my wife if she had noticed it. A few seconds elapsed, then the building started to shake violently.
Comically, we wasted a few seconds deciding what to do. We then rushed down the stairs - not a sensible course of action - and outside into the car park. I have only impressions of those few minutes: finding myself outside barefoot, still clutching a dishcloth; the swaying of the power lines; my heart pulsing rapidly; the sun; the quiet. I have no idea how long the trembling of the earth lasted.
That was the first earthquake that scared me. I had only experienced one other, many years before, and it seemed somehow exciting: I was in a hotel in the south of Japan and woke in the middle of the night to find the bed moving. I was groggy with sleep, and wasn't even certain it was an earthquake until the next morning.
I can't imagine what the Great Tohoku Earthquake was like for those near the epicentre. Fuji was several hundred kilometres to the west, and I felt badly shaken up. For days I felt like I was on a ship at sea, and I went to sleep on edge expecting to be woken by an earthquake warning. I did ask a Japanese friend who had been in Sendai on the day about it once, but all she told me was 'Kowai' (scary).
Years later I returned to Japan to teach at a university. I would ask students about their experiences of the day. I guess it was like the Kennedy assassination: everyone remembered where they had been. One guy even said he had been having sex in a love hotel!
The German writer Goethe once remarked on a visit to Naples that 'here people talk of [earthquakes] as they talk of the weather'. I eventually came to feel that way myself. Numerous were the occasions when I was roused early in the morning in Tokyo by the swaying of the building. It got to the stage where I didn't even bother hiding under my table. I would lie on my futon, half-asleep, and wait until the quake had subsided.
And yet, it's a fact that another massive tremblor is around the corner. I no longer live in Japan, but for my old colleagues and friends in Fuji, it's like being on a precipice. They accept it as part of life. I'm not sure I could.
