Fear and loathing

It's been a trying week-and-a-bit, all things considered - despite being hundreds of kilometres from the badness, the constant uncertainty and doom and gloom eventually started to get the better of us to some extent. Would you call it fear? Probably. People were packing up and leaving Kobe, they were telling us to plan for it too. We got a bit scared, despite the seeming okayness of everything around us. I don't think we were alone.

On Thursday I eventually spoke to one of my coworkers, who up to this point hadn't made any mention of it - the only way you'd know anything was amiss in the office was that the TVs were constantly blaring the news from one side of the room. She looked exhausted for a second, pointing out that everyone was worried that things weren't as okay as promised; they were just doing a good job of masking it. Exchange students had been pulled out of our area, all the way down in Hiroshima and up to Hokkaido. Expats living here for years had uprooted their families and left for impromptu "holidays" as well - whatever your common sense says, it's hard not to wonder if you should be doing the same. Before Wednesday was even out I already felt like I was grinding my hull along the bottom - the weekend couldn't come soon enough. We went out a few times to just bumble around - nothing like a bit of retail therapy to take your mind off impending doom. We even bought a bed, so clearly we're expecting to be around long enough to enjoy it.

Make sure to pack your rice cooker too

All the worry seems a bit silly now and I wonder whether the people who left think they made the right decision. In any case, I don't think the panic is over just yet. The reports of panic buying were true even down here - while it wasn't exactly wartime rationing, when we went to the supermarket we were greeted with empty shelves where rice should have been and cross signs telling people not to buy more than 6 bottles of water at a time. As for stovetop gas canisters, we may well have bought the last packet in the entire prefecture. The first 3 places I went to said they had sold out ages ago - it was only when Lisa spotted a packet stashed at the back of a shelf that we hit paydirt. "Someone must have hidden that there," the owner said, standing on his tippy toes to fish it out. He seemed a bit reluctant to hand it over.

Mass hysteria

The rest of the long weekend was washed out and rainy, so we spent most of it getting the house in order and busily cooking away (with one exception, where we went out for an always enjoyable "Mount Fuji" pile of chips). We've got events happening every week in April so we didn't feel too guilty about doing bugger all for the most part. Things are sunnier this week, figuratively and literally; the TVs are off and the media seems to have completely lost interest, so hopefully that's the end of it. I'm still sending in my daily reports on the situation but for the most part, they're nice and uneventful. If I have my way, they'll stay that way - the only events I want to talk about from now on are ninja museums, baseball games and amusingly oversized foodstuffs.