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There was a cluster of large earthquakes in northeastern Japan today; we didn't feel any of them here in Kyoto.

The main one, a magnitude 8.9 9.0 monster that would fit as the 7th largest earthquake in recorded history at the U.S. Geological Survey, just above the one in Chile last year (Wikipedia concurs), was luckily fairly far out to sea. It's a smaller earthquake closer to the mainland half an hour later that really rocked Tokyo. It's during that later/closer quake that I was first alerted to the situation here in Kyoto when a friend texted me “Big f#@*!ng earthquake. Currently under table.”

Then I went to my go-to source for Japanese real-time earthquake info, I saw that the larger one had hit earlier, a whopping 7 on the Japanese scale of local earthquake perception, which maxes out at 7: “Thrown by the shaking and impossible to move at will.”. I hadn't seen a shindo number that high since the big quake in Kobe in 1995 (one which I most certainly did feel).

For the first time since the World Wide Web became mainstream, I turned on NHK News in English this evening, four hours after the strongest quakes. The first subject was the transport gridlock in Tokyo, since most train services have shut down for the day and some bus lines as well.

Eventually they got to the tsunami damage, with some amazing video from helicopters of a tsunami washing over an area of sparsely populated farmland/countryside (see halfway down on this page). This particular area was hit an hour and a half after the quake, so people had plenty of warning, but in watching the video I see the video cut away just as the wave reaches a road with moving cars (yet the announcer makes no mention of it), so it's a bit eerie. I hope people are okay.

It seems not many have been hurt or killed, but there's a heck of a lot of damage, and tens of millions of people dependent on the transportation infrastructure are going to be hurting today and tomorrow. [UPDATE: I clearly read things wrong that first night.]

As I watch the news, every so often an automated system flashes up an alert of a new earthquake in the magnitude 5 and 6 range. We see these from time to time any time an even mild quake hits anywhere in Japan.

But wow, just as I'm writing the above, a different kind of alert just popped up... one very much in your face about a particularly big tremor just detected (but without additional info at this early stage), so it seems that it's still an ongoing.

They're also now showing live video of tsunami finally hitting some areas from the earlier tremors.

Anyway, we're fine here in Kyoto, far from the ocean and the epicenters of these quakes. Our prayers are with those affected.

The friend that texted me during the quake was up in Tokyo for what was supposed to have been a day trip for a conference, but he's stuck up there and the phones aren't letting calls go through, so I've spent the evening chatting via the iPhone WhatsApp SMS app, shuttling messages back and forth to his family who can't otherwise contact him.

That reminds me a bit of the situation after the big Kobe quake in 95... I couldn't make a phone call across the street, but I could email family in America. I took a few months from writing the first edition of my book to create a web site (yes, a web site in 1995) to help people outside of Japan find out about affected folks in Japan, including long lists of the 6,000+ dead. Hopefully such a thing won't be needed this time.

In the hour and a half since I started writing this post, there have been well over a dozen magnitude 5+ tremors, so I guess it remains to be seen...

Update: small update on the friend stuck in Tokyo. Rather than spend the night at the conference venue, he walked an hour to a friend's place. I just got a text that he had arrived safely, but the elevators have been stopped so he has to walk up the stairs. To the 53rd floor.