Our banker in Tokyo on surviving the quake

In a way I am guilty of putting myself in harm’s way. I have been in and out of Japan for most of my adult life, so the risk of earthquakes has always been in the back of my mind. In fact ,when I first came to Japan in 1987, I remember the excitement when I experienced my 'first' earthquake. In what can only be considered the stupidity of youth, when the shaking started I charged over to look out the 22nd floor window to see if any buildings were falling down. This is a bit like seeing your mate shot in the head next to you and you then jumping up and down to see where the bullet has come from. You really don't want to find out!  So looking out of a window while standing 100 meters above terra firma to see if any other buildings are falling down is a particularly pointless thing to do. It is information that you really want to remain blissfully ignorant of.

Over the following decades my attitude towards earthquakes has matured along the lines of those poor sods that march off to war in the summer of 1914. From excited innocence to a hardened cynicism, in which after each encounter with death, one really starts to enjoy the experience less and less. Kanto, which is the northeast bit of the main island of Honshu, has been due a big one for the last 15 years. The last massive earthquake to hit Tokyo was in 1923, at 7.9 on the Richter scale. It killed about 140,000 Japanese, and flattened most of Tokyo. Unfortunately the folklore had it that Kanto gets whacked every 70 years and so we have been increasingly fearful we were due 'the big one'. Of course, even though the scientists had told us the Kobe earthquake of 1995 was on the wrong plate, we had all been hoping that it had released some of the growing pressure building on the plates around the Kanto region. Fat chance!

But before I get into Friday 11th March 2011 I should go into the nature of earthquakes a little. Do you remember Clive James doing that wonderful series about various Japanese game shows in the 90s? Well, one of them was the equivalent of Japanese Candid Camera, and they rigged an old fashion glass phone booth to show how attuned the Japanese are to earthquakes. There are two types, the first type is the most common and is basically a sideways crescendo. The second, and more dangerous, is the short-lived but far more violent and noisy Jump. All Japanese are intimately aware of the two types. In the game show, they set the phone box up for the sideways crescendo. A Japanese woman came in to use the phone, and once she started speaking the film crew set off the 'earthquake'. The woman looked up sharply once the phone booth started to rock and roll side to side but even though they got it up to an equiv of a 6, she carried on her phone call. The next punter was not so lucky: he got the Jump. There is a huge bang and the phone booth moves a foot off the ground. I have never seen anyone move so quickly; the bloke dived out the booth and lay on the ground with his hands covering his head. You really don't want the jump! Kobe in 1995, and I suspect Christchurch just last month, were victims of this type of quake.

The Event

With incredible irony I was going for a boys’ sailing weekend, the forecast was good and it was the end of a long and busy week in the Japan financials. I was eyeing the clock and wondering what time I could do a runner down to the marina. The time was 14.46JST. Then the building started to shake. My internal alarm mechanism kicked in, and with a sigh of relief I realised it was not a jump type - we did not get the loud bang, as buildings try to defy gravity and reach for the skies only to return to land with a huge crash and in various states of disrepair. We were getting the relatively safe sideways crescendo. Or so I thought. The longest I have experienced one of these things for is about 20 seconds, and in a total Michael Fish moment I sent out a Bloomberg: "Tokyo got a decent earthquake but it’s not too serious".

Then we got the Trillion Yen Jump (the minimum bill for that type of earthquake) after one full minute of putting up with an increasingly violent sideways crescendo. The building went bonkers. The youth staggered to the windows to see if any buildings were falling down, while I grabbed my phone, put on my ski jacket and promptly fell over. Cursing, I started to grip desks and make my way to the exit. The building was swaying violent and even though I was trying not to look out the windows, I could see we were facing the wrong way and I was looking at Tokyo tower, directly to the east, when I normally look towards the skyline of Ginza, which is to the northeast. Just fantastic! So I am 25 floors up, and either Tokyo is spiraling or my building is. I sped up my crab like motion towards the exit.

I finally clawed my way across the dealing room; being old and a drain on society, I am near a window and about as far from the fire exit as you can get. I know the lifts are history, this being by now a huge quake, it had now been kicking off for a full 5 minutes and they would have shut down. Interestingly no alarms had gone off in the building; I guess the health and safety people were having the same problem with their underpants as I was and were distracted. Unfortunately, with the experience of 9/11, I know it's better to get a move on down those stairs before all the sods on the lower floors get there first and start jamming them up. I passed two Gaijin looking a bit dazed, and who were relative newcomers to Japan. I grabbed them by the arms and hoofed them along with me; we were now at serious risk of aftershocks and we needed to get the fuck out of Dodge while we could. We made it to the 15th Floor when the alarms went off. It then got very nasty as the stairs started to fill up and we had to go down three floors which had zero exits before piling out the back of the building.  Amazingly, everything seemed to be standing so it looks like it was not a jump type quake after all but just a massive sideways crescendo.

