Sunday, March 01, 2009
Wheeeee, Apocalypse!
Tragedy + technology * information = fun!
When I was first told in January about the "disaster preparedness tour" the JET Programme had arranged, my reaction was anything but excited. It was on a Saturday morning, meaning I would have to wake up with my alarm clock on a weekend (the horror!) and the dry description just wasn't appealing. I would have missed the deadline to sign-up had it not been an idle conversation with my supervisor on the last day to request a slot. Thank goodness I volunteered to go, because it was both informative and wildly entertaining.
The event was held at theDisaster Prevention Center "Life Safety Learning Center" in Abeno near Tennoji. Riding the subway downtown, my hopes were still low and I didn't know what to expect (remember what I said about expectations?) so I was a little worried about what we would do all morning. Would it just be a meeting in an office? Would there be little more than a list of items I should have on hand in the event of an emergency? In other words, could I have skipped the entire outing and slept in had they just e-mailed me their spiel?
I knew I had made the right call as soon as I saw the building. In a neighborhood full of apartment buildings and construction crews building new apartment buildings, the Center stood out with a eye-grabbing rounded front. My first instinct was to make an Aperture Science joke, but given the company I was in I figured it would fall flat. Still, as first impressions go this building had totally won me over. Its overall newness and sciencey-look had convinced me this would be worth it, if for no other reason than I suddenly had hopes there would an earthquake simulator.
Turns out there wasn't an earthquake simulator - there were two! The first was the opening of our tour. We sat in a theater and watched a brief movie about earthquakes in Osaka when - what are the odds? - an "earthquake" interrupted the movie. Once our seats stopped rocking we "evacuated" into a kitchen where we had to turn off all the potential hazards in a room. Earthquakes don't kill many people in Japan; it's the fires that often follow when gas lines leak and electric appliances ignite the gas. Remember Fight Club? Same thing here, only on a larger scale (and less fighting).
Leaving the kitchen, we had to navigate a smoke-filled hallway by crouching down and feeling the walls. A surveillance video later revealed one member of our group decided to simply walk through with her hand over her mouth, causing us all to "fail" the exercise. Outside of the hallway was a entire street of semi-demolished houses. Clearly, the center was not just giving us a dry run-through on what to do in the event of an earthquake. Their goal was to make us believe that we had just been in an earthquake and we were now dealing with the consequences. Their dedication to this fantasy was impressive by Walt Disney World standards, but considering this was all in the name of public service, I was blown away.
There was so much to see and not nearly as much time as I would have liked to fully absorb all the information and scenery that I was being presented with. There was a fire extinguisher lesson that included a fantastic game element where we used a simulated device to spray water on a "fire." There was a room with a dummy underneath a fallen bookshelf that we needed to rescue by jacking the shelf up and pulling the dummy free. The dummy had no hair and a gray shirt, making it look just like Michael Scofield from Prison Break, and once "Michael" was out he was retracted under the shelf again at the push of a button so the next group could try.
But the best was saved for last when our group stepped onto a metal platform and braced ourselves for simulations of actual earthquakes from Japanese history. We first got a taste of the 2005 quake in Miyagi Prefecture and then we were given a theoretical quake that is supposed to hit the Kansai area in the next thirty years. They were about to open the gate and thank us for coming when I stopped them and made a request: could they please let us feel the Great Hanshin Earthquake from 1995? Having been to Kobe many times and seen the photos and memorials, I wanted to get some idea of what happened that day. They obliged and fired up the machine one last time. I was surprised by how short it was, a single but powerful jolt followed by a few seconds of nearly unnoticeable shaking.
As giddy as I was getting off the platform, I had a rather unpleasant realization. The fabulous "ride" I had just experienced was entirely based upon major catastrophes. Real, deadly earthquakes that leveled cities, shattered families and killed thousands. I saw the list of available quakes and it included the 1923 Tokyo quake, the same one that Akira Kurosawa wrote about in his biography. He spoke of corpses piled in the streets. What would he think of people riding that same shockwave and giggling? What if some "hurricane center" had a Katrina simulation that sent patrons laughing through a torrent of water breaking through a virtual levee? Would it still be tasteless if it was preceded by a few hours of instruction on how to survive a major storm?
It's possible that I'm thinking too much about all this. It's also possible that I'm simply a monster who shouldn't have been amused by all that shaking. After all, the parting message was ultimately one of community. For all the loss of life in Kobe fourteen years ago, that fire had to start somewhere and maybe, just maybe, someone could have been there to put it out and prevent it from engulfing entire neighborhoods. Regardless of my anxieties, the Abeno Life Safety Learning Center is both a hell of a lot of fun and thoroughly educational. I can't promise that I will remember every thing I'm supposed to turn off in the event of an earthquake, but I am damn sure I would try and grab an extinguisher if I ever saw a fire.
