Earthquakes & Onomatopoeia

Friday, October 3rd, 2008 by Matthew Lanigan | Uncategorized

So I completely forgot about this until now (goes to show how bad it was!), but on Wednesday (technically, it was still Tuesday night in the States) we experienced our first Earthquake. Or so I’m told. I was standing at the time, so I didn’t feel it at all. Only the people who were sitting down felt it. And even they only felt it because we were on the 9th floor of one of the buildings at the time… the teachers, who were on the 2nd floor at the time, were none the wiser.

All in all, it was rather anticlimactic. All of a sudden everyone was like “sugoi! jishin da!” (“awesome! it’s an earthquake!”) and I’m like, “wait what?” So it all passed rather quickly. I looked it up, and apparently the epicenter of the earthquake was out in the middle of the ocean somewhere, and by the time it reached us in Kasugai, it was pretty weak. When the teacher, Ueda-sensei, came, she was a bit surprised, since as mentioned before, she had no idea there’d been an earthquake. This led into a 15-minute lecture on what to do in case of a more serious earthquake (open a door, then hide under a desk).

During this lecture, I also learned two new Japanese onomatopoeia. The Japanese language is rife with these things, such as doki doki for a beating heart or peko peko for an empty stomach… but now I know gura gura, the sound buildings make when they sway in an earthquake, and gata gata, the sound of windows rattling (or buildings shaking very slightly like in the earthquake we were in, apparently).

All in all, it was an interesting, albeit somewhat anti-climactic. And now Oct. 1 will forever go down in history as the day of “My First Earthquake” … even though I didn’t feel it. Lame.