Narrowly Missed Japan’s Largest Earthquake

So I’ve spent a good bit longer in Japan this trip than I had expected.

I did my meetings in Tokyo on Monday. Shinkonsen to Osaka Monday night. A slew of meetings and dinners through Friday morning when I was planning on heading back to San Francisco.

Now normally, I fly directly out of Kansai in Osaka but due to United being ridiculously over priced on their international flights of late, I took ANA. That means, I was flying through Narita (Tokyo) via Itami, which is the smaller airport in Osaka.

So I’m on my domestic flight from Itami to Narita and we’re on final approach to land in Tokyo. All of a sudden, the pilot pulls up and comes on the PA. He informs us that there has just been a massive earthquake in Tokyo and that we’re turning around and heading back to Osaka.

Obviously, we don’t know any more details than that. I’m thinking, great, I’m gonna miss my connecting flight.

We land back at Osaka and I fire up the iPhone while I get in line with the rest of the folks on the flight to see what alternate arrangements could be made. A couple quick Google searches on “Tokyo Earthquake” turns up reports of 9.0, 8.9 and 8.8 quakes (turns out 8.9 was the right number). Ok, this is a bit more serious than I’d thought and had my flight been scheduled to arrive even 15 minutes later, I’d have been on the ground in the middle of it.

To understand the magnitude of this disaster, this is the largest quake in Japan’s history and the 8th largest in the recorded history of the world. And as bad as the earthquake was, the resulting tsunamis have been much more devastating.

Resulting tsunami’s washed away entire villages around Tokyo. This footage is terrifying.

Damn good thing the flight turned around.

Thankfully, one of my Japanese co-workers was also on this flight, Tommy. We quickly ascertained that we weren’t going anywhere. At the same time we checked on some of our other colleagues who were either in transit via Tokyo or already in Tokyo. Thankfully, all were either safe or also being turned around back to Osaka (Kaori specifically).

I updated my Facebook with the news that I was ok. I was getting loads of text inquiries and Facebook inquiries so that was by far the easiest way to spread the word (thanks all for your concern).

We headed back to the office to plot our options. Tommy sorted out flights for us the following Monday and we’d asked my admin to see what she could do the next morning US time. Kaori sorted us out some rooms at the Hotel Brighton. Hotel rooms in general were in very short supply.

We had several of our Tokyo office folks similarly stranded in Osaka so we all went out for a Korean BBQ dinner and then retired.

The next day, Tommy, Sekiguchi-san and headed out to Kyoto to see some temples and stuff with the trains having now resumed service, at least in this part of the country. Now I’ve rarely had any time to actually “see” Japan so this was exciting. A quick 1 hour train ride and we were in Kyoto which is about as traditional a Japanese city as you could possibly imagine.

I’m pretty tired today. I’m certain we walked literally more than 20 miles yesterday over our 12 hour journey. I should have had a silly trip meter app running on my iphone to verify.

I’ve put up a ton of pictures from my crappy camera in this set.

Here’s a few cool ones:

As I head back to SF today (hopefully) I’m going the same route (Itami -> Narita -> San Francisco). Unfortunately, as I write this, the government has confirmed that there’s a significant meltdown risk at the nuclear reactor in Fukushima, not too far from Tokyo. Fingers crossed they can get it contained, most importantly for the people of Fukushima.

Since the big quake, there have been more than 500 aftershocks at 5.0 or higher… and 50 of those were 6.0 or higher. Very scary times in Japan and it’s going to take a long time for this to be recovered from.