My Worst Day in Japan | March 11, 2011

to tokyo it is now march 11 2021 10 years after the great tohoku earthquake which is what we're calling it now back then it was just an earthquake and tsunami that was life-changing to so many people and in this live stream i wanted to to go back and and relive recall remember that day and the days before and after kind of give a historical sense of what was going on 10 years ago i was here in japan um i was um this was before my days as a youtuber i was a reporter and i still am a reporter for nhk world's tokyo eye program as well as journeys in japan and a couple of other programs and that was um maybe my main income back in 2010 201 2011 and i was also a video podcaster itunes was really big and i was making a show teaching japanese english using comedy situations and blue screens some of that still might be on itunes but that day i was editing video in my desk in shinozaki which is my old town where i was living before um i think it was like 2 p.m it was in the afternoon i remember that it was it was a sunny day and uh at my desk i i could you could hear you could hear it was almost almost cinematic like a movie you could hear rumbling you knew that there was something coming right at first i didn't know what it was but you there was kind of a brewing of an earthquake um underneath i i've been at this time i'd already been in japan for quite a long time um like 16 years or something and um i've been in many many earthquakes like magnitude five or six shindo five was maybe the toughest one that i was in the first earthquake that i was in was in 1998 when i first came to japan outside of tokyo disneyland actually uh there was a hotel we stayed at i think it was the intercontinental hotel that was over there at the time and that was swaying so much i got underneath the table that was my first earthquake uh was here in tokyo so when when um the earthquake hit on march 11 2011 um 2 pm i i felt that that rumble underneath and i knew that there was something different about this but you can't predict how strong something's going to be i just released a video um one of the reasons why i i definitely want to do this is i just released a video um called how japan's largest earthquake quakes really felt and we simulated inside um the tokyo uh disaster of bosai khan what it was like to be inside that earthquake so you might want to take a look there's some footage from the simulator what it actually felt like so i wanted to make this video so you can get a better understanding of what what actually was underneath my feet as i tell this story um it was it was quite huge and when i made that video afterwards i was very emotional um for about 30 minutes afterwards i couldn't really film much of anything um it just hit home and i'll talk a little bit more about the video as well so wow everything started to shake and it was just it it built up unlike the kobe 1995 earthquake which was just a violent start to it this one just it built up to it but it built up strong and i remember just feeling like a deer in headlights do you know when when a deer some of you might not know when a deer is crossing the road and they see the headlights of a car coming they just freeze and i felt like this i just froze at my desk for what seemed to be like a year but it was actually maybe 10 seconds then i i i think i'd heard something like get in a doorway get in the bathtub i didn't know what to do to be honest with you so i had my hand on the door knob of my office wondering if i should if i should leave the house should i should i run out to the street my first and my feeling was that i was better served being outside which isn't always the case but that's how i just felt like i got to get out of this building because outside the window and i'll take some of your questions this is a live stream outside the window uh everything and i i've been living there 2011. so i'd been there six years at the time everything outside my window was going like this and and then the six years of living in that apartment i've never seen anything like this and we'd had had earthquakes i think we had some foreshocks as well so i it was like being on a boat and i'm not joking i i literally could not stand up um i had to sit down after a while and i'm still holding onto the doorknob in my office um it wasn't a big apartment so it's like i think it was a two ldk uh i you you i just froze and i again as i said in this video that i just uploaded onto the main channel i your first initial reactions are what save your life and that day i was lucky to be in a newer building that and not in an area that was susceptible to even more shaking i believe it was a shindo six in my area i was in edogawa ward and we had a stronger earthquake than others other parts of the city but even um as you look at this you can tell this is gonna be a little bit longer than usual live stream i i i want you just to to look at this [Music] the announcer is noticeably shaken it's moving i watch this everyday is wow i i watches every 10 years just to because that was the worst day of my life in japan and um when i did do that earthquake simulator um it every single vibration in the simulator was taken from seismic data uh from the great tohoku earthquake march 11 2011 and and they simulated exactly the way and when i was when i was there you could feel exactly it it was as though every single rumble was mentally imprinted on my mind and all those jumps set triggered memories from that day the simulator room i think it is good if you are in tokyo and you have the opportunity to go and sit in there because and bob joe thank you yeah it's a really tough day um uh huhu usa thanks uh for the support near to the ron glad you're still with us so am i i again the worst day i thought i thought it was over i thought i was i was gonna die because you