When there’s a risk of aftershocks, they tell you to keep doors ajar: if you need to escape, there’s less risk of them becoming stuck in the mangled frame of the building and trapping you in. All fine, except it’s minus 2 out there and these Japanese air heaters are not exactly robust. Still, the adrenaline will keep me awake for hours, so why not the cold too?
I arrived in Kanazawa on New Year’s morning, slipping serenely in on a Shinkansen across the throat of Noto (already 2024’s best-known peninsula). The sky was big, clear and cold and Kanazawa, Ishikawa’s largest city, was busy but quiet (although I did see, for the first time, a guy being arrested by a squad of police officers, wriggling and resisting in a theatrical style).
I got the key for the machiya I’m staying in: a pretty wooden house with tatami floors and sliding doors. Comfortable if draughty (even when the doors are slid-to). Suitcase in tow, I was walking along one of the main arterial roads towards the river, listening to Tom Holland and Dominic Sambrook’s most recent podcast on Nazi Germany. Sambrook had come on to describing the events that led to the toppling of Erst Röhm in the Night of the Long Knives, when the podcast cut out. It did that sudden drop in volume thing that phones do when you’re listening to something and a call comes in: I thought perhaps the accommodation office. Instead, it was a loud, robotic American voice with nothing to tell me beyond “Earthquake”.
She wasn’t wrong: instantly the whole world began to ripple and shudder. The traffic stopped and instinctively I dragged my suitcase into the middle of the road, away from anything overhead. Everyone else on the street stopped and huddled into car parking areas or, like me, the road itself. The traffic signs and lampposts were rocking like out-of-sync metronomes. Buildings were hopping on one leg. It was like aeroplane turbulence, in some ways: bemusing and over quickly, but somehow quieter and without the obvious consolation that turbulence does no damage. It’s hard to say objectively how long it lasted: probably ten seconds.
It wasn’t scary at the time: I was in the open and everyone around me was calm but stiff, looking up and not at each other. Once it was over, there was something like a knowing eye-roll and people went on, although looking furtively at screens to see what the instructions were. Seconds later, a tsunami warning came through and an instruction to seek “higher ground”.
This is when I started to feel a little lost. It seemed that people were just continuing with their business, although some were loitering in the street, something that does not happen often here. I began to suspect that people were moving together in one direction, perhaps because they knew something I didn’t about what you were supposed to do. But there were exceptions to that and, by and large, my impression was of people going about their business. There was no panic, no excited chatter. Kanazawa is flat and I did not much fancy heading to my little wooden house with the tsunami warning and risk of aftershocks.
So I traipsed back to the station. Five minutes or so later, I got a text message from a friend in Tokyo telling me that there had been a serious quake near me. Had I realised? Since the Earth had tried its best to shake me off it, I said I had realised. But chatting to him gave me some reassurance and he told me to get to a department store or something with three or more floors. I made it to the station thinking I’d be able to go upstairs there, but they had closed it off.
The tsunami was due to hit at about 17.00 (the Earthquake struck around 16.20, I think, and it took me half an hour to get to the station). There was a ticklish moment as the time came close, when the people who had been crowded around the station doors, pressing up against officialdom, were sent backwards and some began to run. At a distance, this made it look as if they were running away from some disaster they had seen, and I considered legging it myself. Nothing had in fact happened. At least not here. At the Kanazawa Port the tsunami reached 90cm (it was 40 metres after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake); collapses and fires up the peninsula have proven significantly more deadly.
I chatted with some young American lads who were touring Japan in their university break. The tallest of them had been talking to the station staff and been told that all the trains in and our were suspended and that he had better book some accommodation for the night. Another of them, the youngest-looking, said he found the whole thing exhilarating, and that he had finally had a proper Japan experience. Certainly one way of putting it.
When they sloped off to their hostel, I started my trundle to the machiya. It was dark and cold. Things looked normal enough but, in that febrile state, every vibration – a spluttering aircon unit, a passing bus – becomes an aftershock, every unfamiliar beep, boop and whistle becomes another early warning alert.
You are struck, in circumstances like this, by the strength of Japanese systems: social and infrastructural. The mobile warning system worked exactly right. Necessary information was given out. People knew not to panic, having practised for events like this since school. I saw no real physical damage to any buildings at all, apart from one pane of shattered glass from a shop front and a vase in an antiques shop. The gas mains were all intact and the nuclear infrastructure was sound. Astonishingly, the bullet trains were up and running less than 24 hours after the quake hit.
I was on the phone to Nav as I headed for my digs. I must have said something about it being scary because an old lady I was passing, in the way that only old ladies can, put a hand on my shoulder and asked me in English if I was ok. She didn’t have to, but she did.
I made it to the machiya and there was no sign that anything had happened there: everything appeared to be in its proper place. A little while later a young guy arrived in his van to have a look round and check and to tell me, in a slightly grim game of charades, that if the place began shaking I had better flee and quick about it. The sliding doors, he said, had better stay open. Good luck!
Odd thoughts cross your mind in your first big quake: should I just sleep in my clothes in case I have to make a run for it? No loitering on the toilet and, heck, should I leave that door open too? Is “tremor” an American spelling (thus “tremour”)?
NHK had rolling English news although it was a little repetitive and high level. I kept refreshing the earthquake feed on their app: every twenty minutes or so there was another mag 3, or 4 or sometimes 5, in the sea off Noto. But I didn’t feel anything more. It was the anticipation that was worst. And the cold.
I had a bit of saké but my nerves were not soothed. Tea was better and at least warmed me a little. Chatting to friends and people at home helped. It’s our nephew’s 17th birthday so it was nice to see him having his face stuffed with cake in the traditional manner. Newcastle got beat, in the less surprising, less serious disaster of the day.
In the end I think I got two or three hours sleep. No more alerts. They have dropped the tsunami warning for the coast. But the fear of aftershocks remains and I’ve made the decision to try and get out of Kanazawa if I can. They say there is a sizeably increased risk of another mag 7 in the next few days. I think one is enough for this trip.