And Sometimes Why

Here’s the result of a query I threw at the USGS National Earthquake Information Center database, showing all earthquakes stronger than 5.0 for the year so far in the region.

Mother Nature is really toying with Japan right now. I’m not sure how much press the recent Japanese earthquakes have gotten in the states, but they’re pretty big news here. First of all, last month’s huge earthquake: When I woke up on Saturday the 14th and turned on the TV while eating breakfast, it was on every channel. The earthquake was a magnitude 7.2, and totally reshaped the landscape in some areas. The eastern and western tectonic plates that meet at the earthquake fault line moved toward each other up to 28cm and 29cm respectively in some places. Because of the specific planting grid pattern layout of rice fields, it’s easy to see where they buckled and formed small hills where the ground pushed together.

A number of roads were not just destroyed, but erased- the land they were on is now gone. One landslide moved 5 million cubic meters of soil – enough earth to fill the Tokyo Dome 40 times over (as repetitively reported by a number of news agencies here). Some landslides left gaping holes in the ground that look like the Grand Canyon. Fifteen “quake lakes” formed from landslides blocking rivers. The power involved is really awesome, in the more traditional sense of the word.

One local onsen was completely erased by the earthquake. The family that owned it and a few patrons were inside when the building was crushed and carried downhill in a landslide. So the building is gone, the owners and their family are gone, and the spring is now buried under a mountain of mud.

Everyone interviewed says that they couldn’t remain standing during the quake, they had to lay down or fall down. Videos from security cameras show everything in stores just collapsing and falling to the ground. Twelve people died, ten are missing (now presumed dead), and 358 injured.

Some bridges collapsed, and land under some national highways has risen by up to 50cm, disjoining sections of roads and bridges. A number of bridges that weren’t destroyed will need to be replaced because of damaged underpinnings. It seems a lot like a Sim City earthquake, with long ripples in the topsoil, and everything above the quake just wiped- trees, roads, and buildings alike.

So that was June 14th. A week ago, on July 22nd, there was a 5.2 off the coast, and then the next day, a 6.8 on eastern Honshu (the largest Japanese island) on the 23rd injured 200 people and damaged 90 buildings.

As if a series of powerful earthquakes wasn’t enough, a few days ago there were wind gusts strong enough to uproot trees, knock over light buildings (temporary offices, sheds, unfinished construction), and injure people with flying debris. A huge deluge today dumped so much rain that four people died in flash flooding, and the government evacuated 50,000 people from central Japan. One river rose 1.3 meters (~4 feet) just in the span of ten minutes. They didn’t even have time to close some flood control gates it was so fast.

I know I haven’t been here very long, but I can’t imagine this is normal. It can’t be.

Right??

The beer garden evening was a success!

The “beer garden” itself was indoors, a convention room like you’d find in many Vegas hotels. They decorated it with outdoorsy stuff (trellises and greenery) to make you feel like you managed to get into the rooftop beer garden (whose reservation slots are full a month in advance, hence our indoor digs). I was actually kind of glad to be indoors, as the heat and humidity are oppressive right now. There was a tasty buffet with a wide variety of Japanese food (surprise!), a small open bar, a few carnival games with silly little carnival prizes, and a projector set up playing music set to Japanese 80s cartoons (Gundam, anyone?). The atmosphere reminded me of a Japanese take on the Hofbräuhaus. The neatest thing was the automatic beer dispenser, though. You put your glass on the little metal platform, and push a button. The machine then tilts your mug up so the dispenser nozzle almost rests against the inside of the diagonal glass, and dispenses exactly enough beer and foam to almost crest the lip as it lowers the glass. Totally worth the ¥3000 (~$30.00).

My Japanese however, was not so good. It’s much easier to compose an email in a foreign language than it is to speak it; I struggled to put about 5% of my speech in Japanese. But I tried, and what I couldn’t express, my Japanese teacher was there to translate. Oh, didn’t I mention that? There were four of us: my Japanese teacher, two of her Tai Chi students, and me. She was constantly trying to get her students to invite me out to do the things they like to do. I think I have plans for a sushi lunch next week, but I’m not 100% sure.

I guess I’ll have to put together another email and find out.

It’s time I talked about the weather in Matsuyama.

Here is one of the corners on my way to work. The small road on the left will take you to my apartment, the large road to the right will take you to ALS Matsuyama. I think I’ve mentioned before that Matsuyama reminds me very much of San Diego. So much so, in fact, that I’ve begun to think of it as a smaller Japanese version of that beautiful southern California city (minus the plastic aesthetic).

Despite its importance on the world stage, Japan is a small country, physically speaking. At about 375,000 km², it’s a little smaller than Montana and a little larger than Germany. One of the neat things about a country that size is that the nightly news gives weather for the entire country, rather than one local area or region. Not only that, but Japan’s newscasters must have some weird 6th sense (Shirley MacLaine, not M. Night Shyamalan) that allows them to determine the precise times, locations, and magnitudes of weather patterns in three hour blocks.

Seriously, the local nightly news here not only gives temperatures throughout the day, it tells you what time it’ll start raining tomorrow and what time it’ll stop. Unfortunately, only the national news is simulcast in English, and having just recently acquired internet access at home, I’m not yet accustomed to checking the forecast online.

This brings us to the trigger that convinced me to write about the weather in the first place.