don't understand what it's like if you've never been in an earthquake i want you just to picture you've lost complete control everything around you is shaking you there's nothing that you can do to stop it you are not in control anymore nature is and wherever you are at that time is is that's all you have to control where you are and um some people are are more fortunate than others in in an earthquake if you're over the years we've seen some big ones i remember during the world series in california in 1989 and a big earthquake hit there and that was the first time that i had really as a kid um like understood what what an earthquake was and and the damage that it can do and how much how much you can kill and destroy and um i i knew that when i first came to japan but i did not realize that you don't realize it until you're in it you can't prepare for it one of the things i'm going to go back to back to the day in a second but one of the things that um imam udasan who is the director of the bosai khan the disaster center for the tokyo fire department told me was look when you do when you are in an earthquake you will see locals here they are just drinking and not they're very relaxed and not actually acting naturally because as you learned you cannot predict the strength of an earthquake if it will get stronger so when you do have an earthquake you do feel something stop make sure that you're protected look around make sure that you're not in a place where things could fall on you evacuate from that area immediately um because you don't know if it's going to get stronger and stronger you just don't know so when i am used to it now too but i also have this i've been through hundreds of earthquakes now i know when it's a real strong one i know when to get worried but we do i think we are too used to the earthquakes here in japan so your first reaction to get out of the way or get under the table it's it's probably the right one to be to be safe than sorry protect your head um there's lots of things that you can do going back to that day the earthquake that they it went on for over a minute and i do remember um when it was done everything in my apartment that's i should i shouldn't say everything almost everything in my apartment that was not bolted down or was not of immense weight close to the ground had toppled over my tv all my glasses all of them broken um lost a couple of wine bottles pictures on the wall down things in my bathroom everything that was standing toothpaste whatever toppled over um the i believe some of the water from my toilet actually spilled out just because of the shaking um the sink cracked in my bathroom um there were cracks in my building in some of the cement which they later repaired um even my hair was messed up i've seen that as a joke but it was i didn't know what to do um so after the minute after after that minute i i picked up my tv because it was on the ground and toppled over i had a 32 inch sharp flat screen tv put it back up and it still worked it wasn't broken thank goodness and i just tuned into nhk and you can watch the broadcast what i was showing you exactly that day was you hear the sounds and for everybody who's lived through that day you hear this um bring bring bring bring do you know it's it's a you hear it on your smartphone now but you also hear it on tv and you'll hear it sometimes on speakers all around japan japan has speakers loud megaphones attached to poles for disaster situations just like this and when you hear that sound it just triggers bad memories and makes you react because we've heard it during the big ones um and i heard those sounds on the tv broadcast and you can see noticeably the tv announcers trying their best to stay cool they can't all right it's it's still going it's going on for a long minute this is a long minute that's shinjuku from shibuya and now i have the tv on and i'm watching it i don't know what's going on i don't have a radio so tv was the only way he's explaining all the places that have been impacted and they're going through other cameras the staff this is sendai i believe live camera the staff is showing is scrambling around to try to get as much news to people as possible this is was the live broadcast this is the uh instant jma japan meteorological agency giving data saying that there is uh a tsunami warning very high up there in iwate [Music] i didn't actually think one would hit you you get a lot of warnings but you never have one that hits i i don't know how i i can't recall how much longer it was um but i think it was like 15 or 17 minutes or something another aftershock hit um like i i was already i don't know my heart had been pounding the first time and i uh i was already emotionally like drained and then another aftershock this one was um smaller but was still very significant the aftershock and i had a hamster at the time um kiki i grabbed kiki out of the cage i was thinking a lot more clearly although i wasn't maybe it was i don't know i grabbed my hamster put him in my my pocket and i ran i'm glad that kiki i think he could sense that that we were in danger uh and i took i ran down the stairs six flights and i i went outside to the park uh an opening a clearing on the street i couldn't stand up it was like i'm talking about the road was like standing on a bus like and the bus was moving that's what it felt like standing on the road so i had to sit down on the street because i couldn't stand up it's different in the apartment i don't know maybe it was it's all vibrating but when you're on the ground during an earthquake a big one it's it's a it's a very different feeling i saw i was sitting down for about 15 seconds i just could not get up or i would have been hurt um i got up there were other people outside kids were wearing hats they have these uh felt hats or padded hats to protect them in japan from