the tokyo diaries

late may / early june ~ earthquakes, kissaten, umeshu

It is 6:32 am.

I wake up to the sound of a shrieking alarm on my phone, charging on a low hinoki wood table in the living room, separated from my bed by about two metres and a paper thin sliding door.

The volume of the alarm is impossibly loud. It screams and wails and shouts EARTHQUAKE EARTHQUAKE at the top of its tinny, desperate lungs.

Everyone who lives here jokes the alarms are worse than the actual earthquakes, which feels true sometimes, even if it’s absolutely, objectively not.

In an emergency situation, my response is dialled all the way up to flight.

I learn this in the great tohoku earthquake of 2011. I was on the third floor of an old guesthouse. My memory is both razor sharp and fuzzily blurred. Tea cups and 10 000 yen bills float in space, fall to the floor, a wooden staircase swings rapidly side to side, me, on the street in an instant somehow, an old woman, a stranger, draws me in close.

With yesterdays alarm, I am out of bed immediately. Thirteen years later I still default to flight mode, but I know now to stay inside, to open the doors, to turn off the gas stove, to cover my head, steer clear of anything that could fall.

When the room is still stationary a minute or two later, I know it is a false alarm. I lay back on my bed, aware of the heat of my own blood.

Later, I wonder how the millions of people around the country react. Many simply roll over and find sleep again I’m sure. A text from my friend pops up on my phone. I was terrified. 怖かった. Where they live, the alarm rarely goes off. She carried her 3 year old daughter down their impossibly vertical stairs and put the TV on.

Later, I think about how often I have told myself the fear of the thing is worse than the thing itself. A lot of the time, this is actually true. Sometimes though, it is absolutely not. The fact remains though. A life well-lived will not be without it. We might as well learn how to let it in.

Unable to sleep, and knowing my body well enough that meditation is pointless right now, I jump up and down one hundred times, shake out my arms and legs and wrists and ankles. I make coffee with cardamom and fresh cream. I open my laptop and google Japan Meteorological Agency, something I do at least once a week. The earthquake was in Noto. Again. My heart drops. I open the news and click on an article about the danger of massive water shortages in the case of large earthquakes, especially in Tokyo.

✨✨✨ Hi! I know paywalls are annoying but they provide me the time and space to write, and the safety to get a little personal and to go deep. You may have noticed this substack slowly shifting. These Tokyo Diary pieces will be in the style of my original long-form letters, exploring life, romance, work and living softly against the grain in a difficult world: now with the backdrop of my favourite muse (this city!) You’ll also find some extra little bits and links at the bottom, too. Okay! Thanks for being here :) I appreciate you.