I experienced my first earthquake in Japan on our final night of quarantine. The apartment began to tremble while a quaint show about a British gardener lady was on NHK. Dishes clattered on the drying rack, glassware clinked on shelves, half-dry clothes swung from the hangers by the washing machine. All of a sudden it felt like we were aboard a ship, listing gently over a swollen sea.
An emergency broadcast came on TV and confirmed that a magnitude 5.8 quake had just hit Ibaraki Prefecture, northeast of Tokyo. The tremors subsided in under a minute. A curious and disquieting experience. Though I’d ostensibly lived through a handful of earthquakes during my five years in L.A., I don’t remember ever becoming physically aware of them in this manner.
Within a few days, I felt the building shake again—this time for only around fifteen seconds—in the midst of a Japanese conversation class on Zoom. Later during the week, while I lay in bed one morning, there was another shudder barely within the realm of perceptibility. The sensation reminded me of my old apartment in Greenpoint, a few blocks away from the eternal cacophony of the elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, where trucks whizzing down the freeway would cause the frame of the house to judder and sigh as they roared past. Eventually I barely noticed even when the house vibrated late into the night, the spectral whistling and shrieking of wheels on pavement fading in and out.
The Ibaraki quake last Sunday is suspected to be an aftershock of the Tohoku earthquake that wrought havoc on eastern Japan back in 2011. That such a destructive force can remain unresolved, jolting into the present day, feels both ominous and poetic.
Nine years in a human lifespan is not insignificant. I was only 25 when the Tohoku disaster struck in 2011. There was much to learn in the years that followed—about indulgence and restraint, pain and pleasure, loving others, loving myself. I’d like to believe that I am sturdily provisioned with the lessons New York taught me in that apartment in Greenpoint, and in all the spaces I inhabited afterward.
Nonetheless, the earthquake made me think about how the past is contained within our tectonic depths, a past that still has the power to send its tremors and echoes into the present. But we go on. We yearn forward, rebuild and restore ourselves from each loss. We carry on the practice of daily living—until those difficult reverberations become so slight, they’re barely noticeable.
Was everything shaking now, or did I just imagine it?
Thanks for a new way to think about that thrilling and worrying feeling.
Having survived the 921 earthquake in Taiwan makes me feel very deeply what you just experienced. Our lives would go on, but we learn from the past and become stronger and more resilient.