Julia Rose Duray
Reporter
Reporter
Friday, March 11, 2011 around 2:30 pm: I should be working on my research paper. I am doing English homework instead, which is a form of procrastination that has the clever appearance of productivity. I am currently sitting in the Humanities Resource Center of the American School in Japan, which essentially consists of a windowless room lined with Dell computers, and a disgruntled intern at a desk who will help you with your history homework but only when he’s finished drawing his latest web comic. He and the quiet anonymous underclassman in the corner are the only other people in the room, but they both have headphones in.
2:46 pm: Earthquakes are obviously not abnormal in Japan. In fact, I have come to welcome them by accepting the brief swinging of overhead lights and a few moments of wasted class time as everyone collectively holds their breath. Right now, the table and computer screen is shaking and seeing as no one else in the room has called attention to it, I consider the idea that it may be a mere figment of my imagination. By the time I finally do alert the disgruntled intern, the earthquake has gained strength. The three of us stand up and look at each other, all uncertain of where exactly to go or what to do. Someone in the hallway tells us to duck under the tables. We are told that this is a “big one.” Maybe it is even “the” big one. The one they had been waiting for after years of uncomfortable geological peace. I feel my breath grow heavy as the shaking grows violent. I cannot shake the sensation that the world is on the verge of a physical rift. I notice pieces of plaster falling from the ceiling and consider what it would be like to be buried by rubble. Mid-panic attack I consider the instantaneousness of death.
3:00 pm: The entire school is sprawled out on the football field in evacuation-fashion, free from any possible tottering buildings or trees. Everyone is shaken and the air is past the point of a comfortable chill. As they begin handing out blankets the school continues its light chatter. One of my friends is playing a Nintendo DS. Another is crying. “I heard she was in a bathroom stall when it happened, can you imagine how freaky that would be?” I have come to the conclusion that aftershocks are less scary if you close your eyes and pretend you’re on a rollercoaster.
Saturday, March 12, 12:30 am The eight-hour bus ride home had allowed me to forget about the fact that I had just experienced a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. The train lines were down, but the only signs of any sort of disaster were the lines of Tokyo-ites on the sidewalk now forced to walk home from work and the painfully stagnant traffic. There had been something so deceivingly safe about a hot bus full of middle-schoolers. Having finally reached my house, I think about musical rehearsal I have the next day and the charity concert later that evening. I open my laptop to the NY Times homepage. I am suddenly bombarded by waves of disturbing images, miles of destruction, tiny wooden houses crushed and compressed into the leveled-out countryside. Suddenly I realize that the scope of the earthquake that had caused ultimately no destruction in Tokyo. I realize that I am not a victim.
Sunday, March 13 1:00 am: After a day of agonizing over the possibility of nuclear fallout, poring over English translations of Japanese press releases and comparing prices of respirators, I have reached the conclusion that if, in fact, a nuclear disaster does occur, it is entirely out of my control.
Monday, March 14 12:30 pm We have cancelled our lavish Vietnamese vacation plans. Aside from the fact that it seemed pretty excessive in a time of international crisis, our family had, above all, simply wanted to go home. And New Canaan had always been the only place we could really call home. 16 horrifiyingly tumultuous hours of turbulence later and here I was, driving home from JFK, and as I sat listening to Regina Spektor or some other equally melancholy acoustic indie music, I felt a mixture of relief and guilt. Even more than that, a deep reflection on the gray sky, increasingly familiar buildings that lined the tree-ridden highway, the English on the radio, and my constant redefinition of the word “home”. Familiarity was comforting, but a this point I had no concept of long-term happiness. I wasn’t even sure how long I would be here. Right now it was enough to retreat into this perfect bubble, unsure of when I would be resurfacing.
Thursday, April 14 11:20 am I am talking to my friend, the hipster, overly apathetic one. “The earthquake changed us,” he says of our student body. “Knowing that I could die today, in this moment–it’s changed the way I look at things”. Of course I knew that it would. It had certainly changed me. And of course I regretted not being part of the post-traumatic love-fest that I knew was going on across the ocean at the American School in Japan right now. I had come to realize that part of me wanted them to be miserable still so that I would be justified in having left them behind. So I would seem less neurotic. But no, things were actually okay at ASIJ. The musical was going on, prom was going on, the student body was furiously folding paper cranes, sending care packages to victims in Sendai–they were the picture of community recovery and I was an outsider, once again. I had to come to terms with the fact that I would never be going back, and that their world would keep spinning on despite me having left it.
But despite feeling somewhat isolated from my own high school community, I have been surprisingly welcomed back into the New Canaan one. People have changed since I remember them last, and I expect them to, but in the larger scope of shifting tectonic plates, I’ve found the NCHS community to be refreshingly calm and beautifully predictable. This was a place that in middle school, I had found too small, homogeneous and constricting. I had assumed that breaking back into small-town suburbia would be even harder than assimilating into Japanese culture. I’d found it easy to get used to the excessively-clean Tokyo subway system and often-disturbingly well-mannered Japanese people, but could I get used to being driven every morning to what I had perceived to be a stereotypically American suburban public high school? A transition that I had so dreaded has in fact turned out to be much less scary than I had prepared for. As usual, my preconceptions had been unfounded and incorrect. The people I’ve met here have been warm, passionate, and creative, and I couldn’t think of a better place to have to finish off my senior year. Finally, I feel welcomed and safe, and for once, have learned to appreciate the stillness of my hometown.
But despite feeling somewhat isolated from my own high school community, I have been surprisingly welcomed back into the New Canaan one. People have changed since I remember them last, and I expect them to, but in the larger scope of shifting tectonic plates, I’ve found the NCHS community to be refreshingly calm and beautifully predictable. This was a place that in middle school, I had found too small, homogeneous and constricting. I had assumed that breaking back into small-town suburbia would be even harder than assimilating into Japanese culture. I’d found it easy to get used to the excessively-clean Tokyo subway system and often-disturbingly well-mannered Japanese people, but could I get used to being driven every morning to what I had perceived to be a stereotypically American suburban public high school? A transition that I had so dreaded has in fact turned out to be much less scary than I had prepared for. As usual, my preconceptions had been unfounded and incorrect. The people I’ve met here have been warm, passionate, and creative, and I couldn’t think of a better place to have to finish off my senior year. Finally, I feel welcomed and safe, and for once, have learned to appreciate the stillness of my hometown.
