A meizanologist's diary (49)

1 January: Somewhere over central Asia, on another flight from HEL, the New Year’s sunrise touches off a haiku:

機内から
あけぼのを見て
元日や

Appropriately, a dragon-shaped cloud writhes its way underneath the Airbus as we fly towards Beijing. Then another couple of hours to KIX. The long journey from Europe ends smoothly when the Hokuriku line limited express pulls into Fukui station, on schedule at 16.06 pm.

Four minutes later, I’m looking for the Sensei and her car in the station forecourt when the earth shifts underfoot. The bus shelter I’m standing under wags to and fro with an audible creaking, while the reflections on the glazed frontage of a nearby building ripple as if in a breeze. Nobody seems alarmed but I decide to stay under the bus shelter until the shaking stops, just in case those glass panels start coming adrift.

The Sensei and I find each other. Her Toyota has just announced to her that an earthquake is in progress. It repeats itself a few minutes later when we are stopped in traffic. The warning is otiose; we can feel the car swaying.

Meanwhile, on the radio, the NHK announcer urges anybody near the coast to escape (“nigete!”) to higher ground – tidal waves up to five metres high could be rolling in near the quake’s epicentre, up in the Noto Peninsula.

By the time we get home, it’s clear that any tidal waves won’t be on the scale of those that devastated the Tōhoku region in March 2011. But what about the damage wrought by the earthquake itself? At this point, we have no idea …