I’m writing this on 11 May. It has been exactly 2 months since the Tohoku Earthquake. The surprising thing is, I can hardly remember anything that happened before the earthquake. I don’t remember if my daughter came back during the new year, but my wife said that she brought crab and it seems like we all ate it together. After that was said, I seem to have some recollection of it.
On 11 March, I woke up in the morning as usual, and went to work as usual, and worked as usual. When the shaking started, I wasn’t really concerned, just thinking,“Is it another earthquake?” but then it just kept shaking. Although Miyagi prefecture is a place where a lot of earthquakes happen, but due to the fact that in the recent 5 to 6 years, there were always tremors, I kind of hated it. As there were rumours that there would be a big earthquake happening again in Miyagi prefecture, I had been prepared, thinking, “In my lifetime, there will probably another earthquake of that degree,” but this earthquake shouldn’t be it. The earth was rumbling, and the buildings were screaming, everything was falling and came crashing down. This was far beyond the scope of anything that has happened to me before, to the extent that it felt somewhat malicious.
In the workplace, it became a situation where we couldn’t even tell what had been damaged, and because there were intense aftershocks, so what we did was to go home using the assistant’s car for now. While on the way back and being stuck in a traffic jam, we watched the news on our mobile phones, and images of the tsunami taken from the Self Defence Forces helicopters came on. These were images of the waves one after another rushing towards Sendai, and we (finally) understood what was happening.
With the mobile phone mail systems down, we tried to go home, and although I felt a little discouraged when I saw my wife standing along the road and talking to the tea shop owner, the house wouldn’t be as badly damaged as I had thought. Stupidly when I received the first mail from my wife at night, the title was “The house is destroyed,” and thinking about how anyone who saw a title like that would probably be shocked, it probably meant “The interior of the house is damaged” or something. When I actually tried to open the main door, (the house) was in a condition where that was all I could do, and I couldn’t even step in.
Electricity was cut, water and gas had been stopped, as it became dark, we momentarily cleared the items, to ensure that we could move about on the first floor. While not really knowing what to do, we started worrying about food, but we had rice. If we had rice, we could probably do something so we were temporarily relieved. However, in the middle of the night, every time an intense aftershock came and without knowing when it will end, the concrete pieces from the side of the broken window in the living room flew. It was scary so we tried to go outside, and gathered with the neighbours. While talking, we heard that there was an elementary school nearby that was converted into a shelter. We didn’t even have water, so my wife and I decided to leave the house for the shelter, and went to seek refuge for the first time in our lives.
Once inside, we managed to get water, crackers and towels, and although there were three kerosene stoves burning, there was nothing they could do against the chill of the snow in March in the Tohoku night, at a gymnasium. Sleep was impossible with the cold and the intense aftershocks, and we watched images of the (destructive) fires burning in the middle of the night in some other place on the mobile phone, which would soon run out of battery.
The next day, as my wife was constantly concerned about a parcel which was due to arrive on the afternoon of 11 March, the two of us walked on the cracked and uneven roads and went to the workplace, and as expected, there had been no signs of a delivery. With regards to the contents of this parcel, before the earthquake a friend of my wife had discovered an image of Tohoshinki wearing the “Bonobono” hat on the internet, and as word got passed around, somehow “it seems like we can request for Tohoshinki’s signature” was the result of it. Following that she really got the signed CD, and it was arranged to be sent, due to reach her on the day of the earthquake.
I knew that my wife and daughter were crazy about the hallyu wave lately, and were fans of Tohoshinki, but with regards to this parcel with the signed cd, the dispatch office had been destroyed, the roads were impassable, with no gasoline, and telephone lines could not be connected, and since we didn’t even know where the parcel itself was, we left it as that. During this time, my wife kept worrying about the whereabouts of the package, and even though we checked with the people at the publishing company a few times, until the actual dispatch company resumed working, there was nothing that could be done. Even while looking at videos of all the affected areas, my wife kept worrying about the parcel. After that, the line for the dispatch company got connected, and identified which office the parcel was at. As the dispatch person had no company car, we would have to go all the way to collect it in our own car or such, so my wife took a bicycle and pedaled her way to the office.
Finally receiving the parcel, it contained once CD each for my wife and daughter, they each had both Tohoshinki members’ signatures as well as a polite message written in Japanese. Just like how the world was impressed with the way the disaster victims had carried themselves, I was impressed by the sincerity of the two members of Tohoshinki, and my wife, who kept crying whenever she saw videos of the disaster, started crying again.
For me, from the day electricity had been connected, I did not move from in front of the television, and watched videos of the disaster areas from my bed. Among this, the local television continuously broadcasted a program about “Messages from the victims” in the middle of the night. In there, while all the victims faced the camera and pleaded into the microphone, there was a woman who kept nodding vigorously. I’m not sure if she is a female announcer, or staff but with her long messy hair tied up in and using a large mask, she sits at the side of the frame and is often half-hidden, repeatedly nodding. Every night, as I watch the recording of this program, I always see this woman simply nodding. This picture is representative of how I was at that time.
Source : [bonobono.jp + Yahoo!Korea]
Translated & Shared by : dongbangdata.net
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