earthquakes or falling objects um and we we all made our way to the park uh kiki the hamster in my pocket was very popular i remember that more popular than i was a little jealous but there's there were kids out there and we were all talking um about the earthquake what to do um what was happening where was where was going on there were some fires across the river in chiba in ishikawa i believe ichikawa had some fires and there was some smoke and you can and things were not good there was more chaos we i went back in after 10 minutes i believe there was another aftershock before i went back in a third one um i just watched the tv i started calling as many people as i could but the um i believe this was the start of 4g lte or maybe it was still 3g but i could not get through to any of my friends or anybody that i cared about until about 45 minutes to an hour later i received a message just this the system became so jammed with people making phone calls this was um this was like the days of the iphone 4 right an iphone 5. smartphones were were a new thing um and it was hard to get as the same amount of information that we get today so i got back into my apartment i think it was about an hour later and then we were all watching the entire country the entire world that tsunami rolling in um into iwate miyagi parts of fukushima um even down in ibaraki they were there were swells where the water was rising and you you you couldn't imagine when you're live watching it and some of you probably have seen the video you can't imagine what you're feeling like when it's live and you see a lone car driving on a highway there's a helicopter that cannot communicate with that lone car and you see the tsunami this black wave just coming inland over fields and saying get out of there just just get out of there shouting at this at the tv um you see the tsunami uh dark water bringing fire buildings that had wiped out with fire on it it was it was watching this live and having aftershocks going on the worst day of my life there's no there's no question about it um so three four hours later um i started getting messages from friends facebook was three years old and we were getting facebook posts from friends who were stranded a lot of people could not take the trains back to their houses a lot of people were i had friends that were in kichijoji that had to get back to chiba so nothing was open they just walked a lot of friends had walked for 12 hours to get home so i was lucky to be at home actually there was a lot of walking and if you asked residents of tokyo that day most of them said that they were somewhere else i i was lucky i was i work at home i was editing video people were at the office and getting home was a huge challenge getting back to your family getting back to your children to your wives to your husbands very very the facebook feed of my friends was very very bad and i i lived in i lived in a city called iwaki in fukushima and i had friends up there also on facebook and we did get some posts and they were not good either fukushima again noted very famous for its peaches very famous for its sake very famous for its nature its own send for me i know all these things because i know fukushima living there before this event took place um uh iwaki was my home uh and that that's very close to where the the meltdown was taking place um out of the control of the people who were living there they had no idea what was going on how to react to it we knew that they were trouble we knew that there was an explosion we knew that there was contamination and the weeks that the days and weeks that followed were the scariest in my life i didn't know whether or not to evacuate and i did look online um and talk to other americans expats here almost 80 percent of my american friends did find a way to leave japan and most of my foreign friends except for a handful stayed in japan and i didn't go because the only way europeans could get a free flight out of japan to go home i think my french friends are like oh it's a free flight home i'm getting out of here so a couple days later they were gone mostly because of the fear out of radiation not so much after the aftershocks and all this we just didn't know if we were gonna be safe um on that day we're not thinking about that we're just thinking about what is going on is everybody okay a little windy here um so the aftermath if you have any questions i'll answer it about the earthquake i'll look at the screen right now and this is an important day just to share um what's going on on that day the aftermath was was awful the the inside of the supermarkets everything had fallen um almost everything was was off of the shelves staff was cleaning up um that afternoon despite the um um happy birthday to chen menacilian it's so long thank you happy birthday the the um supermarkets were a bad situation as well as the convenience stores everything was gone people were binge shopping getting everything very much like the pandemic with the toilet paper but everything water meat canned foods the shells were empty for days i was able to get some rice neighbors shared which was good if you had good relationships with your neighbors you could share get some rice get some eggs get some milk just try to tide yourself over the supply chain was broken for at least five days in tokyo for weeks up in tohoku months but down in tokyo there were five really bad days and and the shortages went on for a couple of weeks um so life back here everything had stopped my job nothing going on i didn't work much i was uploading videos there was no nhk work no tv for magazine programs it was all news all news what was going on with fukushima all this so i didn't have any work going on everything just stopped um life again you didn't have a lot of i didn't have a lot of food um but life was um life was hard not just because