The Sendai Earthquake

This is not finished, but I thought I'd put it out there.  I might finish it later, but I think I got out most of it, except for the kindness of other people, I need to add more about how nice everyone was to me, Will and Beth.  Theres no way they would have been able to get home so soon without other people's kindness.


Wednesday March 9, 2011

I wake up before my alarm clock which is surprising considering Will and Beth came yesterday and we didn't get to bed until 11:30.  As usual, I slept in my trusty winter coat, my favorite mother-made Beatles hoodie, and a t-shirt.  The temperature of my room was hovering around zero but I was nice and toasty.   I wake up Beth since she was coming with me on my school visit to Rokkasho.  Since they are only staying for two days and I want to take them out to eat to several places, my apartment is basically out of food and I settle for an apple and some granola for breakfast.

As 7:30 approaches, Beth and I go to wait out by the bus stop a couple minutes early.  We hear the nice calming music blast through Noheji that signified it had reached 7:30.  Still no ride.

"This is strange, Tobenai sensei is always on time." I say to Beth as we wait.  Tobenai sensei, among other things, is famous for being a pro snowboarder and waking up every morning at 4am to go fishing.  His friendly sputtering English always make the 45 minute long ride to Rokkasho very enjoyable.  After another 15 minutes pass, Beth goes back to the apartment to retrieve my cell phone and I see there are seven missed calls.

"I'm very very sorry Tomasu-sensei but Tobenai sensei has gotten a flat tire and he is getting it fixed!  I'm so sorry, but I gave your phone number to Rinako sensei and she will come to pick you up and take you to Rokkasho, please go inside and wait until Rinako sensei calls you so you do not get cold."  Says the message from my supervisor displaying her perfect English and incredible friendliness.

After we arrived in Rokkasho we learn that we have two classes to teach today.  The first goes by without a hitch.  Each class has around 40 students and we do a simple activity where they have to speak English to fill out a bingo card and the first 12 students to finish their card get a Starburst.

"Is this the same class?" Beth says as we walk into our second class with 40 completely new students.  I turn around to see the Japanese teacher's reaction.

"No, this is a different class..." Rinako sensei casually answers unaware of the American stereotype that all Asians look alike.  Beth introduces herself to the second class, I explain the activity and things are running along smoothly.  Students are finishing up and returning to their seats when I begin to feel the platform I'm standing on shake.  I look up to the lights and see them sway back and forth.  I look to Beth and Rinako sensei.

"Jishin."  Rinako sensei says, the Japanese word for earthquake.  This is Beth's first earthquake and my third.  The students go silent.  Everyone is sitting there waiting for the shaking to stop.  10 seconds pass, the shaking strengthens.  30 seconds pass, the earthquake again kicks into a higher gear.   The other two that I have experienced were over in about 10-15 seconds.  The students begin to feel something is wrong, maybe this is the Tokai Earthquake, the "Big One" that has been long overdue.  When the earthquake kicked into third gear, the students dove under their desks.  Beth, Rinako and I were standing there, hoping the earthquake wouldn't continue to increase its intensity.  Another minute passes, the shaking continues.

The lights are now swaying rather violently.  Finally, well over a minute after the shaking started, it stops as suddenly as it started.  Just a high 3 or low 4 on the scale, nothing too bad.  No damage done, just a few skipped heartbeats.  We finish up the lesson as usual.  Little did we know that two days later, the aftershock would be the strongest earthquake in Japan's history.

"What did you think of your first earthquake?" We ask Will when we return home.

"What earthquake?" Will says.  He had been walking at the time of the earthquake and did not feel it.  "Dangit! I kind of want to feel an earthquake to see what it's like." Two days later, Wilbur would get his wish.

Friday, March 11th, 2011


Waking up late maybe saved the lives of the three of us.  We spent the previous day skiing and eating copious amounts of Japan's most famous food, sushi.  Since Noheji is nearly shut down until 11:00am when all the restaurants open for lunch, I take the time in the morning to start cleaning up a little bit.  Will and Beth arrived to a pretty dirty apartment and I felt kind of bad so I did a few loads of laundry and tried to clean up a bit.