On Thursday, there was a light rain in the morning that let up around the time I needed to leave for my Japanese lesson. Smiling at the clearing sky for cooperating with my need to hurry and get there on time, I set off on my bicycle sans umbrella.

A light mist started falling almost immediately, and the skies darkened the further I got from my apartment. Ten minutes into the twenty minute ride, I was severely punished for my foolishness when the rain really got going. Fat raindrops fell in my eyes and soaked the front of my shirt and shorts. Knowing I was soaked either way, I kept going to my lesson, arriving dripping wet.

I wasn’t really sure what to do at that point, as I had no way of drying myself. Paper towels are virtually nonexistent in Japanese bathrooms. Most small and medium sized businesses rely on you to bring your own towel. I kid you not- my school and many restaurants are the same way. I’ve asked a few Japanese people in Matsuyama, they’ve all said that Japanese people always carry around a washcloth or handkerchief, at least. Large businesses that expect foreign visitors might have an air dryer, but EPIC doesn’t have one of those.

So I found my teacher, and of course she started laughing the moment she saw me, asking “Didn’t you look at the weather forecast?”
“No,” I said, “unfortunately I did not.”

Then she surprised me by going to the front counter and asking to borrow a towel on my behalf. The woman stifled a laugh when she saw me and quickly brought out a towel from what I think is the employee lounge. Anyway, I dried what I could and tried to hand it back to the woman, but my teacher told me to take it home, wash it, and bring it back on Monday. “It’s the Japanese way,” she said.

Surprised and thankful, I said I would do just that.

Here’s a picture of the Matsuyama University towel I was lent. Beneath it is the towel (I got from an onsen that) I will start carrying with me.

I wrote my first email in Japanese this evening. My Japanese teacher wants me to meet a couple of her Tai Chi students who don’t speak English, and we’re setting up a time and date to meet at a “beer garden” downtown. (I almost feel like she’s showing off one of her grandkids or something.)

Anyway, I’ve had a few exchanges with this woman, and I hope I haven’t inadvertently insulted her best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend or something. I’ll let you know how it goes.

While training drug-sniffing dogs at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport, two Japanese customs officials routinely put drugs in regular passengers’ luggage instead of the specially marked training bags they were supposed to have been using. Until May 25th, the dogs in training had always found the drugs. As the bag was unmarked and on a moving conveyor belt, the 124 grams of hash planted by the officer were lost almost immediately when not detected by the dog.

I know it’s not as timely as it might have been, but it’s no less funny. The “recipient” of the drugs was eventually found at a Tokyo area hotel, without even realizing their bag had been tampered with. Incidentally, the image you see was taken from the news as reported by Asahi, one of Japan’s largest brewers and beverage makers.

My first blog post from home!
I’m writing this from my newly set up ADSL connection. They tried to deliver the modem while I was at work Wednesday, but I was home when they came by on Thursday. Installation was just as straightforward as you’d think. The only kink was figuring out which telephone cord goes to the phone and which goes to the wall. You know, because everything inside the box was written in Japanese. I guess they’re satisfied to just have English available to place new orders. I hope I never need tech support.

<begin technobabble>
The modem is a Fujitsu all-in-one DSL modem/router unit with an expansion slot that also turns it into a wireless access point, but because I opted for the cheapest service ($21.50/month for a 12Mbps connection, how cool is that??), they didn’t give me the addon card. The fact that it’s a router is a double-edged sword, tho. Even though the unit clearly has a UPnP logo on it, it’s not responding to UPnP requests from µTorrent, which means my torrents download as though I had a way slower connection, because I can’t connect to other firewalled users. The router has an HTTP interface, but even if NTT gave me the login information for the firewall configuration, guess what language the interface is written in? I wish it was a dumb passthrough unit (and I had my beautiful LinkSys WRT54G here).
</end technobabble>

Anyway, I’ve been trading news and blog reading for sleep for the last couple of days. (Oil is really $147 a barrel? Congrats to Claudia and Brian. Carlin will be missed. Near-beer for children, anyone? Rock Band on the Wii?? Sweet! Weezer is coming to Osaka? Super-sweeet!) Hopefully, I’ll be posting more often, now that I don’t have to leave home to do so.

Unfortunately, just before I got connected, I fed my antivirus program a bad update and it ate a bunch of Windows files (and, amazingly, their backups from the XP Pro CD copy I have on my hard drive). I still have no sound from Windows, and I’ve been struggling to make Office 2007 work, as well as any program that uses a Microsoft Management Console or snap-ins (Add/Remove Programs, Device Manager, Event Viewer, half of Windows’ built-in utilities).

But at least I can get online in my underwear.

I got my work visa! Technically a status “Change Permit” which changed my “Temporary Visitor” status to that of “Specialist in Humanities”, this little postage stamp-looking thing means I can earn money in Japan. More importantly, it means I can get my Alien Registration card, which I did, post-haste.

Look! My Alien Registration Card! (Neat hologram, eh?) Now I can get health insurance! And a cell phone! And internet service! I signed up for NTT’s ADSL service on Tuesday. I should have it up and running in two weeks, thank the gods!

While I was at the city office, I also registered my hanko. That little rubber stamp I showed you before can now be used as a legal signature here in Japan. Neat, huh? Now if I can only remember where I put it…