By SANDRA BARRON
Crisis Points gathers personal accounts of moments of turmoil around the world.
Tags: Earthquakes, Japan, Twitter
TOKYO — The first thing I was worried about was where to put my tea. I’d been sitting on the heated carpet in my apartment, working on a blog post about Japanese chewing gum. I stood up few seconds after the room started to sway. The TV was jumping. Buildings outside were swaying. A six-foot tall cabinet full of books was rocking. Things were falling in the kitchen and water was sloshing over the edge of the balcony, spilling from something above. I moved out from under the light fixtures and held onto a small table. I wanted to put down my tea cup, but there were no stable surfaces. Things were sliding around the floor.
After maybe three long minutes of shaking, it stopped and I tried to call my boyfriend, Jim, at work. The phone didn’t ring. It didn’t make any sounds at all. I tried a few times and gave up. I sent text messages to say I was O.K. and to ask how he was, knowing they probably wouldn’t go through.
Then I turned to Twitter. When there’s a quake, everyone who uses Twitter tends to tweet about it. (The United States Geological Survey has even announced that it will start monitoring these reports as part of its surveillance.) This time I waited until the first round of shaking had died down. Then I wrote: “That rearranged my kitchen.” It had. Drawers were open. Bottles had hit the floor.
The lid of a bottle of Captain Morgan’s had broken, and the spilled rum left the kitchen floor sticky and smelling of vanilla. The impact worked the cork in the Glenfiddich halfway out, but it stayed intact. I tweeted that too, and a flurry of messages came from people I’d never talked to before — from Australia, from England, from the United States — with funny comments about keeping the booze nearby.
I was in my apartment, alone. Aside from some pasta sauce and broken glass on the floor, everything was fine. I had power, water, heat and food. Not much to see here.
Outside, a few buildings had been evacuated, and people were standing on the corners, some wearing protective salmon-colored padded hoods. A vending machine restocking truck was on one corner, and a uniformed delivery man with a bicycle cart was talking to people on another. I took a photograph and posted it.
Tweets were flying by faster than I could read them. It was soothing somehow to see what people were experiencing and pass it along.
.Someone else reported on Twitter that the copier guy had just delivered a box of paper to their office, as if nothing had happened. It jibed with what I was seeing, so I retweeted it. My former co-workers tweeted about hiding under their steel desks, and a friend who worked nearby tweeted that she was getting ready for a three-hour walk from her office home to make sure her dog, a corgi, was O.K. Text messaging still wasn’t working, so I tweeted back that she should stop by for provisions. I sent her off with a bag full of Easter candy.
Twitter was filled with some more useful updates as well, but information is often unreliable after a disaster, and I worried about spreading mistakes. Still, I tentatively repeated someone’s announcement that Narita Airport was closed. And then that it was reopened. And then I tweeted his correction, that he’d meant a different airport. I finally decided I wouldn’t add to the noise by tweeting hard news. I thought the best I could do, the only things I could repeat with confidence, were people’s own experiences. I focused only on what people said they saw directly.
One man said it was “very strange to feel the earth moving while you are walking.” A woman wrote about making “an army” of rice balls for people trapped in her husband’s office. Another man posted a picture of flooding and smoke he’d taken after coming up out of the subway. These small details added up to a larger picture about what was happening.
Tweets were flying by faster than I could read them. It was soothing somehow to see what people were experiencing and pass it along. Some were useful, like photos of personal emergency kits or tips for preparing for aftershocks, and some were funny, like proposals to hit karaoke parlors.
My friend Niki, 250 miles away with her family in Osaka, tweeted to me, “Your guy is trying to reach you on Facebook.” Jim was in his office near Tokyo Station, on the 22nd floor of a relatively new building. I found out hours later that he and his office mates had put on the orange or white helmets that they all kept in emergency bags, and then hunkered down under their desks as the building swayed. He had popped up from under the desk to dash off a few messages. “Massive quake. Still swaying. Sandra please report.” I had been deeply engrossed in Twitter and hadn’t even checked or updated Facebook. We chatted briefly in the comments section of that post, and he advised me to put together a go-bag.
I still had the bright orange fanny-pack emergency kit that I was issued at some point in post 9/11 New York, most of its contents untouched. I pulled a few plastic bottles out of our recycling bag and filled them with water. Poured mixed nuts and cranberries into a big Ziploc bag. Grabbed the huge old flashlight from under the bed and tucked it into the bag, even though its light was weak. Arranged our hiking shoes by the door neatly, the way I imagined a Japanese person would. I tucked a smaller, more powerful flashlight into my pocket. I cleaned out the tub and filled it with cold water.
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And then? What else could I do? I looked outside again. People were still standing on the corners. They looked calm. I was afraid if I went out and started talking to them, they would insist I not go back in my building, where it could be more dangerous. But I felt safer inside than I thought I would out there. In the street, who knows what could roll off of a balcony or rooftop?
On Sept. 11, 2001, I was working in New York for Kyodo News, Japan’s equivalent of the Associated Press. As I headed toward the scene, I remember wishing that I could tell people that I was O.K., and what I was seeing. But with cell phones down, I didn’t have any way to communicate. The way technology has changed in these last few years continues to amaze me.
As the day grew dark, people started tweeting about how long their journeys home were, where they were finding food and phones, and how quickly noodles and bentos were disappearing from the convenience stores. I shared anything that I thought was helpful, interesting or encouraging. I was by myself all day with no working phone; I never heard from any of my neighbors, but with the stream of glimpses into other people’s experiences, I never felt alone.
In the late evening, Jim said via Facebook that he was getting on his bicycle, and he was heading home.
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Sandra Barron is a writer.
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