of that but because of the aftershocks they were coming like every five minutes it felt like every five minutes there was a swaying of your building these are like magnitude 5.0 4.0 like big enough to really make your whole house shake but not anything like what it was like on the day of um uh grizzly moxie i have to read these out live streams that superchats because they disappear and there's a bug in the youtube app thank you for that from canada the aftershocks are bad after after about 10 days of the aftershocks i couldn't take it anymore i seriously i was starting to go crazy because you felt like you were on a boat but you're not and it's mentally and this is the biggest problem with the earthquake there's a lot of traumatic experiences that harmed people mentally from this i was starting to get that way i just you were swaying all the time and you were scared and i didn't have any family so i got on a shinkansen which was up running and i went to osaka for five days to visit a friend that i had one of my best friends lives down there and stayed with her the first night i had to stay at a capsule hotel by umeda station osaka station hey tig rahoff nice to see you um i didn't i'd actually i had met kanai can i met you nissan june and sure yeah i met kanai but she was living in you were in did uh you are just back okay uh she was in new york yeah yeah so mara attended oh we met 2011 december when i went home after the earthquake it's a long time ago um but uh osaka was unusual because in the station a lot of people were sleeping there because they had evacuated from tohoku or the north gotten on a train and they just went to osaka they didn't know what else to do either i believe nagoya station had people too they people just wanted to go to a place where there was no earthquake so there were people sleeping in osaka station in osaka i was lucky to get a capsule hotel um the capsule hotel was full mostly of people who were just getting away from the earthquake or getting away from the radiation because it was scary i didn't know we just did not know the international media was reporting this as uh you know like the radiation news story after news story about um you could be drinking radiated water um fukushima this beautiful place that was my home turned into a bad word overnight and they should have called it they should have called it like the tepco disaster they called it the fukushima disaster and this is the wrong word it's the wrong word that is the place where it happened they could they should have just called it the city they could have called it um you know the city that it was in or a small town and just left the disaster to there but they picked an entire state that's one of the biggest in japan and destroyed it for it's gonna be like that for decades where its reputation is not about peaches and sake and and onsen and nature and and friendly people it's about a meltdown and radiation and i i'm to this day really upset about the name fukushima being dragged down with this they did people had nothing to do with this they lost their livelihoods the peaches in izu wakamatsu the distance is as far as it is to tokyo all right so if the peaches and yamanashi are good the peaches and izawakamatsu are good and it just happens to be in the same state prefecture fukushima we didn't know what we could eat we didn't know if the vegetables were any good we didn't know if the explosion had sprayed radiation into the into the the um into the farms of ibaraki which is where we get a lot of vegetables into the city of tokyo ibaraki is like our bread basket is our fruit basket too so i went down to osaka five days uh it helped me a lot mentally um stayed with my friend we kept watching tv and then i came back this is this is when things start to start to change um i i wanted to do whatever i could to help and volunteer because we were all now at this time it's now you know like two weeks in seeing the stories of people who lost everything everything the ones that did survive were were basically in hell you couldn't get up there to volunteer um uh maria i'm in los angeles scared that the big one will come in the middle of the day it's the worst time to hit it is you don't when you live in an earthquake zone you just don't know thanks thanks for the message so you you turn to what can you do to help and it's just a human thing if i'm here again all my foreign friends except for a handful of them stayed behind we called those we we had there was a word for the people who left the we called them fly gene all right there's gaijin which is the means outsider or foreigner we call them fly gene because they flew away and they they didn't stay and the friends that stayed became best friends i couldn't go up there all the time the the roads were and i didn't go up there as nearly as as much as some other really good friends um my one of my best friends at the time was mike connolly you know shout out to him who's the most unselfish person that i've ever met in my entire life he was he i didn't have a lot of money then okay and neither did he but he was using his money his savings to rent rent vans and get food up there i i think he'd rented vans and food and gasoline and gone up there and it's not it's not cheap to do that this is a very long drive it's like six seven hours hold on sendai yeah it's like six hours at least to get up there i don't think he can get he could get there because the roads weren't open yet but his heart was so big he just had to get out i'm talking about the volunteers now people you just could not stay you could not stay home and see what was going on on tv and not try to do something you couldn't so i i was raising as much money as i could because i had a club called the yakiniku club and we raised money it wasn't a lot but we were able to buy food for food banks second harvest