The students huddled on the floor in groups to stay warm. There had been no time to grab warmer layers. There were no outward displays of panic, but I can read the air well enough to tell the difference between calm and a brittle tension. Personally, I felt outside of myself, as though I were experiencing everything second hand. Pulling my jacket tighter around me, I waited impatiently for the Vice Principal to finish talking to the students. Now the initial shock was morphing into anxiety. All I knew was that there had been a massive earthquake, even by Japanese standards, that there was a tsunami warning, and understandably dazed newsreaders were telling people to get away from the ocean. This was all I knew at that point.
How was I feeling? I don't know. Perhaps I still had that dull roar pounding in my ears. Was I scared? Yes. Not just for myself, but for everyone I knew, too. I checked my watch. 3:00pm. 6:00am in the UK. Would my family be awake yet? Would it even be news over there? And what about my friends? Were they safe? I knew nothing about how massive the Earthquake had been at that point, but I knew instinctively that it had hit them all. From Niigata to Osaka. And hard.
Finally, the students stood, and they filtered back into school. They were all to leave immediately. No student was to travel alone. Teachers would follow shortly after. At least, that was the plan. For by the time half of the students had re-entered another building, there it was. An aftershock. I could see the school move, and I could feel the ground sway underfoot. Myself and some other teachers dashed back inside to re-evacuate. We ran up and down the corridors, shouting for anyone else remaining to get out as the shaking subsided, strengthened, then subsided again.
There was nothing left to say now. All we could do was wait, watch, and feel. Everything seemed to be curiously over-focused and saturated in colour. It was a thick overcast but everything seemed as violently colourful as a blazing summer's day to me.
At last, we all re-entered, more wearily this time. The staff room filled up, and the TV was once again switched on.
Whirlpools. Water charging down streets like a flash flood. Cars tossed about like toys. People stranded on rooftops as the raging water lapped at their feet. My Japanese ability told me enough of the facts: An estimated 8.5 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture, in North-East Japan, with tsunami warnings of over 10 metres in some places. There was already a death toll. It was in double figures then.
I and many other teachers reached for their phones. They too had friends and family to check upon, but we all hit upon the same snag: we couldn't make calls. Whether it was because of the Earthquake or because the millions of other people in Japan were trying to reach out at once, I didn't know, but I more than ever I felt that horrible sensation of being in the middle of something huge and terrible that everyone would talk about later, perhaps even for weeks after, but for now I was cut off from everything and everyone I cared about.
Then there was lots of bags and jackets zipping up and laptops clicking shut. It was time to go. And never before have I been as frustrated with the slowness of my bicycle than I did then. The 4km bike ride back to my apartment is lengthy at the best of times, but today it seemed to drag on indefinitely. Yet the journey felt...normal. Cars drove by as normal, the trees still swayed and yes, the rickety old houses I'd grown used to passing each day were still there. It was only when I passed through the thickest part of the countryside did I realise the one difference, the smallest one, and yet perhaps the worst: the birdsong had gone.
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