Sometime between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. Saturday before last, Mary Simmons sent her brother in Atlanta a text message from her Tokyo apartment: It said, “Big earthquake in Japan. Epicenter not Tokyo. I”m safe and warm.”
Less than 12 hours earlier, Simmons had been on the fifth floor of the 14-story building in downtown Tokyo where she works as an English translator for a law firm when the 9.0 magnitude earthquake hit. The epicenter was 230 miles northeast of the city.
There had been tremors all day, and when the quake rumbled, Simmons and her fellow office workers waited patiently for it to stop. It only got worse.
“It felt like it went on for five minutes,” she said.
Simmons and coworkers worried themselves with keeping files in their shelves and cabinets while others screamed and crawled under desks.
“In the countryside we would have run outside,” she said, “but in Tokyo we were surrounded by skyscrapers.”
Simmons has lived in Japan since 2004 when she went to a rural village to teach English. This was the third major earthquake she”s experienced since moving to Japan.
“I was near the epicenter for the first two, but this was worse.”
“It was sort of a calm chaos,” Simmons said, describing her office when the shaking stopped. “You could feel the emotion coming off everybody. I was breathing heavy and shaking.”
The images are vivid, and Monday afternoon, 10 days later and back in her hometown of Columbus, Simmons described them in photographic detail.
After the tremors stopped, she ran up two stories to the executive suite to check on a lone secretary there. Like everyone else, the secretary was trying to restore order.
“It sounds silly now, but we didn”t know what to do,” she said.
The two women picked up and then washed dishes together. Later she and an coworker went out to check on a frightened lawyer, who uses a wheelchair, alone in his downtown condominium.
She describes the scene in the streets: “There was just this eerie feeling. Nobody knew what to do. People everywhere were looking at their cell phones — none of them were working. They were having muffled conversations about their cell phone providers.”
Simmons was able to hail a cab. Every time there were aftershocks the driver stopped his vehicle.
“Some buildings were swaying,” Simmons said. “I tried not to look.”
She didn”t realize how much they were swaying until she saw news footage later.
Later there would be no taxis, trains or hotel rooms. While other workers were making plans to overnight in the office building, Simmons and a coworker, who lived near her, set out for Simmons” apartment, 11 kilometers away.
Wearing a dress, thin hose, “tiny little walking shoes,” and gloves, Simmons and her friend joined what she described a “horde of people” walking together. Despite near freezing temperatures and the occasional aftershock, Simmons says the three-mile trek with the crowd was fun.
After a Thai dinner and a stop to buy a bottle of wine, the two women were able to catch a train for the remainder of their journey, arriving at Simmons” apartment about 1 a.m. There they enjoyed the wine, watched news reports and sent e-mails and texts to friends and family.
That Saturday, not wanting to be alone, Simmons spent the weekend with an English couple, who are friends.
She said she talked to friends in Japan Friday who told her things in Tokyo were essentially back to normal. There are roving power outages and you can”t buy milk, toilet paper, bread and spinach.
Simmons is not surprised by the orderliness of the Japanese people in the wake of the earthquake, or the lack of crime.
She says after Hurricane Katrina the principal of the school where she taught could not comprehend the looting in New Orleans.
“He said, ”You can”t do that,”” Simmons said. “To my knowledge there has not been one crime (in Japan).
“I love the culture,” she says. “They grew up thinking of systems, working together. We grew up having to express our opinions.”
“I think Japan is in a terrible situation now, but they are resilient. They have been burned to the ground, and this isn”t their first earthquake.”
Simmons said she was going to call her boss Monday night to see when she should report to work.
“If he says I need to get back this week, I”ll get on a plane,” she said.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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