was was the main place that we we contributed money to second harvest is has an office near um and akihabara and we would walk there and i would we would hand them the money and just say do what you can with this pay for your gasoline pay for the tolls buy some buy something to give the other volunteers a break i couldn't get up there until end of june the roads were a lot clearer then and it was that was a time when you can start to really help people because there was if you had rushed up there there was no place for you to really stay you're going into a zone that's not set up for anything there's no plumbing the conditions and we talked to eddie a couple of months ago in a live stream there was no plumbing there was no running water in fact there was no drinking water you couldn't get food the supply chain was broken restaurants that served people could not get enough in to supply the food again the government was stepping up with rations the u.s government and i'm so proud of them the navy and the military came in and did a really good job and they don't they don't get enough they deserve a lot more for what they did they were going into fukushima in places where there was radiation not thinking about themselves hmm and i had some friends down in yasukuni uh not yesterday um yokosuka never um going up there and helping uh up in tohoku so uh supplies were eventually getting up there and i think it was in june and july yeah where uh i was working with trying to get sponsors and was working with aussie beef um australian beef and we were able to get steaks brought in from australia and and drive them up and i remember the first first um positive thing that wasn't such a sad thing was an event that we put on and i i think mike uh japan foreign volunteers i believe was the organization yeah mike's organization japan foreign volunteers quickly uh started recruiting on facebook groups and um we put together a festival and aussie beef uh gave us the meat and we were cooking up 500 gram steaks to the people of ishinomaki in an area that was just wiped out and we had grills and people came we had taiko drums we had something of a party you didn't feel like partying but you needed to have some kind of a break um yeah it's a heavy subject it's one that needs to be told or at least i need to tell it even for myself to remember 10 years from now ah so that was a tough day but it was a good day we were tired we'd come all the way up we'd set up the grills tents it was a hot day in the summer lots of steaks we we must have cooked hundreds of kilograms of steaks to people people some people didn't want to stick around for a festival they took the steaks they went back to wherever they were camped or in shelters um and ate their steaks whatever we could do made us really happy and i spent the night in a school in ishinomaki that was a place where just a bed and you could you could tell that the locals there were used to working with volunteers they'd never met before there was a genuine friendliness to everything there were coordinators and they were just volunteered coordinators saying somebody's got to do it they stepped up the volunteerism up there was amazing in the months after people had had not a lot of experience my friend dean uh newcomb went up there as well um jamie um it's just it's it's not just mud i believe was his organization and he was focused on digging the mud out of the houses of people who who were impacted by the tsunami that was the aftermath of the earthquake was was awful when i did get to to ishinomaki in quesanuma after there's nothing there like there were places where it was just flattened and it's just debris they cleared the highways and you can see all of the debris on the left and the right of the highways just toppled just like mountains of stuff to clear away but they could get the the roads cleared to get supplies into the people who are living there trevor beck uh hashtag japan strong let's start to hashtag to show support they're also using tohoku ten um it's also a really good uh hashtag uh the hegemonka the resilience resiliency of japanese people is amazing tour twitter porco virtual hug from canada we feel and share uh your pain um thanks guys for that it was a disaster zone i i did see the you know the boats that were moored the cars that were in [Music] cars were washed into rice paddies and um you can't move the cars you can't move the vehicles because the property laws in japan prohibit you from doing that without the owner's consent even though it's landed into there so there were there were personal objects until the law was changed where they they could not remove a car they could not remove a boat or they couldn't move things until the proper channels have been contacted um it was it was it was amazing to see we'd seen it on tv when you see with your own eyes it is so much different because you can smell it you can taste it and you can see it and you feel it in the in the faces of the people that you go up there to help it was hard um jennifer french we're so glad you made it through okay so am i so am i i didn't think i would um considering japan regularly suffers from natural disasters are there not government organized disaster recovery teams and food and medical reserves there are but you cannot prepare for this even even so um that tsunami was was beyond what the worst case scenario would have been like okay it was beyond uh that's why we had the u.s um and i i believe japan was a little hesitant for outside help for a while and then well the us is part of our servicemen here are like residents of japan they live on bases in japan so they were very quick to offer help and and took them up but the conditions were bad um will tell you a story and um i'll try not to get emotional i was i was thinking about this last night um before i went to bed which is late