We woke up around 9 with only one plan for the day; take the Shinkansen down to Tokyo.  There were still several restaurants restaurants that I wanted to take them to before they left.  We decided on soba and a bento box lunch restaurant where you can make your own bento.  The soba was delicious like all Japanese food and we returned to the house to pack up.  We took our time and looked up train schedules.

"Theres a train to Aomori that leaves Noheji station at 2:59 pm, how about we catch that then we can get on any of the Shinkansens from Aomori to Tokyo."  I tell to Will and Beth at about 1:00.  We head to the bento lunch restaurant around 2:00 and arrive there by 2:30.  We fill up the plastic boxes with traditional Japanese pot-luck style food and make our way back to the train station to catch our train.

"You guys go up ahead, I need to buy a ticket."  I tell them, since they have Japan Rail passes that let them take any JR train for free, they don't have to take the time to buy tickets at each train station.  It was now 2:50 and the 9.0 earthquake had happened five minutes earlier nearly 200 miles away off the coast of Sendai.  The longitudinal waves of the earthquake were gradually making the long journey to Noheji.

As I reach for my wallet to pay for my ticket to Aomori, I feel the building shake.  "Not a big deal.  This is a train station, trains go by and shake the building all the time," I tell myself.  A few seconds pass, I look to the train tracks and don't see any trains.  "It's a windy day, maybe there was just a strong gust of wind." I think next.  Not the case.  15 seconds have passed, the shaking has only gotten worse.  People have started to leave the station in a panic.  I look over and see Will and Beth standing there.

"Earthquake!" I shout as I make my way outside.  I reach for my camera and start to point it at all of the crazy sights that are happening around me.  The cars on the road screech to a halt and drivers get out of their cars.  Power lines sway back and forth.  The street soon becomes filled with people leaving their houses and restaurants.  The ground has been shaking for minutes and is still going strong.  Power goes out to the train station.  Everyone takes out their phones to check the news to find out where the epicenter is.  After what seemed like hours, the four minutes of shaking finally cease.  We look around, see that there is no damage to nearby buildings and assume it was just another weak earthquake and no damage done.  The three of us know that our train is leaving for Aomori and we don't want to miss it.  We start to head toward the track number three at Noheji station.

"NO NO STOP STOP."  We hear a voice yelling from behind us.  "No trains!"

What with the power being out, we should have known that the electric trains probably weren't running, but in our haste we weren't thinking clearly.  I ask him when the trains were coming.

"No today, no.  Close."  He says in a thick Japanese accent.  As he finishes, the building shakes again.  This would be the second of nearly 20 earthquakes we would feel in the next two days.  Seeing no damage done, we are a little confused, but assume that the power plants have preemptively shut down power for a little bit in case there are any aftershocks.  We head back to the apartment, confident that power will be resumed in the next few hours.  On the walk back to the apartment, the loud speakers that usually play music throughout the town are instead issuing announcements.  My Japanese still isn't good enough to understand what the announcements were saying, but I can usually pick the word "Sendai" out of each announcement and assume that the rest of the announcement was saying something about the power being turned back on soon.  While walking, it is difficult to feel earthquakes, but we felt at least one more on the walk back to the house.

The bento was delicious, but after taking our time eating it and a couple hours passing without any electricity we begin to get worried.  Another couple aftershocks started getting me thinking that this wasn't a normal earthquake.  The announcements would continue to play, I can only understand "Sendai" and nothing else.  I try to call my supervisor to get some idea of when power would be back up, but whenever I tried dialing a number, I just got this Japanese operator speaking to me in Japanese.  I tried to send a text message to her, but after five failed attempts, I knew the cell phone towers were down.

