I find that you seldom have control over what happens in life, a good example of this?
The Tohoku Earthquake. I didn’t see it coming, my friends didn’t see it coming and neither did the
northern coast of Japan. When I think about how one event cane be so catastrophically life changing it
used to care me, but that’s not the case anymore. I don’t really see the point of being scared of life and
death, it’s all so fleeting anyways. I remember that my friends and I, weeks after earthquake, had slowly
changed into new people. We didn’t take excuses anymore and people whining about their petty problems
on Facebook only irked us more.
In one day my life changed drastically. There was no more water in the stores, and scarcely food
for that matter; people I greeted everyday were on the next plane home; trains stopped and I couldn’t send
a simple mail to anyone to see if they were safely home. Tokyo became a horrific flood of people who
walked in an eerily calm way for miles and miles in one direction from central Tokyo out to the suburbs;
following the train station lines back to their homes. A fifteen minute ride meant a two hour wall home.
My dorm mates lost me in the crowd but I was luckily with my Korean older sisters, who led me back to
their home where they said I could stay the night. I had no money, there were some restaurants but they
were overcrowded and the convenience stores had scarcely any food. I took refuge on a heating pad on
their floor as we watched the tsunami wipe away the northern coast of japan like a child flooding an ant
hill. It was humbling and terrifying. There was a white number on the top left hand of the screen, it was
the death toll, and I watched it rise from 10 to 4,000 overnight.
I think the worst part was the aftershocks; they were a constant reminder of the terror the initial
9.0 wreaked into our hearts. I didn’t leave my apartment for about a week after I got home. There was a
rumor of another equally larger or slightly smaller earthquake scheduled to occur in Tokyo before or on
that Wednesday morning and it left me panicked. I decided to venture out, leaving my fears behind if for
only a few hours, to go on a shopping trip. Carefully making my way to the department store, I found that
walking took away the feeling of a majority of the aftershocks which ranged from 3.0 to 6.0. I looked
around to see if there was anything I really wanted and I found a white pair of socks that where beautiful
and striped, transparent with a cuff. Suddenly a fanciful idea crept into my head. These would be my
dying socks. If this earthquake really did hit and the building collapsed, people would be able to find me
from my shining, clean socks. It was strange I’ll admit, but I hadn’t slept properly in days and had been
bunkering in my room watching one of those sealed airline water cups to measure the magnitude of each
aftershock. I came home and told my dorm manager they were “my dying time” socks and she laughed.
Even though it was a frightening experience, I wanted to stay with everyone. I didn’t want to go
back to the US like my parents wanted me to; where no one would understand what happened, and still
don’t. It was not a small ordeal. Even for the Japanese who had been exposed to earthquakes from
childhood. It also wasn’t as hopeless as the media made it seem. I think the people involved in it and
those that witnessed it affects will only be able to truly comprehend the impact it had on our lives. It
changed all of us. This experience truly made me firm in what I want and how I plane to spend the rest of
my life.