The 11th March 2011 earthquake disaster occurred at 14:46 off the coast of Sendai. It was the biggest earthquake to hit Japan in recorded history, with a magnitude of 8.9. The last big earthquake to hit Japan was the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which did nothing like the damage Japan has seen in the last month.
I found out about it just before I went into a Listening class and, just like everyone else, I had no idea just how enormous the effects of it would be. I followed the news coverage closely, seeing each new video as it was released, and watched the death toll climb.
In the end I couldn't keep it up. I was torn between my interest in the event and the geography behind it (as long-term readers of this blog will know that I'm really interested in) and how sad it made me feel. Usually when I see terrible things on the news I'm quite emotionally unattached, so I was surprised when I realised just how affected I'd been. One video left me literally speechless after watching it. I couldn't imagine how powerful water could be before seeing this. In Britain we're so far removed from natural disasters, except for floods, that it's difficult to think about it.
Everything seemed to be getting so much worse over the days following the disaster; with the initial earthquake, then the devastating tsunami, followed by aftershocks and then the harrowing nuclear meltdown fears. I never thought that the Fukushima plant would meltdown, but of course the news played the worries up as much as it could.
I was in touch with my friends in Japan as soon as possible after I heard about it, and I got replies from all of them fairly quickly. I had a couple of friends who couldn't contact their families in the stricken areas for several days. I could not imagine how awful those days must have been, just waiting for any news about them. They were all fine in the end; it was the lack of communication that led to the lack of contact.
The death toll is difficult to find online, because all of the past articles with old figures are still there, but the last figure I heard was 27,000 people. My mind can't fathom that many people dying in just a few weeks.
Even Tokyo, quite far from the epicentre, will be suffering from planned blackouts into the summer, which will tough. Not least because of the heat and humidity.
It's difficult to find English news articles on it now, which is actually pretty disgusting, that it's dropped out of the public eye so quickly. It certainly hasn't dropped out of the minds of the Japanese people.
Japanese students studying abroad at Leeds have been really great, organising a stall raising money and managing it all day every day (they earned over £3,000 for the Red Cross appeal), and arranging lantern nights with food and drink stalls. It was a fantastic effort on everyone's part.
It's definitely an event that will not be forgotten for decades, and I don't think it should be. People need to be reminded of just how powerful nature is, and the nuclear repercussions will hopefully lead to increased safety procedures worldwide.
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