"There is clearly something wrong with this world."  I say after feeling out seventh aftershock in the matter of a few hours.  Since my apartment is nearly out of food, we go outside to start looking for dinner.  The Lawson convenience store is out of of its refrigerated section so we go to a drug store.  The drug store is just closing open but the line to check out was at least 60 people long.  At the start of the line, one lady adding up all of the prices of goods by hand.  Since the power was out they couldn't scan the bar codes.  It was up to the customer to tell the cashier the price of each item they bought.  This policy is classic of Japanese people, relying on the honesty of the customer and the store not trying to take advantage of panicked people.  During the disaster, it was a far more common site in Japan to see people lining up to use a pay phone than seeing people loot stores with no power.

We decide the 2 hour or longer wait wasn't worth it so we go to the grocery store and see the line well out the door.  Again, not worth the wait since power will be back soon.  We go back to the Lawson and stock up on some dry food and Big Thunder bars and head back to the apartment.  The dark night consists of us draining my laptop battery watching One Piece, a couple more aftershocks and an early bedtime.  We go to bed around 9, confident that power will be back when we wake up and then we would catch an early train down to Tokyo the next day.

"This isn't what I meant what I said I wanted to feel an earthquake,"  Will says. After going the entire day with no heater, the apartment is floating around 0 degrees Celsius and for the first time, the three of us sleep in the same room.

Saturday, March 12th, 2011

We slept in complete darkness with the light switches turned on.  If power had returned, we would have woken up to the burst of light in the room.  Unfortunately, we wake up to the raising sun rather than the living room light.  Will and Beth's flight leaves at 5:00pm tomorrow so we need to get down to Tokyo.


Saturday March 19th, 2011

This morning I wake up.  A full week after the devastating earthquake that has taken the lives of tens of thousands.  CNN is back to covering celebrity gossip, Fox News is back to questioning Obama's every move, Japanese TV is back to showing crazy game shows.  Things seem to be getting back to normal and I sit down to write this story.

Earthquake

In an effort to try to get some people to stop worrying too much, no damage to us and everyone was completely unharmed.


Thanks to everyone for all the well wishes.  Everything is completely fine and we were just without power and my cell phone wasn't working so we were all MIA for about 30ish hours.

Wilbur Kan and Beth Hoel were finishing up their visit to Noheji and we were at the train station on our way to Aomori City.  I got my camera out after about a minute of shaking and thought I was recording it for a good couple minutes.  There were buses shaking, everyone ran from the station to outside, and the taxi drivers all got out of their cars.  After a couple seconds of not feeling anything, I pressed the record button on my camera and realized that I hadn't been recording the entire time!  So I didn't get it on video tape, but it really wasn't that bad, only about a 4 or so on the scale.  The power went out right away so we went about 2 days without knowing anything about the extent of the damage, we thought that it was just a preventative measure to shut off the power.  After about 30 hours, cell phones started working so I was able to text my fiancee and she told me all the details of the situation in Sendai and it really caught us by surprise.  So yea, we just thought it was no big deal and didn't know so many people were worried about us.  Luckily everything worked out well for us at least but I'm very lucky to have been placed in Noheji and not a little farther south.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask.  Thanks again for caring!  Hope everything turns out ok!

How Studying Japanese Could Improve Other Areas of My Life

I've never been able to concentrate on the same thing as long as I've been able to concentrate on studying Japanese and I think I have stumbled across a nice concept to explain why.  I have always wanted to work hard at one thing, but I always get distracted by other things and don't devote myself fully to one goal.  When I played baseball, it was too easy to play video games in my free time instead of concentrating on baseball and hitting the weight room.  I just thought I had ADD and couldn't focus on one thing for a long time, but actually what I was doing was I was making it too easy for myself to get sidetracked.

With Japanese though, what I have unconsciously done is simply live in an environment of learning.  I don't force myself to study for 2 hours a day studying vocabulary.  What I do is watch TV and want to understand it.  I don't force myself to study kanji, but I see kanji that I don't understand and I want to understand it.  I simply live in an environment that makes learning Japanese convenient.