actually because i had to upload this video mike and i were were we'd finished um in the morning we were helping people remove tatami mats out of out of their house a lot of people had left to go to other family members houses and had come back to uh ishinomaki to to their homes to start to dig out of it so we were helping people um with money tatami mats um just there were already volunteers there whatever they could we could do to help them to remove the wood out um to help just rip stuff out so that they can put in new wood that tsunami brought in toxic mud and water filled with gasoline chemicals and that brought everything into the house and was dangerous some of it was very toxic you had to wear masks you had to wear gloves and boots because you didn't want to touch the mud um it it was even harder because of that um we finished volunteering we're on a lunch break so we walked into town there wasn't anything open there was a cafe we got a sandwich very basic uh coffee nescafe it was actually really good and we were walking up the street um and there was a guy who was um uh moving a refrigerator he was moving it back into his house and he was by himself so we we saw this so we started to the three of us helped the two of us helped him three of us moved the refrigerator back in but you could see he wasn't okay he was alone i might have told the story before and it i'll try not to to lose it um i would like to go back up there and see how he's doing we were strangers so i guess it's easier to talk to strangers than it is to talk to somebody that you know who is because everybody has lost somebody nobody wants to hear another story about your loss when they've lost a family member too this was just a couple of months after and and uh his house the first floor was a disaster i mean it was just he was still digging the mud out but he'd made pretty good progress and he had some photos uh you know of his family and we could tell he wasn't okay and we didn't want to leave either so he offered us a tea um to stay and talk uh katayama thank you man and purple cat audio i think because if these disappear i might not be able to um thank you um he he we we went upstairs he had a second floor and we sat up there and it wasn't impacted i think that's where he was he told us his story and i'm going to share that with you so he was um and i really do hope i can see him again um when the earthquake hit uh his his kids were were outside he didn't really elaborate just outside and when the tsunami warnings came in his wife um went out to look for the kids and they had agreed that he would stay behind in the house in case they came back so that they would not go back out to look for their parents they would stay in the house so the tsunami when he came in and they were a little bit at elevation but not not quite high enough um this is the tsunami hit his wife and kids didn't return and they never returned and he was just waiting for the longest time for them to come back they didn't and um you could you could see he needed to say this he needed to tell people and we were the recipients of this recipients of this and we had to because the best thing that we could do at the time to help him was to just listen so that's what we did and um he talked about his his uh children he talked about his wife in japanese and you know we told him to be strong we said that we'd uh try to come back in and check in on him he said it was okay he said he had family nearby um he was staying with them he didn't know what he was gonna do he was gonna stay at that location because it brought a lot of pain to him you can see i'm i'm sure he's not there anymore but those stories were everywhere in that town not everybody made it um and those that did live with it they they live with it to this day and and many of them the reconstruction the rebuilding is not complete there's more that can be done maybe more volunteering i don't know um there was an orphanage that somebody told me about of kids that just didn't have um parents anymore because they were lost they were safe in their school so the you know these are some of the stories of the of the day and 2011 was not a great year in general the cherry blossom festival we're getting ready now to celebrate the hanami or sakura and um probably the events might be canceled here this year too they were canceled last year and they were canceled in 2011 um just because there was nothing to celebrate the whole country cherry blossom viewing which was two weeks later was just stopped nobody went out drinking partying having fun nothing it was canceled um you can't cancel nature the blossoms still came out but the blossoms had a different meaning a different purpose that was a bad year the fireworks were all mostly canceled um there were no festivals they were really subdued the next year it was special because tohoku was you know back where we were going to overcome this and 2012 was so much better than 2011 based on that just we're gonna get through this kind of a vibe 2011 was bad but it didn't start off bad you know actually i i found some of these photos um in december in february of 20 i was in the tokyo marathon just uh a week and a 10 days before i believe right it was a beautiful day i i'd ran my best time in the tokyo marathon three hours and 14 minutes this is proof that's true that's me i was dancing i was dancing i had i still had energy i trained really hard i had stolen energy at the finish line and it was i was i was able to dance and get in people's way make a big big big commotion um so it was good it was a great year until it happened it was a great year my work was increasing i was doing more tv stuff um um i don't know life changed we're now 10 years in we're in a lot better situation i'm not sure um i want to say thank you to second breakfast uh who's in mexico thanks guys and uh