Great East Japan Earthquake March 11, 2011.
A
Fifteen-Year-Old Boy’s Experience of the Magnitude 9.0 Earthquake
Poetic Ethnographer: Atsushi Iida
Participant: Earthquake survivor
Project: Exploring
earthquake and tsunami experiences
Source: Iida, A. (2021). ““I Feel Like I Can’t Avoid Dying”: A
Poetic Representation of a Survivor’s Traumatic Experience in the Great East
Japan Earthquake.” Qualitative Inquiry, 27(1), 45–58.
I.
On March 11, 2011,
At 2:46,
In Hamadori-district, Fukushima
All of a sudden,
A giant tremor hits me, Jun, and two other friends
in his house.
Big quake which I cannot stand
Big quake which my friend cannot stand
Big quake which we cannot move
I look outside from a room on the second floor
Houses are
tumbling down,
Roofs are falling
down,
Electronic poles
are breaking down
Right in front
of me…
I look outside from a room on the second floor
Cracks in the
ground here and there
Big houses
shifting from one place to another
Right in
front of me…
II.
I don’t know what to do
I don’t know how to run away
I don’t know what is happening
I don’t know anything at all
I’m about to walk toward a shelter
But,
I don’t know where it is
I don’t know how far it is
I don’t know anything at all
Ground cracking and subsidence
No cars,
No transportation,
No way to move
In such a difficult situation,
I ask one of my friends,
“How can we escape?”
“How should we escape?”
“Should we find our family now?”
“Should we wait for them here?”
We have no answer, but four of us thought that
“If we don’t leave here NOW, we will die soon!!”
Our decision for survival is
to walk toward a shelter
But, a dark, cold, long night is about to begin.
No light,
No smartphones,
No clue to escape
NOTHING we can do now…
All we can do is just to wait here outside the house
silently and safely
until the sun rises.
III.
Four of us are just standing
in the dark and cold garden outside the house.
Suddenly, a car comes close to us.
Lucky or not, it’s Toshi’s mother’s.
She’s just come home from work.
While I’m so relieved that she is with us,
this fatal situation never changes at all.
No idea where to go
No idea how to evacuate
No idea what is going on
We are all in panic.
My friends and I have no idea what to do
Toshi’s mother looks confused and even stressed
because she would have to take care of three more kids in
addition to hers.
“I keep all of you safe”, she talks to us.
“We will sit up all night here, but not in the house”,
she continues.
A continuous aftershock has us stay outside all night.
Bring blankets from the house
Make a fire outside
Save our energy
Sitting there till the next morning
“I will be able to go home tomorrow”, I talk to myself
“The situation will change and get better tomorrow”, I
persuade myself.
I truly believe so.
But, it is only the beginning of the dark, cold, and
hopeless days
