Escaping From My Favorite Place

Me and most foreigners has temporarily escaped from Japan. This woman were just one of many staying the night at Narita airport waiting for a flight out of the country.

The day after the news about explosions in the nuclear reactors I could hear birds singing. 
I don't think I've ever heard that before, because it's usually so crowded and noisy on this street outside my window. But this morning it was empty.

I heard that one of my friends from school had already left Japan on advice from a relative working with nuclear energy. Some minutes later I saw a woman coming running down the street like she was escaping from something.

Most of the news casters were wearing helmets. I first thought that it was only to look professional.

But then it started shaking for a while in my room, and the room that the news caster were sitting in shook as well. He stopped talking and looked up into the ceiling to make sure nothing were going to fall down at him.

When I went outside to check if it was empty everywhere I soon saw lots of people outside the Pachinko place close to my house. Pachinko is Japanese gambling.

The Pachinko halls had been closed for a day, so today they were having a special event celebrating that it was open again. Pretty crazy.

Another crazy thing, that might not sound very crazy to people that haven't been to Japan, is that there's now people crossing the streets even though it's red light!! For the first time in my life, I have now seen a Japanese person cross the street at red light! I couldn't believe my eyes!!

Is it a moral breakdown going on in Japan!? I have never seen so many cops at the "Police Box" in Kabukichou, Shinjuku.

To save electricity they have shut down most of the big screens and neon signs.

At Shinagawa train station they have hundreds of plasma screens everywhere. Everytime I pass by there I'm always so impressed that they could afford all of those. Now all of them are shut down as you can see.

The subways are usually loaded with commercial ads. Now many of the spots are empty like this one.

The spots that's in use are all for beer. But only for beer without alcohol. I guess people want to drink to forget their fear of more disasters, but nobody wanna take the risk of getting drunk in case another big earthquake strikes...?

At least I saw one ad for something else than beer at Shibuya station, when I were going to check if there was any people at Shibuya crossing. It shows how two members of the super popular boy band Arashi has taken 3D-photos of themselves using the new Nintendo 3DS, and then merged the pictures together into one.

Shibuya was far from empty, but maybe not as crowded as usually. Shibuya 109 was open, but only until 6pm. Normally it's open until 9pm every day. After seeing all the people in Shibuya I started thinking that maybe everything is going to be just like before now.

In the evening I went to a restaurant to study together with Dennis and Sofia from school.

First we were in a pretty good mood, and thought that everything were going back to normal now. 
We studied as hard as we could for the upcoming tests and looked forward to meet everybody in school the next day.

Less than one hour later everything had changed. There weren't going to be anymore tests or classes this term. We got messages from pretty much every foreign person we know that they were leaving Japan very soon and thought that we should do the same.

Then we heard that a vulcano just had an eruption in southern Japan. People on Facebook started writing things like "Now Godzilla is the only thing missing"...

We went to school to talk with them about this but it was closed. It was going to be information meetings the next day about the situation.

We saw some more cracks in the walls.

Since it's such serious times we thought that it might be a lot of people praying at the temples. 
But it was totally empty, and they had put metal cages over the statues to prevent them from
falling down if another earthquake would strike.

All the people were busy with stocking up food and other necessities at the super markets that still had any left.

Selling travel bags is good business now.

This lady bought as much as she could carry, and left town with a taxi.

Kabukichou in Shinjuku is usually more lively in the nights than the days, but everything was closed now.

Closed arcade and batting center.

Seeing this crying girl get comforted by a host in the empty streets, almost gave me chills and felt
like a scene from some apocalypse movie.

Talking about hosts... The host clubs seems to still do good business. With or without it's neon.

Is this the fall of the mega metropolis Neo-Tokyo!? No, but if things gets worse it's hard to say how everything will turn out.

Next time I will write about the scenes at the immigration office and airport when I were going to get out of Japan. I'm in Australia right now, but will be back in Tokyo April 4th. 

To be continued...