I have put this effort to other areas of my life too.  I have been eating pretty unhealthily since I got to Japan because I wanted to taste all the new flavors.  But instead of telling myself to eat more healthy, I simply have healthy foods in the house.  It's not that I've stopped eating chips, candy, tempura, katsudon and copious amounts of ramen, but I just have fruits and vegetables always available and I have to leave my house to eat all the fried meats and ramen.  

So basically what I'm trying to say is...don't force yourself to do something, just make it inconvenient to do a bad habit.  Instead of telling myself to study Japanese, instead I have my operating system and internet browsers in Japanese, I always have learning programs open, and there are about 30 Japanese books within arms reach of me right now.  I don't have to force myself to study, it is simply easy and convenient for me to study.  I didn't tell myself that I was going to start eating healthier, I just had fruits and vegetables within arms reach and made it convenient to eat better.

In conclusion, I know my dad is probably the only person that reads this blog and I have been trying to get him to stop drinking pop for about 10 years now (he drinks like 6 cans per day) and so papa, how about instead of telling yourself to quit drinking pop, how about just not having any pop in the house?  If you are at a restaurant and want a Pepsi, that's fine, go ahead and order a Pepsi, but make it so that it isn't so easy to access everyday at the house.  You can drink pop anywhere outside of the house, but no drinking pop inside the house.

For the one other person that reads this blog, if you've been trying to eat better, don't tell yourself to stop eating sweets, just don't have sweets in your house and have fruits and cut up vegetables at arms reach.  If you want to get in better shape, don't tell yourself to run for 20 minutes, just wear comfortable clothes and go outside.

Gave My Life Meaning This Year

I should have done a post about my supervisor a long time ago.  She is truly inspiring.  She comes to work every day about an hour and a half before her contract starts and is always one of the last to leave.  She averages about 14 hour work days while being a mother to 3 year old twins.  In high school, she was the top student at a large high school in Aomori city.  She constantly talks to me about American news and pop culture events.  Every time I ask her a stupid question, she drops everything she's doing and finds me an answer instantly.  In conclusion, she is awesome.

So today I was just sitting here reviewing my kanji like usual and she comes up to me and says "Tomasu sensei, your kanji study has inspired me.  Yesterday I went to the bookstore and bought a book to study for the kanji test level 1.  Your kanji study gave my life meaning this year.  Thank you very much"

I was floored.  The kanji test that she is referring to is a very famous national test for native Japanese speakers.  There are over 6000 kanji on the test, many are never used anymore and have 10 different pronunciations and meanings and it is just an absolutely ridiculous test  In all of Japan, only about 200 people pass the level 1 test every year, it is similar to getting a perfect score on the SAT or ACT.

Here is the wiki about the test if you are interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_kentei

So yea, this made me feel really happy to have inspired someone to take a year of their life (the test is March 2012) and do something they otherwise would not have.  I have no idea where she'll find the time to study but I'm really hoping she doesn't get transferred (lots of teachers transfer schools every year) so I can see her progress and maybe learn some crazy kanji myself.

Fortune Telling

A teacher just plopped down a deck of Tarot Cards on my desk and said "these cards...know how to use?"

Of course I didn't so I said "yes I do."  And proceeded to tell her to pick 5 cards and then lay them out in front of me.

This teacher always complains that she is very busy so after she laid out the cards I said "ahh, in the future, you will be very busy."

She seemed genuinely impressed.  And asked me to tell her how to use the cards and I was just like "no, very complicated...many rules....wakaranai"

My Method for Studying Japanese

I just thought I'd share my study methods in case anyone was curious.  Of course everyone learns differently so this might not work for everyone, but in the past 2 months I have learned far more Japanese than I did in the first 6 months of my studying.  

