Tokyo, Japan 1977

One Account of the Tōhoku Earthquake, 2011

 

“Ok,” I thought, “This is bigger than usual.” It was. I stood in the doorway to my back porch gripping the frame with my eyes closed as objects fell to the floor from my desk, in the kitchen and the top shelves of my closet. “It’s a dream,” I thought. “It’s got to be a dream.” I was afraid. I thought about  the great Kobe earthquake of 95, being crushed, suffocation, burning, children screaming and everything else I’d ever paired with the idea of the big one.  

My front door was thrown open. A close friend and colleague, (an unshaven) Daniel Herbertson ran into my room from his apartment next store, the whites of his eyes fully exposed. He was screaming my name as he tried to steady himself.

“What the hell should we do?” He yelled, holding the wall for support.
“I don’t know, man. I have no idea. I have no idea,” I kept saying it.

We ran outside, shoeless and shaken. A gray sky cast over a small street full of people. Children were crying. The thin, mustachioed barber who had a shop next-door was standing under the awning near the blue and red, rotating barber-pole. He was already smoking a cigarette. He smiled at us, looking down at our bare feet.

“Kowaikatta, ne?” He asked, raising an eyebrow. “Scary, huh?”

Daniel and I walked up and down the street in bare feet searching for damage in some of the older structures around the neighborhood. We came upon the small park with a sandbox, swings and a short jungle-gym. Mothers had come with their children, seeking safety from the quake. Some of the kids (face full of tears) were frightened, but most just ran about chasing each other and laughing as if nothing had happened. An old man ran back and forth in the street shouting orders. He placed orange cones around a cracked, stone shrine.

The aftershocks were very close together. We walked back to our building and sat in-front of the news. We soon heard that a massive Tsunami had wiped out a few cities in the north. Thousands dead and the video footage of apocalyptic tides of cold sea-water washing ships into buildings, being crushed under bridges, cars rolling in the debris.

Daniel was a photographer for sports website. He shot pictures for the fights in Tokyo. I did some writing. We were scheduled to cover the first  events in months: Jewels, Shootor’s Legacy 2, and Pancrase. They were immediately canceled. We heard that our beloved fight temple: Korakuen hall had taken damage in the quake. Japanese MMA had been on the rocks for a while now, and the 9.0 earthquake wasn’t helping.

“When it rains, it pours,” I said.
“Figures,” Dan said. “What else?”

The sun dropped below the horizon. The streets near our building quickly filled with the day’s workers. Public transit stopped. People were stranded all over the city. Office men and women in dark suits walked for miles. They moved in quiet lines (shoulder to shoulder) down the sidewalks of main-roads, some of them walking for up to 10 hours to reach home. Bicycle shops were emptied out. People waited up to 4 or 5 hours to get a taxi, paying hundreds of dollars. Others slept in elementary schools and Jr. High schools made into make-shift emergency shelters where volunteers handed out green tea, water and ritz crackers or powdery disaster biscuits that tasted of air.

A friend who was forced to sleep in a primary school in Kita Senju told me about the experience. “They woke me up every 45 minutes and asked if I needed more water. It was me and about 100 senior citizens. Everyone tossed and turned all night. They were all very polite about it,” he said. “The ritz crackers were pretty great. I hadn’t had those in a while.”

The night after the quake, I had drinks with the few friends left in Tokyo. We shot pool at an old second floor billiard hall near my apartment, doing our best to make jokes about the country sinking, the impending doom of radiation poison giving us super-powers, or the turning of the population into brain-fucked zombies. It seemed like an exciting time to be a part of something awful. In truth, we weren’t really involved in anything dangerous. We were safe and completely terrified of what could become of our comfortable Tokyo lifestyle.

The main road, Ome Kaido, that ran through Shinjuku and Nakano was quiet. I walked home from the pool hall with a girl who had been born and raised in Tokyo. She was very proud of this. It became clear to me that the people would remain steadfast throughout anything like this, because they were used to the idea of The Big One taking them all out in an instant. It was something they were raised on– something they joked about and told foreigners like myself to playfully scare us. It was a part of their condition. It always would be.

“I’ve got no reason to leave, you know? I don’t know why you and your friends are still here, though. You guys don’t have anything to prove. I’m Japanese. My family is here. I’m staying.”
“You think I should leave,” I asked?
“It’s best not to panic.”

Half of my friends had left for the southern city of Nagoya. They took the bullet train to avoid the coming black-outs, food shortages and possible radiation poisoning. My family was doing their best to get me back to the States. They’d had enough, as the foreign news stations did their best to picture an Armageddon, and all it’s trimmings.

“Listen, buddy,” my father said. “Even if something terrible doesn’t happen, who’s to say? How do you know?” He spoke rationally,  and in a gruff tone through the video phone on my computer. It seemed logical enough. I packed quickly and left for Haneda, but by the time I reached the airport, the flight I’d planned on taking was full. Foreigners stood in long, unmoving lines, speaking loudly on the phone…complaining to airline help desks.

“Yes!” a woman said into her phone. “Nuclear meltdown! That’s what they’re saying. Total meltdown.”

