December 07, 2012

Night Before Trip, 7.3 Earthquake Strikes Northeastern Japan

Tomorrow I leave for Japan, and I was excited to do this post saying how I'm all packed and ready to go... and suddenly breaking news tweets start appearing in my newsfeed, saying there has been another major earthquake near Sendai, Japan, and tsunami warnings have been issued for Miyagi prefecture.

I have been going through as many news sites as I can, English and Japanese, as well as Twitter and Facebook, and am slowly getting little bits of information. It was a 7.3, seems to have been felt quite strongly in Tokyo, and a metre-high tsunami has been recorded in Ishinomaki city in Miyagi. There have not yet been any reports of damage or injuries.

I'm not sure yet how this will affect my trip to Japan, especially the planned activities for the disaster area. I guess we will be briefed on how this latest earthquake has impacted our schedule at our meeting in Auckland tomorrow. We will be in Tokyo until Tuesday, then are scheduled to move to Minamiaizu in Fukushima prefecture and stay there for 3 nights.

I need to go to sleep as I have to be up at 5am to catch my flight to Christchurch, but I have to say that this news makes things feel very frighteningly real. I hope everyone in Japan is ok.

All going well, you'll be able to read about my experiences when I return on December 21st. For now, a somewhat cautious 行ってきます!

4 comments:

  1. I don't know if you'll read this before you take off, but don't worry too much. At least for the Tokyo journey. Tokyo was swaying a bit, but it was business as usual within minutes. Only the trains were running a bit late.

    Up in Fukushima, I would say it was far enough that you don't have to worry much. Just remember, it may shake but you generally have time to get to higher ground if a tsunami alert is called. Thankfully the tsunami was only 1m in the worst area and less in most other areas.

    Have a good trip. I look forward to hearing about it.

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