So I’m a bit late on this — I meant to write something last night, but never got around to it — but there was a medium-sized earthquake two nights ago (Wednesday night.) Actually, it was early Thursday morning, at about 1:45am. I was in bed, somewhat asleep, when my dreams started to become strange and wave-like. The entire bed was swaying. There have been a few small earthquakes in the two years that I’ve been in Tokyo, but this was one of the bigger ones. In my strange dream-like logic, I thought “Should I wake up and run outside?” I convinced myself that the rocking, wavelike motion was kind of pleasant, and somehow thought that I was a on a nice boat.

I feel back deep asleep again shortly.

It was apparently a fairly big earthquake – showing up on the the local blogs.

Checking some of the earthquake report sites it looks like it was a 6.8 on the US scale, and a 4 or 5 on the Japanese scale.

Anyway, things were fine in my place. I think a pen rolled off one of my tables, but that was about it. I’m up on the 4th floor of a 4-story concrete “mansion”, and that thing really gets swaying!

I’m a little worried now thinking about “the big one”. Benkei is convinced that the big one is coming and will hit Tokyo soon. A friend of mine at work said the same thing. I’m not so sure: I don’t really know much about how earthquakes work. Since I’m in the process of buying a place here though, I’ve decided that the big one is not coming, and our new place will be built to withstand it even if it does hit.

Unbridled optimism is a great power if only you can harness it correctly!