Earthquakes

We feel a lot of earthquakes in Japan - not every day, but enough to notice when you've never experienced an earthquake before Japan. I've been woken up a few times by shaking, which is so weird because you barely figure out what's happening before the moment passes and you go back to sleep.

This morning just before 9 a.m., there were two big quakes - 6 minutes apart, higher than 6 on the Richter scale - in the same spot about 200 miles north of Tokyo that killed several people, and it also shook Tokyo. Here's the Japan Meteorological Agency's diagram for the first and the second.

I was on Skype making a doctor's appointment for this summer in Seattle when our kitchen table started to rock back and forth irregularly, like it was on a boat. "We're having an earthquake!" I told the receptionist. "Are you okay?" she said, alarmed. "Yeah, it happens all the time here," I said. (Turns out that the shaking in Tokyo was only a 2, not much really, but a friend who lives on the 20th floor said her apt building was really swaying.)

What's really weird about earthquakes, I think, is that your brain races to establish a regular pattern to the shaking, as if you might rationally predict when it might end. But there isn't any pattern. The earth lurches around for a while - sometimes a hard shake, sometimes a weird rocking, sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for more seconds - and then it's over, kaput.

Still, the China earthquake and this one remind me, yet again, that we have to revisit our earthquake preparedness situation.