Earthquakes are few in Australia. In fact, until the year before Vince came to Australia, there had supposedly been no recorded earthquake casualties in Australia. Then, a quake had hit Newcastle with its epicentre at Hexham, killing several people at the Working Men's Club. Vince had passed this club every morning on his way to work during his six months in the city.
Vince himself had never felt any earth tremors until he arrived in Japan. He had been off the plane less than three hours and was in bed having a nap to recover from the eighteen hour trip when he felt his first jolt. He was later to discover that they felt a lot stronger if you were horizontal, but he leapt off his futon and staggered out into the kitchen. No one else, it appeared, had felt a thing. He read in the following day's newspaper that it had been a very minor earthquake indeed, only 2.2 on the Richter Scale at the Chiba house where he was staying. Vince knew that earthquakes got as high as 7.9 and that this scale increased with a logarithmic progression, which meant that 7.0 was far more intense than twice 3.5.
He had also heard that a major earthquake hit the Kanto region, which included Tokyo, Yokohama, Chiba and Saitama, every seventy years. Some believed that you could set your clock by it. As the last great Kanto earthquake had been at 11:58 a.m. on 1st. September, 1923, he calculated that the next big one would surely be in 1993 or 1994 some time.
He was soon to learn that the next great earthquake to hit the Tokyo area already had a name and that seismologists who monitored the earth's movements on a daily basis said matter-of-factly that the next big one was just a matter of time. One continental plate was sliding up under another on just the other side of the Izu peninsula and thus the next big one would be called the Great Tokaido Earthquake after the old road that linked Kyoto with old Edo.
One day, Vince's mother-in-law rang up and screamed, "Don't either you or Connie go into Tokyo, tomorrow!" She had been watching a television programme in which a seismological expert, who had predicted the exact date of the last San Francisco earthquake, had just announced that the Great Tokaido Earthquake was due to hit Tokyo, the following day.
The next day was a Sunday and Vince was able to assure Connie's mother that neither Connie nor he had any intentions of going anywhere near Tokyo until Monday. What he didn't tell his relieved mother-in-law was that Yokohama would be closer to the epicentre than the bigger city to the north.
How much closer, he didn't know until he went to the Yokohama Disaster Prevention Centre, which was coincidentally less than a hundred metres from the old Tokaido Road. There, he saw just how much of Yokohama had been destroyed by fire alone during the Great Kanto Earthquake, how much had been hit by the resulting tidal wave. He also saw just how much of Yokohama was now on dangerous reclaimed land. The old Tokaido Road had run along the shore front in early times, but now it was impossible to see Tokyo Bay at all from it. You could see the area around Yokohama station, which would have been under water a century earlier.
He went through photo after photo of crumbled buildings from the 1923 and other more recent earthquakes from all around the world. There were photos from the Phillipines of buildings almost identical to the four storey apartment block that he lived in, and one of them was lying face down on its side as if a giant had come along and just pushed it over.
If that wasn't enough, the upstairs section dealt with the dangers of fire and Vince thought uneasily how many of the casualties of the 1923 earthquake had died in the resulting fire. The big message seemed to be that it was safer to crawl away from flames than to run away from the smoke. Smoke, it turned out, moved faster than Nigel Mansell in a Formula One race.
If Vince thought he'd got the message already, some of the attendants at the Disaster Centre had spied him earlier on, and had other ideas. Almost bodily they pushed him into a movie theatre where he was shown a 20 minute long film about the victims of three major earth tremors in the first part of the 1980's. They'd all been in Japan, but all had done most damage in Northern Honshu and Hokkaido, nowhere near Tokyo and even further from Yokohama.
The message came through loud and clear - be prepared, store food and water beforehand, turn off the gas, fill up the bath and the washing machine, turn off the gas, don't panic, stay away from brick or stone walls, hide under tables, open the front door for an escape route, and know where your emergency evacuation area was. Thoroughly convinced, Vince took out a note pad and pen and jotted down these very points, determined to act on them as soon as he had left.