First a little background.  Before I came to JET, I had a decent grasp of the Hiragana and basic phrases thanks to Pimsleur.  For the first 2 months, I tried learning kanji through the Heisig method using the book Remembering the Kanji.  And I got about 500 kanji into it before I went back and realized that I wasn't retaining any of the kanji.  Basically from August to December I had very little to show as far as Japanese progress and I was pretty disappointed in myself so I started taking studying seriously in mid December and I can tell a huge difference between then and now (mid February).  In December I knew about 200 kanji really well and couldn't understand a thing on TV.  Now I can recognize 2042 kanji and understand some of the questions that they ask on those awesome Japanese game shows.

So heres the summary of how I am going about reaching my goal of JLPT level 2 (The second highest level possible, level 2 is fluent as far as I'm concerned).

First, by far the most important thing, you have to really really want to learn Japanese.  If you are forcing yourself to study and not enjoying it, then you're pretty much doomed.  You have to make time in your schedule to study often and make it productive.

Second, download Anki (which means "memorization" in Japanese), a free online flash card program that is the greatest thing ever invented for learning Japanese.  The rest comes down to finding decks that you enjoy.  For me, it was the deck, Heisig's Remember the Kanji 1-3 w/top 2 community stories.   That deck gives you stories for each kanji and makes them very easy to remember.  Don't expect it to magically do all the work for you though, it took me about 6 hours a day for 20 days to memorize them all.  So you're going to have to set aside around 120 hours of solid study just to get the kanji learned.

Third, my current step, is to translate 10,000 sentences. When you translate sentences, you learn the vocab in context as well as kanji compounds and obviously grammar structures all at the same time.  

But of course it gets a little bland to just sit around translating sentences I'm also doing other things.  Probably the coolest of which is I downloaded a couple of movie Anki decks that show you a picture/video from a movie, plays an audio clip, and shows the Japanese characters on one side, then on the other is the English translation.  This is super awesome.  Already after just a week I can already understand about the first 30 minutes of Spirited Away and it is one of the coolest things  in the world to watch something and hear "blah blah blah" then an hour later watch a couple scenes and follow all of the dialog.

On top of that, I'm working on recognizing kanji (I'm decent at going from English to kanji but I am terrible at the reverse.)  So I have an anki deck that just shows a kanji then the other side has the English key word.

Finally, I also use Rosetta Stone but I find it to be far too boring.  When I get really sick of studying, I throw on the TV and watch awesome Japanese game shows or anime.

Well hope this helps someone out there.  I will finish with a picture from AJATT that explains everything pretty clearly.

Great Morning

This morning has been fantastic.  First, I had my first dream in Japanese last night.  I dreamed that the Apache Mall had turned into a giant onsen (hot spring) and you had to swim in the giant pools to go from store to store.  While swimming to Foot Locker, I noticed some of my students and began talking to them in Japanese.  It was sweet.

Then yesterday I tried to make onigiri but ended up just having rice and plum rolls instead of the cool triangle looking onigiri.  So today one of the office assistants brought in some rice, plum, and nori, and gave me a lesson on how to make my very own Japanese rice balls.  I'm pretty sure that the key is to use white rice (I have been trying with brown rice and minnesota wild rice, and they just don't stick together very well.)

And also I understood my second speech from a teachers meeting.  One of my Japanese English teachers stood up and said that she was going on a business trip to a college in Aomori with a couple of students.

Also, we got a new batch of tea leaves at the teachers room and I am already on my second cup and it's super delicious.

And then to top it off, I thought the next work party was going to cost 5000円 (about $60 or so) but when I went to pay for it, the teacher was like "no, only 1000円 (like $13)"  So I get to go to a fun all you can eat and drink buffet for super cheap.

And it's only 8:30 am. Sweet.

update: it's before 11 and I have translated 13 sentences, written 200 kanji and am 1/200th of the way to my next big goal (translating 10,000 sentences).  Such a good day.

And also I ate the Onigiri that I made (with 大丸さん's help) and it was absolutely delicious.