Osaka Lights. Photo: Simon Sellars.

In the second half of 2004 I was travelling around northern Japan on assignment for Lonely Planet. I was also commissioned by LP to maintain a blog of my trip. The entire blog archive is here, but I’ve reproduced one of my favourite entries below.

‘My First Earthquake’ by Simon Sellars. Published online by Lonely Planet Publications, Sept 6 2004.

I’m writing this entry from the town of Aizu-Wakamatsu, the first leg of my Northern Honshu trip. Before Aizu-Wakamatsu, I had a hairy time of it. I was in Kobe, near Osaka, for a few days, visiting two Australian friends who had settled there. While they worked during the day, I would invariably head to Osaka, seduced by the bright lights and compressed atmosphere.

I’m fascinated by ’second city syndrome’, when a city feels it has something to prove as a result of living in the shadow of a bigger, swankier, richer place (usually the capital). Think of Melbourne versus Sydney, Rotterdam and Amsterdam, Manchester (maybe) and London – the ’second city’ invariably develops a grittier, underground attitude, some kind of chemical reaction to the perceived pretentiousness of its attention-grabbing rival.

This seems to describe Osaka. For a start, the fashions are different: there seems less of the Gucci/Prada mania that appears to be gripping Tokyo and more of the innovation and hybrid designs that the capital used to embrace. Also, centuries ago, when the seat of Japanese government was moved from the Kansai area (containing Osaka) to Tokyo, Osakans developed a lingering suspicion. Certainly in sports, like baseball, the two cities share a fierce rivalry.

These attitudes filter down to microscopic levels: people stand to the right on escalators in Osaka, in Tokyo to the left. But perhaps the biggest difference I’ve found over my two trips to Japan is that Osakans seem to be more casual, a little more relaxed in their everyday dealings. Tokyo is a mad, bad sprawling beast; a metacity, a living, breathing organism consistently wrongfooting the unwary. It can be hard to relax in Tokyo.

Which brings me to the crux of this entry. On one of my sorties into Osaka, I was emailing in the Yahoo internet cafe near Umeda train station, when I felt the bench begin to buckle and sway. My computer was jumping up and down and the lights in the cafe and the adjacent Yodabashi department store were madly flickering on and off. I leapt off my seat and felt the ground shake beneath me. I was scared and disorientated. The boy next to me wasn’t Japanese and he didn’t speak English, but we looked at each other and came to a simultaneous conclusion: an earthquake was rocking our world.

Then the boy grabbed my shoulders and we both laughed, because we realised it was over – it lasted about a minute – and the earth hadn’t swallowed us up. But the detail I remember most is that it was only non-Japanese that were panicking. The locals were laughing and clowning around the whole way through, treating the tremor like an amusement-park ride. I’m not sure if this is because Japanese are used to earthquakes, or if it’s part of the Osaka thing. In any case, I soon calmed down.

When I returned to my friends’ apartment in Kobe, we swapped war stories – they felt it, too – and switched on the news: it was only a small tremor, around 5 on the richter scale. Later that night, as we sipped gin and watched a movie, it happened again, only this time much, much more intense. This time there were no relaxed Osakans to cool us out, just three very scared Aussies.

Do you remember those old nuclear propaganda films from the ’50s? They told people to duck under a table in case of nuclear attack and that’s what we did, instinctively. But it seemed ridiculous – how the hell could a table save us? – so we bolted for the door. We were on the third floor, and when we got outside we saw the concrete-and-steel balcony dipping and swaying like a flimsy hammock in the wind. What to do? The building seemed about to collapse and we could either run for the street and risk the building falling on us, get back under the table, or die right there on the balcony. The building was shaking so much my vision was blurred and the concrete surface beneath my feet felt spongy…and then, nothing. But I couldn’t be sure it was over because my vision was still darting all over the place. I tried to light a smoke and my hands shook so much it was impossible to do so.

We turned on the TV to find tsunami tidal wave warnings on every channel. People were being evacuated from the southeast coast to higher ground as a result of waves from the quake, which this time measured 8 on the scale. Fortunately the epicenter was in the ocean, away from civilisation – no one died, but there were a few minor injuries. The rest of the night was spent lying in bed wide awake. The only other experience I can compare this to was during a major car accident I suffered a few years back. Like then, I felt like I’d broken through some veil of reality. All my senses were hyperaware, as though I was looking at white light and I felt disembodied, shot through with adrenaline.

Kobe was the site of the massive earthquake in 1995 that levelled a large chunk of the city and killed 5000 – my friends’ residential area was precisely where most of the damage occurred. I had to leave soon after, but not before I made them promise to seek guidelines for proper evacuation procedure. Who knows when Kobe might erupt with full fury again? Like the boy in the internet cafe, we all understood we’d shared a unique moment. Imagine feeling vulnerable, like a baby, knowing that everything you’d learnt in your life was totally useless in the face of the earth’s fury.

But that was then. Now, the smalltown delights of Aizu-Wakamatsu – samurai castles, temples – beckon, and with them a chance to forget about big cities and earthquakes.