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.
This robot made by the telephone company Docomo was supposed to showcase their new super fast internet connection. That never happened. :(
They often have events promoting new products next to the east exit of Shinjuku station. They were going to have a big event today as well...
...but it was cancelled because of the earthquake, just like everything else these days.
I was so surprised when I looked behing the plastic curtains and there was a big robot standing there!
The robot was going to show the power of Docomo's upcoming mobile internet connection.
Japan has the largest population of robots in the world. Maybe those robots can help out in the search for missing people and rebuilding houses after the disasters?
This video was taken by my friend that was in school when the earthquake struck. It's during the later weaker part of the earthquake though.
One of the Japanese teachers says that it's the first time even for her to experience something like this. A student were just about to start his presentation when it started shaking.
Update: There's been some comments that it's horrible how people in the video can think it's cool when the building is shaking.
I just wanted to add that they didn't know that a lot of people were going to die, get harmed or homeless when this happened. I'm sure nobody would have thought it was cool in that case. The devastating consequences of this disaster are extremely sad, unfair and absolutely nothing to laugh about.
After the earthquake people have been panicking to store up a lot of food and water in their houses in case the transportations doesn't start or something happens again. The food stores are either closed or almost empty...
Here I'm happily coming with my shopping basket to buy some food...
What!!??The food is gone!! :O
Pretty empty.
Very empty.
100% empty.
The Japanese food stores are usually so filled with stuff that there's not even enough room for everything.
The staff started cleaning up the empty shelves.
Not only most of the food is gone, almost every store is closed in the city where shopping is religion.
Outside the stores there's sign that says that it's closed because of the "Jishin", which means earthquake in Japanese.
The Starbucks cafés in Tokyo makes more money than anywhere else in the world. But today they're all closed...
Even the Pachinko halls that's usually always open no matter what are closed with warning signs all over. Pachinko = Japanese Slot machines
The huge Yodobashi-Camera department store that sells everything in electronics were closed down. They must loose so much money in just one day... The hundreds of neon-signs were all shut down and dark.
At this point the crazily populated Tokyo started to feel like a ghost-town. After the news of the explosion in the nuclear plant we saw people checking out of their hotels and hurried to the trains with their travel bags. Got a bit worried and talked with a police about this.
Me: -"Why is everything closed??"
Police:-"The food is sold out so they have nothing to sell."
Me: -"But what about the electronics stores. Those are closed too."
Police: -"Ah, there's no customers."
Me: -"Oh I see. We heard about the nuclear plant explosion... Are we okey here??"
Police: -"Yes we're okey here in Tokyo. The nuclear plant is five hours away with train."
After midnight some shipments seemed to have finally reached the stores. But only soda...
...and potato-chips. Let's enjoy the earthquake-diet. :P
I have been seeing this huge mysterious egg at Ueno strain station for so many times but I had no idea what was inside.
This is where the egg used to be before the earthquake.
But after the earthquake the egg was gone!! :O
I found the egg cracked up into pieces a bit away from there, with warning tape around.
The egg turned out to have been containing small cafés and other mysterious stores. Now the question is if somebody will be able to fix it, so that we can enjoy everything inside!??
Yesterday was crazy... Everything around here stopped due to the earthquake and you could see some people walking around with these kind of hats in order to protect themselves from falling objects, fires and other dangers.
You can buy the hat at Rakuten. A child wearing this hat came up to me and some friends from nowhere and said "Konbanwa!" = "Good evening!" His family had put these hats on all their children. Seeing that made it feel like it was also a space invasion going on...
Penny that used to live in the same "Guest House" as me took this picture of children outside a school wearing these kind of hats. More pictures at her blog here.
My friend Jakob took this picture of me standing next to one of many cracks that appeared in the walls of our school.
I was eating Ramen with some friends at a small restaurant while talking with a 70 year old drunk Japanese man when the eartquake struck. It started shaking a little bit and then the Japanese man jumped down under his table and started screaming "Get down!!".
We just laughed at him because small earthquakes happens once in a while here. But this one didn't stop for several minutes and just got stronger and stronger. I thought the lamps inside would fall down on us so I ran outside.
All the cars had stopped and the streets were flooding with people. Some of them were crying and the buildings was shaking so much that for a moment I thought that Tokyo was about to fall apart...
But then it calmed down before another one with similar power struck. The Japanese man was a bit angry at me when I came back inside and said: -"You should never leave your group!"
Even when the eartquake was over we still didn't really understand what a catastrophe this had been in some places of Japan. When we came to school they told everybody to evacuate to this local.
Some people had just come to Tokyo some hours ago and must have thought that this is part of daily life in Japan, so people started joking with them saying things like: -"If you thought this one was big you should have seen the one yesterday".
You have all probably been seeing these crazy pictures of places in ruins with cars floating around. Those pictures are mostly from north Japan where the Tsunami hit, which seems to have done more damage than the actual Earthquake.
The damage in Tokyo was nothing like this, but it still felt crazy to experience it. I'm so regretful that I didn't have my camera this day, but since more than 1200 people is dead or missing in Japan now I should just be happy that me and everyone I know is okey.
You couldn't call anyone and all the trains stopped so the lines to pay phones, buses and bicycle stores were extreme... A good thing in this situation is that the Japanese people are so organized and don't panic too much which could have made it more dangerous.
While writing this I can actually feel my room shaking a bit. It's been small earthquakes throughout this day too, but I think the danger is over for now?
I've been pretty lazy recently with taking street snaps of people, but when me and some friends saw this guy after a Karaoke session in Kabukichou they told me that I just had to take photos of him. ^^
Kabukichou is the place in Shinjuku where all the Host-clubs are so I suspected that he might be a host but I've never seen a host with that kind of hair so I was really hesitant.
But he turned out to be a host standing on the street to find customers for his host-club. The hosts that are standing on the streets in Kabukichou are usually the new ones that haven't got popular enough yet to just sit and wait for customers in the club.
When I had just taken photos of him he went up to a girl but got ignored. I know how that feels and he seems really nice so I felt sorry for him. :/
When I see his extremley colorful hair it reminds me of this EGG-model that always have really colorful hair as well.
I saw him at an EGG Youth Party in times of Halloween so he even had a pumpkin painted onto his hair somehow! XD
Maybe these two "Masters of Hair Coloring" would have a lot to discuss if they ever meet!
Update: Thanks to your comments here and on Facebook I now know that this guy isn't just some random host. He's a Visual Kei-artist that have done porn and disguisting stuff from what I read about him and the pictures I saw when I searched on his name...
I'm happy that girl ignored him after all, and I hope the EGG-model never meet him. Watch out! :O
However I'm really happy to have such well informed and smart readers!!^^ I learn so much from you! Thank you!! =)
