Earthquake!

Okay, you might be a little disappointed after seeing that title.

But it's true, there was an earthquake two nights ago. Tokyo experiences earthquakes several times a day, but most are far too small to be noticeable.

This was the first one I've actually felt and been sure that it was an earthquake. It was about 2.30am and I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep, when I heard a faint rumble.

That rumble became more of a painful groan, and then my bed started shaking. At first I thought I might have been dreaming, but floating in and out of consciousness. But the bed was definitely rocking from side to side and there was a rumbling from the foundations of the building.

It lasted maybe 10-15 seconds, then everything was calm again and I fell asleep.

I asked people the next day, just to check that I wasn't imagining it, and yes! Tokyo de jishin!

It wasn't as scary as I thought it might be. However, I was half-conscious. It would have been much more worrying if I'd been standing up in the middle of the day and other people were around, then we were all thrown off balance by the earth's shudder.

Statistically, Japan has a major earthquake every 60 years, and the last one was in 1923. Scary, huh? Long overdue. If you did Geography, or are generally just knowledgeable, then you might be wondering what the 1995 Kobe Earthquake was if not a major earthquake. The Great Hanshin (as it's also called) earthquake killed around 5,000 people on January 17th 1995 in the Kansai port town of Kobe. The majority of the damage was caused by the collapse of a section of the Hanshin Expressway, which links Kobe and Osaka. The epicentre of the earthquake was under Awaji Island, in the Seto Inland Sea, which runs between Honshu and Japan's smallest main island of Shikoku. This island lies on the triple subduction zone of the Pacific, Eurasian and Phillipine tectonic plates, which originally created the Japanese archipelago. (And yes, I wrote all that from memory - I'm so sad, but it was my A-level CASE study!)

However, the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake was something else entirely. It flattened half of the Tokyo connurbation (one of the two reasons Tokyo is such a modern, and confusingly laid-out city now (the other was WWII bombing)), and killed an estimated 140,000 people (this figure includes missing people, but it's 90 years later and they haven't turned up). I just can't imagine that many people being killed from maybe a 20-second quake, it's terrible.

Fingers crossed the Tokai (the name given to this type of earthquake) earthquake chooses not to strike too soon. Or worse still, Mt Fuji deciding to become un-dormant and erupt for the first time in centuries.

A word of advice if you live in an earthquake-prone area. Turn off the gas during an earthquake! The majority of damage from an earthquake is done by fires resulting from burst gas pipes. Also, open a window or door to prevent jamming so you have an escape route. Then get under a strong structure, like a door or table.