'Ja hear about the earthquake?

Here's The Age's report of the earthquake that hit Japan early this morning. A rather amusing dramatisation of it all, given that the epicentre was in Suruga Bay, which little ol' Numazu sits on and meant that we were in the thick of the action, so to speak.



The circles in these maps represent earthquake measuring stations. Japan has a very informative way of measuring earthquakes; instead of using the Richter scale as a blanket measurement, they rate the quake according to how it is felt at all the different stations. Logically this means that the closer you are to the epicentre, the more intense the reading, although if you look at the maps you'll see that in practice it doesn't always work that way. In Numazu, we felt it as a 4. In Tokyo, which the article focuses on (because, of course, no-one's heard of any of the places that were really affected by the quake), it was felt as a 3 or 4, but the article reports it as a 6.5 because that was its highest reading in a few places that really aren't anywhere near Tokyo at all. Gotta love media sensationalism.

This link will give you a really interesting run-down of the effects of each rating, if you'd like to know what 4 actually means in real life. It shows you that 6.5 is serious stuff, so I'm not saying it wasn't a big quake. Just that the article tries to make it sound a lot worse.



And for the curious, Numazu is located just to the north and slightly west of Izu Peninsula, which is the arrowhead sticking out at the bottom right of this map.

As for our own experience of it, I happened to be awake at the time because Cassia had only a few minutes earlier woken and asked for something to eat. She was lying in bed between us when the rumbling and shaking started and the ceiling light swung back and forth. I could hear the unwashed dishes rattling around in the kitchen too. Craig woke and sat up very suddenly. I was scared for about three seconds when it wasn't clear whether the quake was going to get stronger or not, and worried that Cassia would get really scared too. But her reaction was no more than to keep munching on the piece of bread and exclaim "What's the light doing?" Later on I opened our kitchen cupboards and noticed a few spice jars teetering on the edge (note to self: after large earthquakes, do not open top cupboard suddenly), and I'm sure the fridge was closer to the wall than it usually is. But other than that, no damage sustained.

So there you go. I've now felt a real Japanese earthquake. It was an interesting reminder of the uncertainty of life, actually. I'll be glad if I don't stay here long enough to experience anything stronger than a 4. (Well OK, maybe I could take a 5 lower.)