Third report: Ms. Nathalie Brandenberg

Life in Tokyo (cont.)

Learning Japanese and its implications in daily life:

Three month after having started studying Japanese language, I was able to understand, speak and communicate much more with the people in my laboratory and in my daily life. This new tool appeared to be a keystone to make my life easier in Japan for different reasons which I ll describe here; the first and most important effect was that, Japanese people were warmer with respect to me, because they felt I was trying to really understand Japan. Secondly, as soon as I was able to follow the life of the lab, I started to feel much more part of the laboratory than what I was before, which was a important relief. Finally, in a more practical point of view, being able to ask for what I needed and being understood appeared to be incredibly convenient and I was suddenly able to solve my problems much more rapidly than during my first months. But, in the other hand as soon as I was able to speak, even a little bit, I started to realize how Japanese relationships are complicated, something which is well assessable by understanding Japanese.

Tokyo and earthquakes:

This year 2011 entered in Japan’s history because of the Great Tohoku Earthquake, of magnitude 9.1 on the Richter scale. Before, I felt about three earthquake. Although already impressive for a European, these earthquakes were negligible compared to the Great Tohoku earthquake. Indeed feeling such an earthquake has been very difficult to handle psychologically and physically, it shocked me for all my life. For the first time in my whole life, during the biggest shock, I was wondering if in the following minutes I would be still alive just because the building was moving so much that I was sure it would collapse. The weekend following the earthquake was one of the hardest I lived so far also. After the first shock we had more than 500 aftershocks, of variable amplitude. The TV and the alarms were shouting all the time, even during the night. Additionally, hours after hours, we were discovering the huge tsunami damages in Tohoku area, and also watching the number of death increasing. Finally, we started to notice that Tokyo was dangerously threatened by the Fukushima Nuclear Plant damages. After this nuclear plant problem announce, the atmosphere became heavy and the fear was sensible through the whole Tokyo area. At that point, after one night of mental struggle, I decided to go back in Switzerland for some time and most of all for my family, which was really worried. This experience was very difficult to go through both physically (exhaustion) and mentally, but it reminded me that everything we build can be broken in pieces in less than four minutes, an awakening which will be really important for the future.

Tohoku area, crisis area:

When I came back to Japan, I first went for volunteering in Tohoku area (Ishinomaki) to help people cleaning, rebuilding, and recovering from the tsunami. This experience was also indescribable. In these areas, everything is broken, there are ships in the middle of the streets (see figure 2), car crashed everywhere, house completely broken, in one sentence, people lost everything. This landscape was also really difficult to stand mentally, even if the situation was already slightly better than right after the earthquake. The most important shock I got is that the government is totally absent except the self defense soldiers that care about the people that are temporary living in the schools for the food and supplies.