First things first:

About 20 minutes ago, at 6:24 this evening, an earthquake measuring 6- on the Japanese scale hit just off the coast of Miyagi prefecture in the northern part of Honshu. Although no tidal waves are expected from this quake, it's effects were felt over most of northern Honshu. As I am at the extreme southern end of Kyushu, I felt no effects. If, by some chance, this gets reported in the US, I'm okay, just so you know.

Edited to add: The Japanese earthquake magnitude scale tops out at 7.0, and in fact the strength at the epicenter was 7.0. This quake was felt all throuought eastern Japan, from Hokkaido to Kyoto Prefecture.

Edited again to clarify: It was a 7.0 on the the open-ended Richter scale, and a 6- (six minus) on the Japanese scale.

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Happy Memorial Day!

For those teachers and/or students reading my web log, who are approaching summer vacation with great anticipation. . . I don't wanna hear about it. I will just remind you that MY summer vacation doesn't start until mid-July. . . .

I'm getting close to the end of my second year in Higashiichiki-cho. Time flies when you're having fun, I guess. Well, mostly fun. I still get bouts of the "stranger in a strange land" blues. I've been chatting with Itakura-sensei, one of the English teachers, about this, and she said that every ALT she's ever worked with has complained about the same problems. Her advice? "Get married!" (?) Well, it sounds like a good idea, but it might be a bit difficult to implement in the near future. (^_^);

Of course, earlier that day, I was in one of the other teacher's English classes, and her students like to joke around that she and I should get married. [sigh]

As for Memorial Day, since it's not a holiday here, I'm sitting in the school board offices, typing up this entry. I took last Friday off, though so that's okay. Besides, according to some people, I get too many days off as it is (right, Derrick?).

At the junior high schools, there are occasionally elective enrichment classes in addition to the regular curriculum. Every once in a while I get to work with these classes. It makes for an interesting change of pace. For example, at Tou-chuu, the third grade (U.S. 9th grade) is writing poetry, while the second grade has expressed an interest in translating English comics into Japanese. I got to work with the third grade class last week. I actually composed two or three haiku on the spot, though now that I think about it, a couple were based off of old pop songs, and thus don't count.

light and warmth have left
there's no sunshine when she's gone
will she be come home soon?

cold begins to thaw
winter fades into spring warmth
my heart becomes glad

. . . and somesuch. I don't remember the third one, but for the last line: "home is where you are."

Yeah, I know, someone should stick a hole in me and let the sap out. . .(^_^)

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It's now about 6:50, and half of the TV stations have switched to the NHK newsfeed. It took them about 30 minutes to get the bilingual broadcasts going, but now I'm listening to the news, and it seems that although it was quite a strong quake, initial damage reports are minimal. Lots of blackouts, closed highways, and many warnings about potential fire risks. Some helicopter shots of houses burning, but not many. However, apparently communications in the areas closest to the epicenter are down, so they don't know for sure how things are there.

I'm switching between This is exciting! and This is frightening!

There was more that I was going to write about tonight, but it's gone clean out of my head. I might post more after dinner.

R.