Don’t Worry About Us

Asumi was heading to Takeshita Street with a friend when it started. Not unusual for Tokyo—the city shakes often enough that minor tremors barely register—but this one ran long. Unusually long. The ground moved, the trees moved with it, people poured out of buildings, and then it stopped. A man nearby turned to them and said, That wasn’t normal. She reached for her phone. The network was dead.

On March 11th, 2011, a magnitude 8.9 earthquake struck Japan’s northeastern Pacific coast and sent tsunamis crashing into the shoreline. I got Asumi on Skype a few hours later. She was 21, living in Tokyo, and the connection kept dropping, but she talked me through it.

The subway was shut down, so she and her friend took a taxi as far as it would go. At home, her younger brother Kotaro and a friend were already watching the news. Kotaro was calm—the school had run earthquake drills just the month before. When the shaking started he’d sheltered under a table, then decided outside was the safer call. He’s pretty brave, Asumi said.

She eventually got through to her mother at work. Everyone there was fine, but the power had gone out and her mother was trying to figure out how to get home in a city where nothing was moving. The airports were closed. An oil refinery in Chiba was burning. Helicopters circled overhead. The top of the Tokyo Tower, she told me, was bent slightly to one side from the force of it.

The real destruction was further north. Tsunamis were hitting the northeastern coast, entire towns going under. The death toll was already climbing. She had relatives in Sapporo she hadn’t been able to reach—the line rang and rang without answer. She said she hoped they were all right.

They’d stay home and watch the news, she said. More aftershocks were expected, more tsunamis possible. I asked what happens now. I don’t quite know, she said. But she wasn’t scared, or wasn’t showing it. Japan had survived worse. Don’t worry about us, she said.

I worried anyway.