So after living in Japan for over a month I finally felt my first earthquake. There have reportedly been several already but I hadn't noticed one yet.
This morning though, just before 10am, I was lying in bed why I noticed a slight rumbling in my apartment. I had never experienced in an earthquake before so it took me a few moments to realize what was going on.
At first I thought maybe there was a train going by my apartment.
Then I realized there are no trains that go by my apartment.
That's when it dawned on me there was an earthquake going on. It continued for maybe thirty seconds to one minute. It felt like the building continued to sway for a bit after the rumbling stopped. It's a bit of weird feeling having the earth shake. Every experience in my life up to this point has been building the intuition that the ground is solid, stable, and the point of reference for every moving thing. In an earthquake, unlike being on a rocking boat you don't have the sea or anything to give you a visual sense of how your swaying. You can just feel and hear the movement but you look around and there's no visual evidence that you're moving.
It didn't really feel too violent. There isn't even anything in our apartment that could rattle around. I figured it must have been a very mild earthquake, but then I learned it was actually magnitude 7.1 with the epicenter off the coast of northeastern Japan, the same place as the big one back in March. I'm sure the shaking was much more intense north of Tokyo. Apparently, it triggered a tsunami, but the wave was only 10cm high.
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