Koko and I went out today to buy food for our emergency stash--just in case anything else happens, even if it's something like a power outage. It seems many other people had the same thought: all the convenience stores and groceries stores we went to were empty of ready-to-eat foods like bento boxes, breads, cooked fish and seafood, heat-and-eat foods like parboiled noodles and dumplings. It was surreal and a little like...are we supposed to be preparing for the end of the world?
A lot of the food at the Lawson near us was gone as of last night around 8-9 PM. I think people were getting food for the road if they had a long walk home (like 6-9 hours), and also stocking up for the coming days, since no one was sure what was going to happen.
So we just bought what we could--some canned clam chowder and vegetable soups, dehydrated miso soup packets, chocolate, dried fruit, spam, juice, canned organic corned beef, quail eggs (hey, it's ready to eat). Koko and I joked that we were preparing the gourmet survival kit. But really, it was hard to find any food left that didn't look disgusting. Were we really going to eat pasta sauce out of a jar? We bought a container of vegetable juice, and I really, really dislike V8.
The store shelves were pretty empty, partly, I think, because the delivery trucks probably couldn't get to them. Traffic going out of Tokyo was backed up like crazy, even around midnight last night.
Everything around here looks pretty much back to normal otherwise. But it's the other parts of the country that are more worrisome--the fire, tsunami, people still being trapped under collapsed buildings, the nuclear reactor that had a small explosion and is supposedly ok now, but they evacuated people in a greater radius than before.
In the next few days, we'll also be gathering things for a first-aid kit, more food and water, a helmet like ones for construction sites--things that you normally wouldn't think about but are recommended by natural disasters.
I had trouble sleeping last night because I was thinking about all the things I had seen and heard and felt. The aftershocks didn't help, since they came (and continue to come) every 10 minutes or so. And with each one, I thought, "Is this going to turn into another earthquake?" The news said there were over 130 aftershocks since the actual earthquakes, and some were as strong as earthquakes themselves.
I started doing drills in my head--if my building catches fire or begins collapsing, what would I bring? My shoulder bag with my wallet, cell phone, my Gohonzon (Buddhist object of worship) and my bookbag with these survival items--once I put it together, that is.
Koko said that when the quake was happening, his colleagues (most of whom are in their 40s or older) started panicking. He turned to his one colleague, who is around the same age, and asked him repeatedly, "What should we do?" It took a few minutes for him to snap out of the shock and say "Get under the table!" It was only then that the other colleagues followed suit.
All this has made me think that you can't rely on others to know what to do, even if you're not in your own country and don't speak the language. I'm pretty unprepared for these kinds of things, and maybe most people are too. But you need to make a plan and rehearse it, just in case. Because when it actually happens, you'll know what to do and not panic. Otherwise, people start freaking out and doing unsafe things that could harm themselves and/or other people.
Do you remember all those signs you saw after 9/11, about creating a survival kit and emergency plan--what to do, where to meet your family, etc? I think we really need to prepare for those things. If you're at school, do you know how to respond if there's a shooting? There were instructional posters for these situations in the bathrooms at UC Irvine, which was good, but but I think we shouldn't just read about it. We need to have drills in schools, at work, with our families.
I don't know if you know this news story, but minutes before the tsunami in the Pacific Ocean in 2004, there was a family out on a boat, and the little kid in the family recognized the signs of a tsunami because he (or she; sorry, forgot the gender) had learned it in school. The kid saved the entire family.
FEMA's website is a good resource on how to prepare for a variety of disasters, including fires, earthquakes and terrorism. Please check it out:
http://www.fema.gov/plan/index.shtm
Japan apparently has a rainy season in the summer and typhoons sometimes, too. So we'll be preparing for that as well in the coming months.
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