Blogs

So we sing, so we live

It’s Golden Week in Japan. For most this means a ten-day break as a series of Japanese National Holidays fall over a week and a half plus weekends meaning companies shut down and everyone hits the onsen (hot springs), visits their home towns, fills the parks, jets overseas at ridiculous peak travel prices, or hits the beach. And what fantastic weather for it this year.

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She’s fierce, this ocean of ours.

There are times when the power of the ocean takes our breath away. Quite literally. For most of us, this is usually when we cop a bigger than expected set on the head and are held down for longer than we are comfortable with. In times like these, we remember her power and embrace it. But then there are times, like these now in Japan, when the ocean reveals to us her true power. Mind blowing, life changing, earth moving power. Perhaps it’s only then we are reminded as humans, how small we are on this planet.

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We keep counting the days as more than two weeks pass by since the Great Eastern Japanese Earthquake and subsequent Tsunami and Nuclear disasters hit our island.

The Tohoku region was hit hardest, however the whole country has felt the pain.

Surfers lost their lives up north, and as the rest of us mourn for our community we are also running or anxiously waiting for the outcome of the ongoing nuclear emergency at Fukushima.

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A quick break from my pregnancy posts, but more to come I promise.

As many of my readers know, my husband, son and I are based in Japan, in a surfing village called Isumi city, in Chiba prefecture. The earthquake hit us hard on March 11^th, whilst our little son was at kindy, but as our self-built wood cabin house and studio remained in one-piece during what was the most intense serious of earth movements you will ever feel in your life, we were never to know what the nation was in for next.

We were safe, our boy was safe, but the tsunami warnings started coming over the town’s loud speakers and everyone was in panic. We evacuated, taking almost nothing with us, got our son from kindy and threw the dogs in the car, and got up high for the rest of the day and night. The tsunami did hit our waters, but the majority was up north, so aside from a few boats strewn into the port’s carpark, most houses including ours were spared. We were lucky. Friends up north weren’t.

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