When the Great East Japan Earthquake hit on March 11, 2011, I was at home in my apartment in Tokyo. The ground lurched, the walls shuddered and my CDs began flinging themselves from the shelves.
Mercifully, that was the extent of the physical damage, but as the aftershocks and the drip, drip, drip of increasingly alarming news from farther north began to seep through, a feeling of disquiet began to set in — a feeling that what should be a place of comfort and security was now neither of those things.
At that time, I was helping out a musician from overseas with a tour he was on, and what kept us going through that tense, fraught week was the knowledge that we would soon be lucky enough to escape it, even if just for a couple of days. The place that offered us a brief sanctuary that following weekend was the southern island of Kyushu, the sun-dappled streets of Fukuoka and Kumamoto allowing us to role-play normality for a while.