Well that was an unpleasant wake up call at 11:46pm last night. By now I'm sure you heard about the 7.4 magnitude earthquake we had in Japan last night. Depending on your proximity to an earthquake anything above a 5 can be serious, so when you get into the 7's it can be catastrophic. Luckily this one wasn't despite the violent shaking.
The epicenter was off the coast of Fukushima and it triggered a small tsunami at 30cm high. Here down in Western Tokyo the shaking was really strong. Last time I was in one this strong was back in 04' when a 6.9 hit while my wife and I were on the 6th floor of a building.
I was shaken out of a deep sleep when the quake hit. I stumbled out of bed and saw my wife stabilizing our entertainment center which holds our display of expensive gems and minerals and our TV. She told me to help, but I felt like I was drunk and couldn't totally comprehend what to do. Nothing fell or was damaged that we know of here so that was great.
After the shaking stopped we turned on the TV for information and sat for the next 2 hours watching the news come in. 1 aftershock hit about 1hour later, but the shaking was minor.
We were crossing our fingers Fukushima would be ok and the tsunami wouldn't do any damage. Thankfully damage was very minor across Japan. I have to give the Japanese credit in their engineering abilities.
Ended up going back to sleep at around 2am only to get up at 6am to get ready for my dentist appointment at 8am.
A lot of areas in Tokyo lost power. I'm not sure if that was due to reactors automatically shutting down or something more localized. Everything seems to be back to normal now though except part of the shinkansen northern line has been shut down. This is the route we take from Tokyo to my wife's hometown up north. So it seems all is well except for some minor issues.
We were a bit shaken, but not stirred. Now I think I'm gonna get some of that lost shut eye back.