I decided to meet the others down south.

160 miles south of Tokyo, Nagoya doesn’t seem so big, but with over eight and a half million people in the metropolitan area, it is far from tiny. The bullet train took about an hour and a half. I got off at Nagoya station, walked to a large apartment building and took the elevator to the eleventh floor. Apartment #1106 was packed. Eight or nine people slept on old futon mats and across couches and under the dining room tables. Six of them had fled Tokyo. People woke. Some were on their way out of the country: Korea, Hong Kong, France and back to the States. A few took trains to Fukuoka to catch boats to Busan: cheap and plenty to see. A part of me wishes I’d gone along.  I didn’t blame them for leaving. Seemed like the appropriate thing to do. The world was ending. It truly felt as if it would end, and we’d created this mood with our incessant talking of “worst case scenarios” and too much news.

Sunlight broke through the short, square window in the hallway. It was an old-style Japanese apartment with grass mat floors. I slid open the door to my friend Norisuke’s room. He was at school. I fell on his futon and slept into the evening, exhausted. Fleeing friends entered and said their goodbyes, rubbing my back.

“See ya when the smoke clears,” they said.

When I woke, the group of Tokyo refugees had been cut to three: myself, Daniel and the top women’s pound for pound fighter: Roxanne Modafarri. She and Daniel had arrived a day before me. Roxanne was very kind and said everything in earnest. In the evenings, myself and Daniel, along with our 3 Nagoya friends would go out drinking. Roxanne would train nearby. With over twenty professional fights under her belt, she had the usual fighter’s discipline, and we drunkenly declared this whenever it felt necessary.

Once over afternoon coffee and french toast, I asked her about the current state of  Japanese mixed martial arts and how she felt the earthquake would affect it.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard to say right now. I’ve lived here for five years and I love it. I’ve got no intention of leaving.” She was confident in the country’s ability to rebuild. I felt the same.

Days passed eating cup ramen and playing video games (Street Fighter and Nintendo Ice Hockey), following Tokyo reporters on twitter and watching the horrible news unfold on television. The nuclear issue was getting worse. Companies in Tokyo shut down and food was scarce. We spent our nights getting drunk in bars and restaurants around Nagoya station with the gang arguing over uncertain futures, smoking cigarettes on the floor and discussing the end of an era.

After nearly a week, I needed something fresh. I asked our friend Norisuke about art galleries around town, as he had been an art student prior to our meeting. Nori was thin, but athletic. He drove a motorcycle and taught Karate. He stole things like posters from bars, and street signs when he was drunk. He suggested we ride bicycles to the galleries around Sakae and Osu Kannon. He said his old metal works professor had a show somewhere. I borrowed a bicycle from his roommate, and we were off into the city.

It was a cold day in March. While Tokyo currently seemed to exist in a certain mode of despair (or at least careful hesitation), Nagoya was thriving. I sensed nothing of the tragedy in mood of its people. We peddled quickly down the sidewalks, through traffic and across overpasses to reach the social heart of Japan’s motor-city.

“My hands are freezing,” Nori said. He didn’t have gloves. We stopped every so often to smoke a cigarette and consult his map of local galleries. He lead me in and out of various, small venues and spoke briefly about the work.

“This stuff is interesting, but it’s just kind of boring,” he’d say about a series of paintings. “I like getting the viewer involved in the experience a bit more.”

“I think foreign artists and Japanese artists need a way to connect. There’s a big gap,” I told him. He agreed, quietly nodding.

We reached the gallery where his professor had a show. It was a small place with a rabbit insignia on the glass door. It read Westbeth Gallery Kozuka. We walked downstairs and were greeted by Nori’s teacher, Kiyoshi Hurukawa. He was a serious looking man in his 60’s who seemed sharp and spoke very quickly to his his ex-student. Nori did his best to translate between us, as I understood only half of the artist’s Japanese.

I told him that I was an American and that I had been in Tokyo during the earthquake. Hurukawa said that for the people in the North, it was very a very terrible time. He turned to his large, iron structures spread out around the center of the floor. He asked me what I thought of them. I walked around and touched the cool metal sculptures, doing my best to come up with something charismatic to add to the conversation.

“What is it made from?” I asked Nori. Nori asked his teacher.
“He said it’s iron. He soldered it together from piping and scrap metal.

There were large, cutting lines soldered into wide, hollow pipes that formed unusual curves and sharp edges that stretched nearly to the ceiling.

“I like it. It’s really cool,” I said. I felt self conscious at having little to offer in the way of commentary. The man nodded and motioned us to sit down with him. A woman brought coffee with spoons. Nori asked her what she thought about the earthquake.

“Hanashi o shitakuni,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She walked into the small kitchen. She did not look at me.

Hurukawa told us that she currently lived in Tokyo and that she was very upset. We spoke about the tragedy. He told us that is was inevitable that something like this would eventually happen. I felt like this man could share with us his wisdom. His demeanor fit perfectly into my quickly assembled idea of him as an artist. I asked him how he felt about the future of Japan.

“What will happen?” I asked.

