Resting Tremor – Text – Emergency – Earthquake Warning

Today all the mobile phones starting going off in the Aichi Art Centre with emergency messages.

An earthquake, in a minutes time.

I was very worried. What should I do? What was the right thing to do? Should I get down, stand in a door way. There was no table to get under and my legs didn’t seem very helpful to me anyway at that moment.

No one really said much until a few minutes later, when it appeared that the trouble has passed us by or that 2.3 on the rictor scale was something we couldn’t feel. That different parts of the city were more or less stable depending on the earth and the architecture.

Apparently they are happening all the time in Japan just so mildly that they are mostly imperceptible. This didn’t make me feel reassured, neither did the casual mention of tsunami and 50 centimetres of water.

I have what’s called “Resting Tremor” in my hands and in my legs a little. Most of the time you can’t see it, but it’s there all the time, a shaking, that wont go away. It occurs in many different ways, my favourite is peas jumping off a fork, my least favourite is giving a talk and rustling the papers. I have coping mechanisms which nobody notices except me. And you can see it in my video of the dying cicada below:

The last time I was in an earthquake was in Tokyo in 2005.

I thought someone was shaking my bed and I didn’t want to open my eyes, as I couldn’t imagine what sort of person would be standing there, it felt so violent and why would someone be doing this?

Eventually I did open my eyes and out of the window I could see a low level sway,almost like a vertical heat haze up the sides of some of the buildings.

A friend I was working with rushed down to reception in his underwear and everyone looked at him like he was crazy.

He’d never experienced anything like this before either.