But the Disaster Centre attendants weren't finished with him yet. They led him into a strange machine that had a decor not unlike the dining kitchen area of his apartment with cupboards, a table and two chairs. He was informed that he was going to experience the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Vince wasn't too keen on the idea. It was Connie after all who loved roller coaster rides. "Isn't it enough," he pleaded, "that I'll experience the next big one?" But it was to no avail. One of the men cranked up the machine. Vince was standing in the centre of the room, wondering if he should get under the table as all the earthquake procedure manuals suggested you should do. He feared that it would be too tight a squeeze and so he just sank to his knees as if he were ready for prayer. At this point, just as the machine was being cranked up and hitting 5 on the Richter scale, two coach loads of tourists piled into the Disaster Centre and jostled each other for a glimpse of Vince being buffeted and bounced around. The earthquake simulator was like a train wreck in sound. The cupboard doors flew open and swung wildly and a plastic bucket fell out and bounced off Vince's head. He watched as it clattered across the floor and started to roll backwards and forwards around in erratic arcs. The chairs juddered and threatened to fall, but didn't until the very last minute when one of them grazed Vince's shin. He was lying down rather than kneeling by now and apart from this, his only injury was a wrenched shoulder which had come from trying to rest it against the side of the simulator.
The tremors had come in waves of intensity and Vince would just think that the experience was about to cease when the buffeting would start up anew. A roller coaster ride would have been preferable. Actually, Vince had experienced something like the earthquake simulator before. It was while he was hitch hiking on a dusty dirt road between Wollomombi and Jeogla in New South Wales, Australia. A man had pulled to the side of the road and told him: "There's no room in the car, but, if you want a lift, you can hop in the trailer." For the next 60 odd kilometres, he'd been bounced off every pot hole and swung around every bend or deviation in the road. It was certainly the roughest ride in his life. He had emerged as he did now from the earthquake simulator with every bone shaken. Admittedly, the two coach loads of tourists were applauding, but he did notice that none of them were game to experience their very own Great Kanto Earthquake. Perhaps, they thought that he was part of the display.
Vince feared that he might be shaking more from mounting terror than from the rattling of the earthquake simulator itself. He had felt the whole sensation first through his knees and then through each and every bone, joint and sinew of his body, which was rattling of its own accord when he was finally permitted to leave the Disaster Centre.
Connie was in no mood for surprises when Vince arrived home that evening. She didn't want any flowers. She wasn't in the mood for champagne or chocolate. She most certainly wasn't in the mood for 250 tin cans of Yokohama water with a half-life of five years, tins of fruit and fish, a fire extinguisher, a gas stove, a glow in the dark transistor radio, flares, a first aid kit with gaijin size band aids, a rope ladder and two crash helmets.
Indeed, it took some time for him to persuade her of the significance of being prepared for the next disaster, but, for a change, he won out on this one. Within a week, he was securing bookcases with brackets and putting special seals on each of the cupboard doors so that things wouldn't fall out.
As always seems to happen, there were no more earth tremors for quite some time, not even small ones, and Vince became quite blas? about the Great Tokaido Earthquake. In fact, he turned his attention to more immediate disasters. Three substantial typhoons hit Yokohama, that year. Vince was well aware that there was a saying in Japan that there were four things to be feared in the following order - first, earthquakes, second, lightning, third, fire, and fourth, fathers. Not a word about typhoons, he noticed.
Two of the most ferocious typhoons weren't officially typhoons. The typhoon season was at the end of summer - late August through to early October. One of the biggest typhoons had appeared in June when all rain was considered part of the tsuyu monsoon season and the other had arrived in November. Television weather forecasters across the nation had politely informed their audiences, that while these were very similar to typhoons and had almost identical properties, they were in fact not typhoons. Unlike earthquakes which could arrive at any time, if a typhoon were to do something as untyphoonly as arrive out of season, it jolly well didn't deserve to be called a typhoon in the first place. The tsuyu monsoon brought similar problems. One year, the steamy rain that hung like a mist that soaked you from all directions had arrived too early for the weather forecast to predict and therefore they decided that there must have been no monsoon season that particular year.