Hurukawa spoke to Nori while looking at me. The man held his chin and nodded. He talked about World War 2 and how things were when he was a child, during Japan’s great rebuilding.

“He says that this will be a hard time for Japan, but that it will give the youth new energy.” Nori asked his teacher again about the the youth.  The professor took his fist and hit himself on the chest as he spoke. I couldn’t tell if he was about to cry. I felt as though I should look away from him.

“He said that is will give people a new heart, that a new period will begin for Japan.”

We were all quiet after that. We exchanged some pleasantries and finished our coffee. I thanked him as politely as possible and we left the gallery. Nori and I stood in front of the building.

“He’s a pretty intense guy,” I said.
“Yeah.  His classes were always pretty fun. He used to get very annoyed with some of the students.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. We acted careless sometimes, I guess. He could tell.”  Nori said that Hurukawa wanted him to help take down his sculptures next week after the show. Nori agreed and said it’d be a pain in the ass, and that he’d have to cancel some plans to help him. I laughed at his eagerness to please his old teacher.

We unchained our bikes and started off again down the hill. It was quiet. The sun was setting and we were refreshed at having heard there would be a future. We rolled through the city, taking  big breaths of the early, spring air.

-March 17th, 2011

*REJOICE, because the sun rises in the tiny hours of the morning with the bull-stained troops continuing their chanting. Someone hollers “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” and then an echoing crack– balloon filling rapidly to a taught, purple end.

It’s 7 in the morning on the 1st of January. The warm glaze from a bottle of Jameson paired with the salt-watery GHB retreats. A loud crash through a short table of papers, cups and glasses- hidden valley ranch dressing and carrots smash across the wall.

“Shut up already, Z. I’m dying,” I say and I fall down again into the pile of sheets, coats and pillows huddled near the door of a closet in a dark hallway. The off-white carpet is new. A girl with dark hair wearing my plaid shirt, (blue-green) hangs above me with a shapely silhouette made visible through the thin material.
“Are you comfortable,” she asks?
“Yeah. Thanks for this. You’re a diamond,” I say. She laid it all out. Took linens from the top of the closet and carved us a nest.
“Try and sleep,” she says. She’s young. To hell with it and rejoice, I think. Rejoice in Carolina. Rejoice at the sheer texture of her secret skin.
“Gotta sleep,” I say. “You’re number 1 tonight.”
The tiny light shines down through the oriel. Piles of 20 somethings under tables, and asleep in each other’s arms. A den of bears, mouth-breathing through the first hours of a golden opportunity.
Z, the last of us with his nonsensical rebellion clamors through the front door again.

“You think I’m stupid?” He raises his fist to the wall; to nobody. His eyes close. He smiles.

“K, get him to sleep.” E says, swaying on the backs of her heels. She puts a purple balloon to her mouth and inhales, exhales, inhales, exhales… “I know these are bad for you…” her eyes roll back and she whispers something very quietly. Her lips barely touch.
“K,” she yells again.
“What?” I say, my arms over my face. She runs into the hall and body-checks the closet door.
“You’re the only one who can get him to sleep,” she says. Young girl in plaid shirt cups my ear and starts whispering me to “run away, run away, run away,” she breathes against my neck. Dark hair drags crosswise.
E pulls me to my feet and points at Z in the kitchen. He threatens the refrigerator, turns and sees me, leaps over the couch and rolls over a snoring couple.
“You think I’m stupid,” he says.
“Let’s go outside, Z. It’s a pretty new year. Look at the sunshine,” I say. He looks out and pulls a cigarette from his jacket.

We walk to the driveway and sit. He lies back and crosses his hands behind his head.
“So damn bright out here,” he says. “What time is it?”
“About 7. New Year’s day, man. This is it.” I turn to look at him and he’s asleep.
I stand up and stretch, go through the door and fall back into the hall to the piles of softness, and the girl in my shirt.
“Where is he? Did you leave him outside,” she asks.
“He’s asleep in the drive. He likes it. He’ll be comfortable there for a few hours. I covered him with his coat.”
“Good job,” she says, “You know you’re way around.” She drops her white thigh over my hip.
E dashes in, stepping on our legs.
“He’s not breathing!”
“What?”
“He’s not breathing, Kris. I swear. Should I call someone?”
“He’s fine. He’s invincible. Christ. What?!”
She’s standing there holding a sagging, pink balloon in her chest. Something to hold on to.

*The IHOP was full. It was completely full, so 21 of us walked across the parking-lot, over the concrete divider to take New Year’s lunch at a Mexican place called Tres Pesos. It was empty. They took us to a party room with a disco ball. The reggaeton was turned up. The place smelled of lime. I ordered the burrito plate with an extra pork taco that I did not need.

*I woke around 10 or 11 and walked down the wooden steps from my brothers room to drink my father’s coffee. It was cold. I made four eggs and 2 slices of toast. I gave a plate to my brother who sat in the den. He drank yogurt and grape juice.
“Thanks, bro,” he said. The dogs were everywhere in coats of white, black and graying sand colors.
We watched TV together every morning and made jokes over their jokes.

-First moments of the new year in North Carolina, 2011.

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