Dark Side of the Moon

At precisely14.46 on 11 March 2011 the Great Tohoku Earthquake, a massive quake with a magnitude of 9.1 struck just off the northeast coast of Japan. I was in my office in Tsukiji, which is located on land reclaimed from Tokyo Bay in the eighteenth century.

I was writing a brochure for a famous camera maker when the office started gently shaking. This happens all the time in Tokyo, so I paid no attention to it. But the trembling did not stop; it grew in intensity and violence until things started falling off shelves and sliding around the office. It continued for almost five minutes and shook the building so badly that it was impossible to walk across to the door.

I stopped working on the brochure and sent out a frivolous email to everyone in my address book, stating briefly that they could be lucky enough to be reading my final words. Meanwhile, the girls in the office were hiding under desks and screaming until the tremors stopped; then there was a rush for the ladies toilet. We had only a few minutes to survey the damage before the next shock struck, and this one was even more severe than the first one. I managed to get across to a window and saw that people were streaming out of buildings and running for evacuation areas; so we did the same.

Apart from the internal damage brought on by the shaking of the building in which I working—shelves broken and books, files, etc. scattered all over the room—I did not see much damage, but I knew there would be carnage somewhere. From the moment of the first tremor, the mobile networks went down; so I had no idea what was really happening. Police cars, fire engines and ambulances were racing around with sirens blazing, which gave the impression that there were incidents all over the city.

The evacuation area was a park located next to St. Luke’s International Hospital. It was packed. There must have been thousands of people there, all standing around in groups that I assumed to be company-based. And, as far as I could see, I was the only foreigner, which was ironic, I thought, as we were standing on the site of one of the earliest foreign settlements in Tokyo. One corner of the park was, in fact, formerly the location of a brothel that catered solely to the foreigners.

The tremors continued. Buildings, street lamps and even trees shook violently at regular intervals, and I realized that we had experienced a ‘big one’, but that we had survived. There was no question of going back to the office, so I went to a convenience store and bought a can of chu-hi, which constitutes sho-chu (white liquor) and fruit juice. Other shoppers—the store was doing good business—were more circumspect and were buying things such as water, lunch boxes, bakery products and chocolate.

I joined my colleagues in the park, but after I had finished my chu-hi, with the ground still shaking badly I left and decided to walk home. I dropped in to the convenience store again to pick up a couple of cans of chu-hi for the walk home. The store was still crowded, but most of the shelves were empty. While waiting in line to pay for my drinks I heard a number of people ask for underwear, and I noticed a long line in front of the toilet. I also heard the store clerk say that underwear was sold out, so I assumed that quite a few people must have been spooked by the earthquake.

I often walked home, and it normally it took me about 45 minutes, if I walked at a brisk pace and only drank three cans of chu-hi or beer on the way, but on 11 March it took me almost two hours. The streets were packed with people who had fled their offices; so it was slow going. All convenience stores were crowded and people were coming out of them were loaded up with all kinds of things to eat or drink.

When I got home and switched on the TV, I was shocked to see the tsunami wrecking coastal cities north of Tokyo. The official death toll started at just above 1,300 , but it was rising drastically as the evening went on. The aftershocks continued relentlessly all night and most of the next day, with some severe and some just a ripple.

I received phone calls or emails from friends all over the world, who were worried about me after seeing the devastation on TV. It was good to know that my friends were thinking of me and the potential danger I was in. Although Tokyo did not bear the brunt of the earthquake, some of the tremors were quite heavy but this did not worry me at all. I knew that if we were to be hit with the big one that Tokyo has been promised, there would be nothing we could do about it, so I went to out to a pub to enjoy a few pints of draught beer just in case.

In the days following the earthquake, I walked from my office in Tsukiji to my home in Roppongi every evening.. I had a feeling of déjà vu every time I did that, but for some days, although I wracked my brains, I couldn't figure out where the feeling was coming from. Then, one morning, as I opened my eyes to a shochu-fuelled hangover, I experienced satori.

The Tokyo of March 2011, I realized, resembled Berlin of the 1970s, when the city was divided in two. I lived in the West but worked in the East. The sun shone evenly on both sides of the city; so during the day there was very little difference—except for the advertizing billboards. In the West, the glitzy billboards advertised the latest in the line of automobiles such as Mercedes and Porsche, as well global brands like Coca Cola, Channel and Gucci; in the East, the giant austere billboards hosted huge photos of the Worker of the Month and text listing the achievements of the “Working Class Hero of the Deutsche Demokratic Republik.”

But when the sun went down, the difference between the two halves of the divided city was stark. The West lit up with neon while the East disappeared into the darkness. In the words of the song by the singer-songwriter Paul Joses (Scottish-born but then resident of West Berlin), “the red side of the Berlin Wall was like the Dark Side of the Moon.”

Tokyo was by no stretch of the imagination like the East Berlin of the 1970s — quite the contrary, it was still very much a vibrant and exciting city — but there were certain similarities. Because of power shortages, there were very few flashing neon lights and store fronts were dark while the interiors were on minimum lighting. But this is because everyone understood the need to save on electricity while the country was experiencing a crisis.

By mid afternoon each day, many of the shelves in convenience stores were empty of milk, bakery products and the like. Large bottles of mineral water were just not available, beer was scarce and getting scarcer, and even cans of chu-hi were in short supply. The reason for the beer shortages, we were told, was that the major domestic brewers all had breweries in the Tohoku region. But I heard no excuses for the shortages of chu-hi.

Nevertheless, despite the dimming down (of the nighttime skyline, I mean), and the shortages of essentials like beer and chu-hi, Tokyo was not at all in crisis; nor was East Berlin in the 1970s. The difference between the two was that the situation in Tokyo was just a temporary phenomenon, while for East Berlin it was the norm, and Tokyo soon lit up again.