Miyagi-ken's JISHIN

It's been four days since the earthquake hit in the north-eastern part of Japan.

It was in the afternoon when it hit here; everyone was still at school, and I was killing time and correcting my brother's 12 page paper for his college writing course. Then, randomly, our school's PA system came to life, saying something in that calm, "I'm kind of panicking but my voice is completely calm because I've trained my whole life in Japanese society for this" Japanese crisis voice, all in Japanese, of course. There were a few things I could pick out. Evacuation center. Tokyo Dome. Several different prefecture names (including Tokyo). JISHIN, or earthquake. And the word for "emergency" (I had to look that one up).

It turns out that something basically hacked our PA system to broadcast an emergency message about the earthquake that had hit in Miyagi Prefecture, off the coast of Sendai. We were kind of like, "oh shit." The first place I turned to for information was the internet.

It's been so surreal the past few days as I've been watching the news, knowing that the northeastern part of Japan (roughly the size from NY to Washington, or so I'm told) was in utter chaos and had been partially annihilated. We've kind of been going about our normal lives down here. Okayama is blessedly far away from Tokyo (though the affected zones stretch down to Shizoka really). So I've been completely fine, and was somewhat amused when the first "OMG ARE YOU ALRIGHT?????" messages started coming in.

I was tempted to show them a map of Japan, but then I realized that many people, when they were watching the news, had it reported to them as the quake near tokyo since 98% of foreigners probably know where Miyagi prefecture is. So really, not people's fault I guess. Plus I could have been out traveling. I guess this is why they want you to tell your supervisor where you're going before you head out on long trips.

But this quake, unlike the other large ones that have hit, has hit a little bit closer to home. Literally. All of them, of course, have been tragic, sad, events. But this one in particular has hit the country I've come to call home for the past 7 months now. I could have been placed up there just as easily as I was placed in Okayama. I work with people who have relatives up there. My family members are in Tokyo, which, while not as bad, still got massive quakes.

So while Japan has been way better prepared and (hopefully) will result in fewer lives lost, I still can't help but worry. Entire towns got wiped out along the coast. Entire towns. Granted, some of these fishing villages can be quite small, but an entire town getting obliterated. That's crazy to think about.

It reminds me a lot about the global issues course I took a while back on The Scholar Ship. Prof. Gordon had talked about natural disasters, and how the worst ones in history weren't *actually* that bad as far as power and nature stuff goes. Most of it was location, and where humans had decided to build things. I suppose that's true, huh. But we can't really help where we build, since a lot of the places also are the most suitable for living, even if it means living near the river that's constantly flooding or living near the coast in a earthquake-prone (and thus, tsunami-prone) region.

I can't watch the news though any more. It just makes me too sad.