The next day - Fukushima 1 year later (Part 2)

So what does a city look like the day after it's hit by the biggest quake in Japanese history?

The day after the Tohoku Earthquake - March 12th, 2011 - I stayed at home most of the day. In light of such horrific destruction it was a good time to take stock of my own situation.

My first order of business was to get my own life back in order. This meant cleaning up damage in my apartment and making sure I was really safe, and making sure everyone I knew and the world around me was still intact.

For me the actual damage was minor as I mentioned before - a stack of cracked plates and books and stuff knocked down, but that's about it. None of my close friends suffered much either, thankfully, but in some ways the lack of obvious impact on me or people I knew made everything seem even more surreal - like I was watching the ash of Mt Vesuvius cover Pompeii from the windows of my Humvee.

Yes, there were reports coming in that the power outage at the Fukushima nuclear power plants was worse than had initially been imagined, and later that day at 3:36PM was the first of several explosions, but it still hadn't really set in that it was really that serious, and images of that explosion and others wouldn't really appear much that day. That would come later.

After a few hours cleaning up my apartment I had to get out. It was just too much for me to sit there watching endless footage of cars, buses, and then whole towns being swept away. I had to get away, to clear my head but also to make sure the world beyond my apartment and schools was still there.

I hopped on my Yamaha and headed in to Kashiwa to see what had happened. I had lived before in Kashiwa for 3 years, and even now it still kind of feels like my hometown away from America. And when I arrived I saw it was surprisingly (mostly) fine. Yes, a shrine had lost an arch, and some metal signs over shopping arcades had also collapsed, but for the most part the city hadn't suffered much damage.

The same was true about most of the nearby area. East of me, in the lower lying parts of Abiko there were houses damaged. And as you go north into Ibaraki the damage gets worse, but for the most part we were spared.