The Phone Goes off...

Mercy--I was just about to start writing this post about the several quakes we've had today... and my phone went off "whoop!whoop!whoop!" before I could start typing.  Nagano prefecture--nothing big this time, though.  Fourth quake today. The JMA shows it to have been a weak 5 on the Shindo scale.  I'm not sure why my phone went off--looking at the JMA map, the shock waves didn't come anywhere near this far east.  Somebody must have thought the waves would travel farther, and sent the warning over the cell phone system...

The first one was this morning--while I was on Skype with a friend.  Number one there says "In Fukushima prefecture earthquake beginning".  According to the Japan Quake Map, that one was a 6.2M at a depth of 13km--which must be why it was as strong here as it was.  Shook the house pretty good (of course, we're on the fourth floor, so we feel the swaying more than somebody on the first floor), but nothing fell over.  Interestingly, the quake map shows a 6M at around 2pm that I know I felt, but the phone didn't go off.   Hmmm...  Must be hard to predict how far shock waves will travel.

I'm up to 15 now (photo is already outdated as of this writing) on the quake history list (it only shows quakes that were big enough to trigger the warning system).  Everyone up in Fukushima, Iwate, and Miyagi must have phones full of warnings.  Watching the news with my husband last night, I jumped because I heard the phone go off... then realized it wasn't mine, it was footage from a refugee shelter in Fukushima shot just as a quake hit.  You could hear someone's phone going off in the video footage.  Children were crying in fright--I wanted to reach right through the TV and hold them 'til the shaking stopped.  Those school buildings must be sturdy.  They've been hit by goodness knows how many 5M, 6M, and even 7M aftershocks... yet still they stand.  One of these days I'll have the foresight to have the video camera out when my phone goes off.  But in the meantime-- go visit my brother-in-law Matt's place at Hellion Gallery.  He had just hung the last picture for his upcoming show yesterday when a 6.6M quake hit off the coast at 5:16pm.  He realized after a few seconds that he actually had his camera in his hand, and began shooting.  The show is being held in a bar--so all the wine glasses became quake-chimes.  (You can also see the Blaine Fontana piece that I like so much when he turns around--the long wood piece with bonsai on top.   He uses all recycled wood for his sculptures--really beautiful!  Blaine will be doing recycled wood sculptures for the upcoming TED conference scheduled for June in Portland--can't wait to see what he does for it!).
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Ame Ni Mo Makezu

My brother-in-law, Matt Wagner over at Hellion Gallery , put up this video of Watanabe Ken ("Letters From Iwo Jima" and "The Last Samurai" for which he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) reading Ame Ni Mo Makezu (Strong Against the Rain) which I found both simple and powerful.  It's a poem that expresses the Japanese "gambare" spirit well, I think (there are subtitles accompanying the video).  Matt is putting on a show next month in Nakameguro, part of the proceeds of which will be donated to Japan Red  Cross or Peace Winds Japan--click over to his site and scroll down to see an *amazing* piece by Blaine Fontana that will be in the show.

(The drawing in the medallion in the center of the blog header, in case you were wondering, is a stylized drawing from a photo of Cici on Christmas morning in her undershirt wearing a holster and holding toy six-shooters from Grandpa.  Has to have exactly what her brothers have...)

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At the store yesterday, I ran into a friend.  We stood talking about how we both thought the hoarding of bottled water was both unwarranted and silly for this area, not to mention the negative impact it will likely have on the Tohoku prefectures.  She, upon noticing me glance at her bag (only one--in the usual small-amount-daily style of shopping), took out the spinach lying on top and said she bought it on purpose.  Just because people were overreacting--and because there's no reason at this point to avoid it.  The detected levels just don't warrant the hysteria (though the NHK announcers, to be  sure, are anything but hysterical...).  Less than a banana.  I-san, you *rock*.  Eat that spinach with a big glass of tap water!
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Gambarimasho, Nihon!