The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

Previous story: The Wave

At about midnight between the 10th and 11th, I got a phonecall. I don't know how my mom had found out about the quake, but I'm glad she let me know right away. My initial memories are fuzzy. I think I probably checked the news first, but it's hard to say. Pretty quickly I was on Facebook, learning from my friends Andy and Ewan a little more about what happened. When I realised how badly Tokyo was shaking and where the epicenter was, panic started to set in. Thank the great Whatever that Maiko, an old student of mine from Icchu and one whose family I know very well, is staying in Comox right now on a 10 month exchange. I remember having a lot of troubles with what to say to get her attention; you can't say hello, you can't ask if everything is OK because it's not. I think in the end I just said "Maiko..."; she replied back with something I won't forget. "Yabai", literally just "this is not good". The understatement of it all, funny in any other situation, kinda snapped me back into reality and stopped the panic.

I spent the next couple hours contacting friends online who had been in Japan together. We were all awake. I don't know how everyone found out so quickly, but we all knew. I talked to Nicole, Andy, Ewan, Bill, some people I haven't talked to since I left. There were a lot of wall posts and chat windows going on and it seemed a bit clunky. There wasn't much to say, because none of us knew what was happening. Footage of the tsunami wasn't out yet as I recall... that didn't hit until the next day, although Natori was slipping into the ocean as we talked. I think if Maiko's older brother Sota hadn't made it online to say he was OK, Maiko and I wouldn't have been able to get to bed, but he got that message out and I managed to sleep a little.

The next morning we didn't go to work. I watched the Japanese news a lot, trying to figure out what was going on. My Japanese was really rusty, and I only got a little out of it. I made a few misassumptions about what I heard, and that makes me sad now. By around noon the feeling of helplessness and guilt was getting overpowering; I was a few steps away from just slumping down and giving up for a day or two. I decided to get my friends together in a facebook group to discuss what maybe we could do to help, once the chaos had subsided a bit. I figured planning might make us feel better.

I added fifteen people to the group when it started. By the end of that day, there were three hundred.

The group didn't hold its intended purpose very long at all. The first few posts to come out were links to Japanese news articles. People started posting summaries and translations far better than what I could do. With dozens of people watching English and Japanese media and posting what they were hearing, we began to develop a much clearer integrated picture of what was happening in the area. The media was starting to take their eyes off of Tokyo and settle them on where the real disaster was, as well.

Over the next few days, that Facebook group went through rapid growth phases. News became second fiddle to reporting and tracking missing people and status of places. As we began to reestablish contact with our friends and families, we used the group to share information. With the rapid growth of data, I set up a wiki to hold information where it could be searched. Man, that took a lot of pushing; I didn't realise how many people don't know how a wiki works! Thanks to tireless efforts of friends, it's a good wiki now.

I learned something incredible. The internet has something I think of as the "4chan effect": large groups of people online can form a single mind and work cohesively towards a goal without any kind of leadership (I would never make any kind of claim to being a leader of that group. Aside from admin rights, which I've maybe used twice, I'm just another member). Usually the goal is to spam a server or annoy someone. For us, the goal was to help Miyagi. Somehow a group of seven hundred random internet people with nothing more than the love of a place connecting us managed to coordinate search efforts with volunteers in the disaster area, helping them to locate other foreigners who don't have families nearby to look out for them. We found maps of traversable roads, lists of emergency shelters, last known locations, photos; we set up twitter networks to alert the internet-capable regions to the people we were looking for; we hunted through lists of found survivors; we scanned the news for glimpses of lost loved ones. We couldn't be there, but we damn well could do something. Survivor's guilt is a powerful motivational force.

There have been other strange effects. I never read the news now. It's all about the Fukushima reactor, which frankly is trivial as far as I'm concerned. I'm not going to waste more energy worrying about a disaster that might happen when there's a disaster that already has happened, to my friends, right there. Even when it's not about the reactor it's about the toll of dead and missing; I banned that from the Facebook group early on. What good does it do us to know how many bodies are in the gymnasiums? We knew it was bad. We decided to move on. Despite hardly ever reading or watching the news, I would be surprised if I don't have as good and clear a picture of what is going on as anyone who hasn't been there can.

Through it all, I kept in touch with Maiko. She heard from her family; good news, thankfully. She still worries about her school; it was in Tagajo, and Tagajo got wiped out. Class was not in session. I don't have high hopes for all her friends... I can't. For a natural optimist, being forced into this kind of pessimism is awkward.

Over the next few days, as power returned to Natori with alarming speed, we heard back from friends. First, Hiromi Iizawa and the Yamadas via their children overseas. Then, Nagisa Aizawa through city hall let me know everyone was okay there. That lead to a strange experience. I found a Person Finder entry for Chizuko Nakajima shortly after I had learned she was all right, and followed up on it to find it was a teacher from Sooke whom I'd met during their exchange to Natori. Since then I've tried to keep Sooke integrated into our network of foreigners as well. Word kept pouring in to us, via strange sources. Jen befriended the niece of a woman she'd studied calligraphy with, through their shared contact over Itsuko's status. We heard from a friend's cell that while she was okay and had power, the stores were still rationed to almost nothing.

The biggest breakthrough for me was finally reaching Eiko Saito when the powerlines and landlines came back up. Knowing the Saito family was (for the most part) all right broke much of the remaining guilt I was feeling. It will never go away entirely, but I have been able to get on with things since then. The next day, we made contact with Meg Watanabe; that washed away a bit more of our concern. We still have people to worry about, but strangely, fearing for our friends has become such a part of our daily lives this week that it's almost going to be strange when we know what has happened with all of them.

I don't think our common language has any words for the emotions we've felt going through this. We, the displaced, don't feel right being away, but we also know it's wrong to wish we were there. We can't claim what we're experiencing is worse because it patently isn't, yet we wish it was so we wouldn't have this dichotomy of safety and fear. We don't know how to talk to the people around us, because the ones who aren't bereaved so often don't understand why it affects us so strongly. In the light of everything that's happened, the everyday concerns of the world around us seem so trivial that it upsets us that they can even be mentioned. "How can you worry about school? Don't you know Yuriage is dying?"