Earthquake! Day 62

So I'll give a rundown of my experience with the earthquake.
Friday afternoon, the boss is away, not much work to do. Everytime I look at the clock, it's 2:23, or 2:37. But it's Friday afternoon, and I'm thinking of stuff to do on weekend.
Then I start to feel a little dizzy. I think it was about 2:45. It's like feeling lightheaded. I've been here long enough to know that I'm okay and it's probably an earthquake. We get an earthquake probably once a month, usually really minor ones. Part of life. A few times a year you get one that gives the building a jolt, and the blinds start swaying, and everyone gets a little excited, but they are rare.
So I look around and a couple of people are looking around too, so I know it's an earthquake for sure. "Jishin!" I hear people saying.
This is when they usually stop, but this one just kept going. Then a hard jolt, and that's when I started thinking about the three floors above me. The building is really rocking, and the blinds are smacking against the window, and some of the office ladies are, not screaming, but exclaiming. Then everything calmed down a little, and I guess our building kept swaying for a while after the earthquake stopped, because it took ages to stop feeling dizzy.
My initial though when it finished was that a lot of people had just probably died somewhere. I didn't think about tsunamis or anything. I mailed Junko, who was driving at the time and didn't notice it. I updated my Facebook page. I went outside to check that my motorbike hadn't toppled over (it hadn't). Then I had a coffee with a friend, then went back to my desk and back to work. Of course everyone was buzzing, and a couple of co-workers asked me if I was here for the Hanshin earthquake in '95 (I wasn't). They said that was stronger. My dad mailed me, and my sister called at 5:10 and asked me if I was okay, and said that there was a tsunami and it was wiping out villages in Sendai. That's north of Tokyo, and I'm in Nagoya which is hundreds of kms to the south. Then I went home and turned on the news, and saw what everyone else was seeing.
Everything's as it usually is here where I live, except the TV is all about the earthquake, every channel. A chain text mail is doing the rounds telling everyone to use less power, but I don't think it's official. I haven't seen any damage at all around where I live. Shops open, no one panic buying water or food or anything, although my friend said he went to a hardware store on Sunday and all the bottled water was sold out. The roads were a little quite this morning (Monday) because Toyota and a lot of other companies around here have closed factories due to an uncertain power supply, but that's the only real difference I can see. On TV it looks crazy, and it's weird to think it's happening in the same country I live in.
The nuclear reactors are the big news now. I don't think it's anything sinister by the Japanese authorities, it's just that people here have a hard time recognizing a problem until it reaches the level of catastrophe. Having lived here so long, you see it over and over again. I'm not sure why they do it. Maybe it's a fear of admitting defeat. So when they say that yes, some radioactive gas has escaped, but don't worry about it, IT'S NOT A PROBLEM, that's when people get scared and start running. People don't know this about the Japanese, but they are terribly reckless. They think about things long and hard, but then often make the same decision as an impulsive idiot would have made. It's weird.
They say that another big earthquake is coming, because things have shifted around so much that it is highly unstable. We'll see. Who can predict these things? I feel bad for all the people in Sendai. A whole village just wiped away. Amazing. And I hope that if the reactors do blow up, the wind is blowing away from me. Or if not, I hope that I mutate into some kind of super being.