Earthquake alert

Well, I was planning to do a post about earthquakes in Japan in the future, but the universe had other plans…

An earthquake occurred with 5.3 magnitude on Richter scale on Monday 25^th of May. With all the major alarms went off and the epicenter of the earthquake was very close to Tokyo, so everyone in Tokyo felt, it was a big one, and hard to miss.

Thankfully, no one is hurt, no damage and no tsunami…

It was in the afternoon around 2.30 pm, I was working on my desk. Everything became shaky, I was like okay it is an earthquake, and it will pass. It frequently occurs in Japan. I try not to make a fuss over it. I think because that I am on 7^th floor I feel stronger hit, so I was cool. My colleagues also said oh earthquake and just waited it to pass…

I don’t know how long it took but, at one point we realized that it was still happening, and getting stronger. Oh dangerous they said.

And within seconds all the emergency alarms on the phones went off, loud scary sounds… Oh screaming alarms, alarms wake you up in the mornings, and you would know that something important is coming. I feel the tension of a scary movie. You just wait a couple of seconds to see what is coming an earthquake, a meteor, a dinosaur…

The big hit of the quake came. And everybody became worried about the earthquake. There is nothing to do but to grab the helmet and start evacuating… It was high time.

I try to deal with it as a Japanese people do about an earthquake. But when they freak out, I can’t help it. From my perspective, when Japanese people freak out about earthquake, it means that it is very very serious. So I freak out more.

I put my helmet on. Yes, we all have our personal helmets at work, grabbed my bag… The guides say don’t worry about your belongings, and it is acceptable to grab only your purse. In my defense, taking my purse from my bag would consume so much time… I have one of those rabbit hole kind of bags….

I realized that I was the only one who was completely prepared. Most of them had their purse or bag, there were a couple of them who had helmets, no one had worn them… So, I also followed the crowd and took the helmet off. We talked about how big it was, how the alarms went crazy…

All passed unharmed… It will happen again and pass again, this is a classic example of Japan.

Cheers,

Ece