Quake 2 Tokyo Tremor

Quake 2: Tokyo Tremor

It’s my third week in Tokyo and I was wondering when I might feel the Earth move.  Well, in the office last night (twelfth floor) it happened.  This is the second tremor I have experienced in my life; the first one was in Los Angeles and it shook me awake.  The Tokyo tremor was quite different.  It was a slow movement – I perceived it as a lump moving up through the floor for about a second.  The whole building rose up a bit and then shook from side to side.  The whole experience lasted no more than 4 seconds.  

The IT infrastructure (discounting the banks) in Japan seems to be excellent.  As soon as the quake had occurred, my colleague showed me the live data on a quake web-site.  It’s in Japanese, but there was a map of the country and a colour coding scheme for the size of the tremor – green through to red.  We hit a yellow (level 3 – not Richter scale).  A level 4 means that a building is likely to fall down and things fall off!

Another first for me.