After the first few seconds of shaking I knew that this was going to be a big one. In fact, along with just about everybody else in Japan at the time, I had never experienced such a long and severe earthquake. At the precise moment of the earthquake I was on the second floor of my firm's headquarters in Tokyo together with 6 clinician customers. One of them was just about finished with a presentation, and we all laughed that it made quite an impact. He called it his "jishin-saku" which is a play on words in Japanese. While the Chinese characters are different, the Japanese pronunciation of the word "jishin" meaning "confidence" and "jishin" meaning "earthquake" is similar. Thus, while the real meaning of the phrase "jishin-saku" is "masterpiece," the intended meaning at the time was "earthquake piece."
As we were wondering whether we should go outside, our small study group stopped for a moment before beginning again. It was not long, however, before we decided to take a break in order to access news websites to learn more about the earthquake. One look out the window, moreover, confirmed that this was no ordinary earthquake, as many people came out of the surrounding office buildings to get out into the open. Because the elevators had immediately shut down, several of my colleagues who were up on the 6th and 7th floors of our office came down the stairs to tell us about how scary it had been higher up.
Along with just about everybody else in the eastern part of Japan, I tried using my mobile telephone right away. I tried calling my wife and sons only to get a constant busy signal. I knew that my wife was probably at home up on the 17th floor of our apartment in Yokohama, and my children were at school. While it took a while to get through, the only means for communicating that worked was e-mail. It made us think how dependent we all are on technology and how vulnerable the mobile telephone networks are.
