TOKYO — I was at home in Toyosu sitting on our new high-tech john on Friday, March 11, 2011, when the Tohoku earthquake struck. I was used to quakes, dating back to childhood in California, and experienced any number of them living in Japan. There’d be some shaking, sometimes violent shaking, and then it was over, usually in a matter of seconds. No reason to panic. But this one was different. It refused to end. There was a dramatic swaying back and forth, punctuated by sudden, huge horizontal jolts and the sound of creaking walls that went on and on and on. It lasted an excruciating six minutes.
When I emerged from the bathroom, no books had tumbled from the bookcase in the room I used as office and no lamps or vases had fallen over. Everything was still in its place. The new tower my wife and I lived in, sitting on reclaimed land, had incorporated the latest in earthquake-resistant technology — its builders had taken the trouble to mix the sand and dirt beneath with concrete — and the building emerged unscathed, save for a couple of easily repaired cracks in stairwell walls.
But the scene in cities and towns in the Tohoku area 150 miles to the north, telecast live on the flat-screen AQUOS TV set in my office, was one of chaos and horror. Buildings everywhere had collapsed. Roads and railways were damaged, and fires had broken out in many different places. At a magnitude of 9.1, announcers were saying it was the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan and the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded on Earth since measurements began in 1900. It was later discovered that Honshu, the main island of Japan, had been moved 8 feet to the east and that the axis of the earth had been shifted several inches.
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