The most ferocious storm Vince did encounter in Japan, thankfully arrived in the typhoon season. It was Typhoon No. 20, nicknamed Typhoon Keiho, which unleashed its fury on Yokohama on 19th. September, 1991. Vince had seen at least a dozen so-called typhoons by this time and all of them had either rained a little or blown a little, but never had done both at the same time.
Vince's daytime job was cancelled for the afternoon and his students were told to go home early. He made his own way home just in time, not to get wet, but before the trains stopped moving altogether. He caught the last train to run between Nagatsuta and Kamoi. It crawled along at a pace that was hardly faster than walking. When he reached Kamoi station and crossed the railway bridge, he had had to wade through 18 inches of water on the other side.The Tsurumi was in flood. Vince was quite used to the rapid rise and fall of the Tsurumigawa and other Japanese rivers, but he had always thought that the high, built up embankments were a little excessive. When he passed it, the river was within five feet of the top embankment and with wind and rain still driving into his face, he could see the water cascading over the top and flooding the surrounding district.
Vince glimpsed the dairy milk chocolate brown waters with soccer balls, tree trunks, polystyrene vegetable boxes and the like bubbling and bouncing along in the swift current. If he thought that the rush would cleanse the river, he was wrong. Soccer fields, riverside farms, newly laid gate ball courts were all under a foot of silt, the following day when the waters had abated. It would take months to clean it up. Vince was amazed at how quickly the river had dropped back to its original level. Eighteen hours later, it was as if the frothing brown tumult had all been in his mind.
If anything, you could do less when faced by a typhoon than by an earthquake. You couldn't use a fire extinguisher. You couldn't escape it. You couldn't hide under the table. All you could do was stay indoors and pray that the roof didn't blow off.
Winter in Yokohama is the most pleasant of the four seasons. It is cold, but, on most days, the skies are a greyish blue. There is the odd snow storm, but these are rare and blizzards are non-existent. It was on a day in the middle of Japan's coldest month, February, that Vince's earthquake finally hit. It was 4.8 on the Richter scale or so Vince's once jarred bones told him.
It had been so long since he had seriously considered the possibility of the Tokaido Earthquake that he seemed at first to have forgotten the procedure he'd outlined for himself. Or perhaps, this was simply because it was shortly after 3 o'clock in the morning. Such was the immediate jolt that he was out of his bed in an instant and muttering between breaths each instruction as he performed it.
"Open the front door ... don't panic ... fill up the bath ... don't panic ... turn off the gas ... don't panic ... fill up the bath .... don't panic ... no, fill up the washing machine ... hide under the table ... don't panic ... fill up the bath ... no, crawl under the table ... don't panic ... don't panic ... don't panic ..." After Vince had crawled under the kitchen table, he noticed Connie's legs standing not two feet away from him, one foot tapping vigorously. He could feel the draft from the open door, could hear the bath and washing machine filling up. What else? "I'm not panicking," he explained from beneath the table.
"Vince," Connie bent down and looked straight at him. "the floor stopped shaking ten minutes ago." "Oh?" "I think you can come out now, dear. It's over." Vince reluctantly crawled out from under the table, turned off the taps and returned to his futon. He didn't sleep at all for the rest of the morning and was up early to inspect the damage. The brackets had stayed in place, the cupboards had stayed closed and he still had 250 undamaged cans of Yokohama water.
But Vince had proof. He noticed a long crack in the wall from ceiling to floor. It was proof that his apartment wouldn't fall flat on its face during an earthquake. No, it would break in half down the middle.