It’s a new day. The sun is shining 🙂 And we have been woken up by a few minor quakes during the night. But nothing compared to the one at 3 pm yesterday.

This is the result of the earthquake at home. No big damages but quite a lot of things had moved around.

The frige, for instance, had moved about 10 cm from the wall. A shelf in the kitchen had moved about 15 cm as indicated by my hand in one of the pictures. And the bookshelf had moved 5 cm sideways though I cannot moved even 1 mm back because it is too heavy.

But on the other hand, the power of the earth is quite a lot bigger than what I have. Even though I spend some time at the gym 😉 At wikipedia they compared 8.9 on the Richter scale to 336 megatons of TNT. We were quite lucky we were not at the epicenter.

Now I have walked home. I learned something about automatic bicycle parking machines today. They don’t work after an earthquake. I just hope it is my bike that is popping out once they start working again, and not an old rusty lady’s bike 😉

Chie also walked home as subways and trains closed down. And they just announced on TV that they will remain closed down for the rest of the day. And we were not the only ones walking home. I have never seen so many people walking, except maybe in Ginza during sales 😀

Anyway, the apartment was quite OK. No major things broken. Furnitures had moved around and a lot of things had fallen down from shelfs and so on. I’ll update with some pictures later.

They are saying this is the biggest earthquake that hit Japan since recording started and the 8th biggest in the world since recording started [wikipedia]. 8.9 in magnitude on the Richter scale at the epicenter and 5 or so around the Tokyo area. After the first quake hit us the building I was sitting in was shaking almost continuously for 1.5 hours. And as I am writing this at 7:40 pm there are still some minor quakes in the aftermath.

For the latest earthquake data in Japan you can have a look at: Japanese Meteorological Agency. By the way, the numbers you see in the map above is JMA Seismic Intensity scale which differs from the Richter scale.

The building where my office is located is still swaying after the biggest earthquake I have experienced so far. Haven’t had time to check where the center was or at what magnitude but we really felt this one in Tokyo.