I will say this: the Japanese are a pretty stoical people and there was no real panic, just a lot of "wow that was really big". Also at this stage we were also deaf and dumb, with the phone networks jammed and no access to TVs given we were standing out in the emergency area. Me and the couple of guys I'd dragged out sort of milled around for a while trying to decide if we wanted to go back in the building. One of the blokes had managed to get through to Sydney of all places and was able to get some headline news, that we had been struck by a 7.8. He was just about to say there is a risk of a Tsunami when the sirens went off. They are not subtle, and the Japanese were starting to look scared.

Shit. In a Tsunami you need to get to high ground fast. Like the 25th floor of a modern building, just like the one we'd just bailed from. We started making our way back to the office, when of course we got the feared aftershock. I fell over again. It was the trees that went bonkers first; trust me, seeing a tree sway as if it’s in a 30 knot wind because the ground is moving so much under it is a very bad experience. Then I looked up and saw the building. The park we were in is surrounded by three 4-storey jobs and they were falling on us. I could not frigging believe it. I have only managed to escape from the 25th Floor to now either face drowning or having the building fall down on top of me. The building swayed away, twisting and swelling as it’s compressed by a vengeful earth and gravity. The noise was overwhelming, with huge banging as the elevator cables smash against the lift walls and the buildings scream in protest at the unnatural gyrations they are been subjected to. People were now starting to flap big time. There is really something absolutely unnerving when you see the locals starting to run away from supposedly earthquake-proof buildings.

I looked at my two new mates and said, "This is pointless. If the buildings are going to come down we are as buggered standing here as we are being in the sodding things. Lets go get a beer; if it’s time to meet one's maker, might as well have a glass in the hand." Once the tremor passed (this was in fact the 15.14JST Ibaraki earthquake), we pegged it towards Roppongi.  Finding a bar open was not as easy as I'd hoped, but we ended up at Zest's on the corner of Iikura Katamachi. Top bar staff, they loaded us up with cold bottles of Dos. Unfortunately still no live TV, no phones but email and the Internet were starting to work and we found we'd just survived an 8.9.  With shaking hands we ordered another round, praying the worst was over, when another large aftershock hit us and the bar's fire alarm went off.
 
The bar girl ran outside, had a look and checked the building was not obviously falling down. She then promptly taped her coat over the fire alarm to dampen its screams before heading off to get our beers. Jesus, the Dunkirk spirit or what! Another 3 or 4 big shakes hit the bar, but the tequila bottles stayed upright and the fire alarm got bored and turned itself off after 10minutes. By 5pm I'd decided it was time to see the status of the office.

I then walked into something from The Day after Tomorrow: the streets were full of walking people and it was deathly quiet. The offices were emptying out, the inner city motorway was shut and the trains were not running because of the concerns of flooding from a Tsunami. I walked over to the office building to find the lifts were still shut down and took a view. Knees are not what they were, and I was buggered if I was going to walk up 25 floors to turn my computer off, then walk down again.  It was time to move bars and find a TV.

It was then the full extent of the carnage became apparent, with those shocking pictures of Tsunamis sweeping all before them. More Gaijin were staggering in, with stories of walking from distant points as transport shut down across Tokyo and the Taxis got more business than they had seen since the bubble days of 1989. The roads outside were getting gridlocked, the pavements were full of Japanese walking home. I knew I was not getting back to Yokohama that night, so I collared a mate and begged a bed for the night.

I bade farewell to the survivors in the bar and started the trek across Tokyo. I decided to take a shortcut across Aoyama Bochi, the main central Tokyo cemetery, and was actually starting to come off the adrenaline buzz and began congratulating myself on having survived the day. Then I was down again, did not even feel that earthquake. This was really boring. It was pitch dark, I'd smashed my knee on something and I was stuck in the middle of a totally deserted cemetery with no working phone. Ah! But it does have a torch function. I got some light on the situation. God is a comedian; I had tripped over a headstone which had been flung over the path I was on. I peered at the writing. It was for one of those 19th century gentlemen who came and died in a very distant land and a very different era. I could just make out RIP 1861.

His headstone had survived the opening of Japan by Admiral Perry, the 1923 earthquake and the carpet-bombing of WW2. The great Honshu Earthquake of 2011 had finally brought it low. I wished the old gent my best and limped off to my bed, thinking I had been one incredible lucky Brit this day.

The Outcome

In progress: it is now Monday 14 March and I am checking wind forecasts. The situation at two nuclear power stations, a mere 130 miles from the biggest city on the planet is very uncertain. Petrol is running out in Tokyo and there is electricity rationing. The ‘we never shut’ Hard Rock café is closed. It’s the first time ever I have seen it not open. The good news is the winds are mainly from the southwest, which means any radiation will be blown away from Tokyo. There is rain coming, which will also help. Unfortunately it will cause a lot of hardship for the hundreds of thousands now on the move away from death and destruction. The situation is on a knife’s age as to whether it will get a lot nastier. I go to bed for a third night with a bath full of cold water, in case we wake up to no electricity and thus no working bogs or taps.  And to save electricity, the lights are being turned off across Tokyo and Yokohama. It’s all rather surreal. This sort of thing does not tend to happen in Woking.