There was a big earthquake yesterday afternoon in central Mie Prefecture. The center was Kameyama City, about 40 miles northwest of Matsusaka. Matsusaka is my wife's hometown and where her parents live. In Matsusaka the magnitude was 4 and did not cause any damage there. However, Kameyama City had just a few injuries and a castle wall came down.
I have automatic earthquake alerts sent to my cell phone so when I saw the map on my cell I called my Mother-in-Law right away. She did not answer with the typical "Moshi-moshi" greeting. Instead she just said, right away, "We're OK!" after seeing my caller ID on her cell since she knew exactly what I was calling about.
Being from the Mid-West, the largest earthquake I ever experienced since moving to Japan was the Big Hanshin Quake in Kobe in January 1995. This was a 7 in Kobe and a 4 in Matsusaka then too. All I have to say is that I'm lucky I went to the bathroom before the quake hit because it scared the crap out of me.
The building I work at in Tokyo is built on shock absorbers to keep the building from coming down in up to a magnitude 7 quake. However, because of this, the slightest high wind can cause the building to sway. Whenever this happens I look around to see if any of my coworkers sense this. Unfortunately most of the time, I'm the only one.
The cell phone just paid for itself with the earthquake alerts. Because of this, I'll forgive the cell phone company for a while for not having a signal at our house.
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