I woke up shouting.
After six years in Japan I thought I knew earthquakes. I'd felt the earth move many times and was used to seeing flashlights and helmets in hotel rooms and offices. You learn how to read magnitude with your body. Small quakes hum, medium ones rattle, and then there are the big ones.
It was January 17th, 1995. I was living with my girlfriend in an old wooden teahouse perched on a hillside on the outskirts of Kyoto. The house had no indoor plumbing and sat outside normal infrastructure. When the quake hit an hour before sunrise it suddenly felt provisional.
Glass jars came off shelves and shattered. Disoriented, I yelled half intelligibly that we should get in a doorway. We held on as everything continued to move. When it was over the house was a mess and the cats were gone — we wouldn't see them again for three days.
Our little home survived. But much of Kobe, 60 miles away, did not.
Read the full essay on Substack →
https://open.substack.com/pub/splendidtorch/p/account-88888-is-everywhere-now
—
PS — I'm moving my writing to Substack. If you'd like to keep getting new essays as soon as they publish, subscribe there. This list will be winding down over the coming weeks.
Bob Gower
Founder @ Splendid Torch
Adaptive Organizations for an Unstable World