My very personal earthquake weekend V: Epilogue

Naturally, I slept in late the following day. The weather was nice, though, so I decided to go for a walk in order to check out the day-after-atmosphere in Shinjuku (plus, it was my last weekend after all and I felt like I should make the best out of it).

I was surprised to see that the first stores I passed on my way to central Shinjuku were still closed.

Another thing that I found to be impressive:

In central Shinjuku, most stores would be open. Nevertheless, there were less people than usual in the streets. The shops were emptier. And even in the center a lot of them would be closed.

All the paper signs on the shop signs put up in order to tell customers that those shops are temporarily closed...

This golf shop was actually open that day but the staff apparently didn't have the time to fix the display...

So, again, there was this weird contrast I was talking about in my earlier posts: on the one hand life seemed to go on like on a normal saturday afternoon (and why shouldn't it, I thought); but on the other hand, there were still these small things (like closed department stores and shops, things that had tumbled down during the earthquake the day before or the simple fact that there were less people in the streets compared to a usual saturday).

And I get used to the fact that these days it's harder to get my beloved Onigiris...

(although, by the end of the day, I had visited enough convenient stores in order to find out where chances would be highest to find some (7/11-stores!!!)).

There were constantly more aftershocks. As you don't notice them too easily while you're walking, I'd ask myself every time whether it was me (the hang over?) or the earth moving (seems to be a common question, though). But I got used to it...

After hours I walked back to Waseda. I went to Julia's dorm in order to pick up my suitcase, that I had left there while we had been travelling. 

Up until this point I hadn't watched any news or checked the internet. So it was my friend who first told me about the problems in Fukushima and that they made her actually consider going back to Germany for a while. I hadn't been worried earlier, but having grown up in the aftermath of Tschernobyl in Germany, a potential nuclear disaster made me more nervous (than the earthquake). 

I got back to my guesthouse and found everybody cramped in the common area, where the lights were switched off because they were waiting for a 3 hour black out that had been announced on TV. Not a very comforting impression either...

But my flight would leave the next day anyway. There wasn't a lot to do until then, so I packed my stuff and went out for dinner and beer.

In the end, Julia got a ticket for the following day and we went to the airport together. Kind of as a souvenir we took the following memorable picture, which should be my last picture from Japan...