Day 1 Friday March 11, 2011
It was
graduation day. After the ceremony the
students had gone home early so only we teachers were left at school and
another teacher and I were talking to each other about the faculty party
scheduled for that night when the shaking started. I
instinctively took shelter in the doorway out of the teachers room. For the past year my rule had been that if
the shaking did not knock anything down, I would not worry. The first tremor knocked everything over,
including me. After the shaking ended I
could not move for a minute. The lights
went off. The shaking stopped and the
office was a mess but the building appeared to be undamaged. The principal came out of his office and
began to direct everything. I went back
to my desk to sort things out when the next tremor struck and one of the
Japanese teachers told me all had to leave the building so we ran out onto the
baseball field. It was snowing and I
hadn’t tried to get my coat. The shaking
continued. Some of the teachers got out
their cell phones and turned on a web browser or television in order to get the
news and we heard about the tsunami. The
teachers kept using a word I had never heard before but could understand that
translates to “great tsunami.”
