Earthquakes

A few people seem to have heard about the earthquake, and the resulting casualties, in Miyagi-ken*, and I've gotten a some expressions of concern from friends and family as to my safety. I blame a lot of this on the media, who say things like, "There was an earthquake in Japan" and do not go any further to define the location of the tremor.

To begin, Gunma-ken is one of the safer places in Japan as far as earthquakes are concerned. We have earthquakes around once a month, but they are rarely anything stronger than a 3. In short, it feels like the earth gets a sudden chill and shivers, or like a really large truck is driving by and shaking the house. Nothing falls, nothing breaks, and I don't even really react to them anymore. I've slept through earthquakes like this.

In regards to this most recent earthquake, I was on the phone (well, Skype) with my parents at the time. "Hold on just a sec; there's an earthquake" was my reaction. It was rather slow by the time it got to my area of Japan and felt rather sluggish.
I didn't know that there were casualties until the next day, when I got a couple of "hey, are you OK?" reactions from people who'd heard the bad news. Things have been rather bad up north in Miyagi-ken. There have been tremors every ten or twenty minutes and the quake registered as a 7.2. Nine people are confirmed as dead and another twelve or so are missing. It's a bad situation, and (unfortunately) one that will continue to occur again and again in Japan.

The interesting thing about this incident was the use of some new technology that predicted the oncoming quake before it arrived. An announcement was made on the NHK channels in the area some 3 minutes before the quake hit. It wasn't enough to save all of the lives, but hopefully the time between the predictions and the event will grow and incidents like this can become old-hat.

So...I'm safe, and am likely to be safe in the future. Thank you for your concern, and be sure to keep the citizens of Miyagi-ken in your thoughts.


*Note: "-ken" means "prefecture."