Jishin da!

[snarp]

There was just an earthquake! It was the biggest one I’ve ever felt - intensity 3-4 on the Japanese scale in this area, and it lasted about two minutes. I’ve never been in one of more than twenty or thirty seconds before. My first instinct was to move my cup of tea away from my computer. My second was to get under the bed, but I had a duffle bag under there and couldn’t fit, so I pulled the futon over my head instead. This struck me after a moment as being not particularly helpful. So I went outside in my socks, which are now very wet. (The duffle bag now resides elsewhere.)

The only people to go out into the street were other foreigners from the guest house. I could hear some of the Japanese neighbors going “Kowai! Sugee!” but none of them left their houses. I imagine that this particular street isn’t really all that much safer than indoors anyway. It’s very narrow, and there are potted plants and stuff on everyone’s windowsills and porches.

And Mo just texted me to make sure I wasn’t panicking. I’m not panicking! I panicked only temporarily. There were never any noticeable earthquakes up in Shibata, so I’d kind of forgotten to expect them - I thought the clattering was rain at first.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

Comments

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Going outside is a bad idea if there are multistory buildings in your area, because people tend to get badly hurt by falling glass. Don't know what your area is like, but I think covering yourself with a futon was actually a pretty good idea.
http://72hours.org/earthquake.html

2 minutes is a really long one, man. The longest one I've felt here was about a minute.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

(okay, doom_magpie has a good point, which I guess is why the above link suggests a pillow.)

[snarp]

It's a pretty thin futon. Also, it's rust-red, which I feared might limit the ability of hypothetical rescue parties to identify my hypothetical bloodstains.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Heh. I've always been concerned by the whole "hide under a table" thing. I mean, my parents' antique oak table, sure. My Ikea one? Hmm...

Anyway, earthquakes in which you get to change your mind several times about what to do = yikes. I actually got the USGS e-mail notification about this one when it happened. It said 7.1 (at the time) off the coast of the Izu islands (IIRC). That's huge, but I didn't think anything of it because I figured it was really far off the coast and I didn't read the details. So I was pretty surprised to see your post from way up there in Niigata.