I Miss Sharks

In Australia everything wants to harm you. You swim with jellyfish and maybe sharks, and when I was in North Queensland there were plants that could put you in hospital if you touched them. I check my shoes automatically because I have grown up sharing my backyard with spiders. But over here the spiders are just season markers and I don't expect to be swimming anywhere except a water park over manned by life guards. But I do have to worry about the ceiling falling down on me.

It is the middle of the Typhoon Season (season's greetings to you all), and we are up to number 14 I think. The Japanese just number their typhoons because there are too many to name - sometimes the weather map at the end of the news will have more than one typhoon being tracked, like planes queuing to approach an airport. Hamamatsu appears to have been blessed because Mai recalls many nervous evenings throughout her life with everyone waiting for a typhoon to make land fall, but they always seemed to change direction and deliver ruin to some other poor sods.　We have storm windows like most homes on the coast but apart from one or two umbrella inverting rainstorms we don't suffer too much anxiety over typhoons. The same is true of earthquakes - but not for lack of threat.

Earthquakes are like any looming danger - you deal with the fear by ignoring it. The same principle ensures the continuing viability of the Egged Bus Company in Israel. The National Emergency Service (I'm imagining the name of a real bureau) has a system that notifies the population when there has been a reasonable big earthquake by broadcasting the details in captions at the top of the TV screen, along with a beep tone to draw your attention. I don't even ask Mai to translate anymore unless it's a decent one over magnitude four. We have our emergency supplies bag at the ready , that is to say, neatly folded in the cupboard above the sink. At my Japanese class we did a lesson on what to pack in the emergency sack but all I can remember is that the list included slippers for some reason, but not batteries. A few days supply of fresh water I think. Anyways, we're so close to a convenience store that I can just loot what we need later.

So far I have only sat through one 20 second tremble that did little more than interrupt whatever important point I was trying to make in a morning English class. Interestingly, it was the sound of the building straining that caught our attention, not the movement itself. When you think about it, your bottom is vibrating at the same frequency as the chair, which is in sync with the floor and so on down to the ground (in this case, three storeys down to the ground), so it's no surprise we didn't detect the earthquake until we 'felt' for it. What I first thought was the sound of furniture being inexpertly moved upstairs was in fact the friggin' planet testing the structural integrity of the Forte Building.

But it's a sunny day in autumn and I don't have to worry about bushfires taking my home anymore.

My apologies to anyone who began reading this one week and had to wait until the next week for it to be finished.