When I was first told in January about the "disaster preparedness tour" the JET Programme had arranged, my reaction was anything but excited. It was on a Saturday morning, meaning I would have to wake up with my alarm clock on a weekend (the horror!) and the dry description just wasn't appealing. I would have missed the deadline to sign-up had it not been an idle conversation with my supervisor on the last day to request a slot. Thank goodness I volunteered to go, because it was both informative and wildly entertaining.
The event was held at the
I knew I had made the right call as soon as I saw the building. In a neighborhood full of apartment buildings and construction crews building new apartment buildings, the Center stood out with a eye-grabbing rounded front. My first instinct was to make an Aperture Science joke, but given the company I was in I figured it would fall flat. Still, as first impressions go this building had totally won me over. Its overall newness and sciencey-look had convinced me this would be worth it, if for no other reason than I suddenly had hopes there would an earthquake simulator.
Turns out there wasn't an earthquake simulator - there were two! The first was the opening of our tour. We sat in a theater and watched a brief movie about earthquakes in Osaka when - what are the odds? - an "earthquake" interrupted the movie. Once our seats stopped rocking we "evacuated" into a kitchen where we had to turn off all the potential hazards in a room. Earthquakes don't kill many people in Japan; it's the fires that often follow when gas lines leak and electric appliances ignite the gas. Remember Fight Club? Same thing here, only on a larger scale (and less fighting).
Leaving the kitchen, we had to navigate a smoke-filled hallway by crouching down and feeling the walls. A surveillance video later revealed one member of our group decided to simply walk through with her hand over her mouth, causing us all to "fail" the exercise. Outside of the hallway was a entire street of semi-demolished houses. Clearly, the center was not just giving us a dry run-through on what to do in the event of an earthquake. Their goal was to make us believe that we had just been in an earthquake and we were now dealing with the consequences. Their dedication to this fantasy was impressive by Walt Disney World standards, but considering this was all in the name of public service, I was blown away.
There was so much to see and not nearly as much time as I would have liked to fully absorb all the information and scenery that I was being presented with. There was a fire extinguisher lesson that included a fantastic game element where we used a simulated device to spray water on a "fire." There was a room with a dummy underneath a fallen bookshelf that we needed to rescue by jacking the shelf up and pulling the dummy free. The dummy had no hair and a gray shirt, making it look just like Michael Scofield from Prison Break, and once "Michael" was out he was retracted under the shelf again at the push of a button so the next group could try.
But the best was saved for last when our group stepped onto a metal platform and braced ourselves for simulations of actual earthquakes from Japanese history. We first got a taste of the 2005 quake in Miyagi Prefecture and then we were given a theoretical quake that is supposed to hit the Kansai area in the next thirty years. They were about to open the gate and thank us for coming when I stopped them and made a request: could they please let us feel the Great Hanshin Earthquake from 1995? Having been to Kobe many times and seen the photos and memorials, I wanted to get some idea of what happened that day. They obliged and fired up the machine one last time. I was surprised by how short it was, a single but powerful jolt followed by a few seconds of nearly unnoticeable shaking.
As giddy as I was getting off the platform, I had a rather unpleasant realization. The fabulous "ride" I had just experienced was entirely based upon major catastrophes. Real, deadly earthquakes that leveled cities, shattered families and killed thousands. I saw the list of available quakes and it included the 1923 Tokyo quake, the same one that Akira Kurosawa wrote about in his biography. He spoke of corpses piled in the streets. What would he think of people riding that same shockwave and giggling? What if some "hurricane center" had a Katrina simulation that sent patrons laughing through a torrent of water breaking through a virtual levee? Would it still be tasteless if it was preceded by a few hours of instruction on how to survive a major storm?
It's possible that I'm thinking too much about all this. It's also possible that I'm simply a monster who shouldn't have been amused by all that shaking. After all, the parting message was ultimately one of community. For all the loss of life in Kobe fourteen years ago, that fire had to start somewhere and maybe, just maybe, someone could have been there to put it out and prevent it from engulfing entire neighborhoods. Regardless of my anxieties, the Abeno Life Safety Learning Center is both a hell of a lot of fun and thoroughly educational. I can't promise that I will remember every thing I'm supposed to turn off in the event of an earthquake, but I am damn sure I would try and grab an extinguisher if I ever saw a fire.
Labels: earthquake, Japan, JET, Osaka
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That's actually very informative for me. I experienced and earthquake less then two months after arriving in Nagasaki. I was told by the gas company, after moving in, that the gas "thingy" outside my apartment was set to automatically turn off if and earthquake occurs. I never understood or put much thought into it until I read your post. Thanks Dan.
That's what I'm here for - to tell people about earthquake safety. I should put that at the top of the blog. "Ask me about earthquakes!"
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