soapy knop you guys are great nagoya john everybody else i'll i'll go back and make sure yeah if i can that the app's been a little funky ten years on i i think there's a lot more needs to be done we may have lost focus because of the olympics i'll be honest with you i think we were when we were focused on tokyo um maybe we should have been more focused because we were also focused on getting a bid for the um the 2016 olympics remember so maybe we should have been more focused on on on this i don't i don't know how that if it was a bad impact or good impact but i just know that the attention shifted a little bit more to tokyo than what i was comfortable with and wish the attention had stayed on miyagi iwate fukushima um parts of ibaraki chiba people hurting small businesses locals um grandmothers that lost their house now they they're living in trailers still some of them people might be i haven't a couple of years ago they were um eddie told me that the situation is a lot better his hotel and the live stream is from from a couple of months ago is still available his hotel is now abandoned um and i walked past it but that was headquarters back then in in casa numa for volunteers for people coming through eddie speaks great english because of all the violent international volunteers that went through there but 10 years on there's still a lot more that needs to be done and that's why talking about this 10 years on is important to me it's important in japan to talk about it and what what still needs to be done and we have the olympics coming this year and i'm hoping that nbc focuses a lot on tohoku we do have some events the softball events are actually based in fukushima i believe some of the olympic events are there i don't know if i don't know what will actually be going on but to me that's a good thing and that puts focus uh on an area that that very much needs it and if you can do me a favor when you think of that word fukushima i don't know how you erase it or click a restart button i'd click restart and think of it as the places of of peaches onsen sake friendly people yeah um i don't know what it's gonna be like in 10 years from now it's could be it could be um a lot of new stuff in case numa had a pretty exciting vibe they had pokemon manholes up there manhole covers uh new businesses a lot of younger people have come in started uh entrepreneurial enterprises um they're trying their best to attract people to come here it's on everyone's radar now um other youtubers are focusing on on it um i know uh abroad in japan chris broad is uh from uh his his japanese hometown is the sendai area right now uh charlotte's living up in morioka there's a lot of other youtubers that are there doing good things putting a light on on um on tohoku on the areas that were really impacted and that's a good thing because we cannot forget um same with kobe you know you see the earthquake memorial down in kobe and you remember i was a couple of years when i came to japan when that happened and the impact was still being felt a couple of years later um in 1998 is when i came so we're still feeling that impact and i believe there was still an aftershock not that long ago that was pretty strong quake that they said was an aftershock from 10 years ago all right so we still have occasional aftershocks from that one quake the next big one can happen all right and i wanted to make this episode i don't know if you've if any of you have seen it yet but i wanted to make this episode uh and release it today for this purpose this is um it's called japan's experience japan's largest earthquake really felt because if you do come to japan it will help you prepare mentally for the next earthquake hold on like i i do think i do think it will help you watching that video just so you can see and feel because nobody has their camera running when an earthquake hits and you can't see their face you can't see how they react nobody describes it to you when it's happening those earthquake simulators give you an opportunity to do that if you're in japan definitely go check that out and and definitely um um like watch that video and get an understanding if you're thinking of moving to japan you have to take in consideration yeah it's a safe place but it's not a safe place in the sense that mother nature is pretty cruel to japan we've got typhoons we've got earthquakes we've got landslides we have volcano eruptions we've got like every single possible natural disaster situation here all right um which is probably why japan is so safe maybe that's one reason we respect life very much okay after you lived through a situation where you thought you were going to die you try to make every day count you try to live every day better you remember that day you have now a point in your own personal history to go back to to say things were that bad i could have died you remember it and it sets up the course of your whole life going forward that's this is what this channel only in japan um again i say this in the video but it comes from this just a deep love for that area for people um for japan japan's been very good to me 23 years what could i do and that's what i could do um i was doing it for nhk but i thought i could do it better a little bit maybe my way what do you think i don't know so that's why it's important for me to keep doing only in japan um despite the recent challenges with the channel uh it's for me it's rooted in a very very deep personal personal feeling um personal desire to help that's why i spend a little bit more time with the videos that's why i want it to be as factually correct as possible it's the journalism part of it in the next 10 years you know i i don't know but i i do know that um there's a lot of people who love tohoku a lot of people who live up there a lot of people that have voices now and there's a lot of people that are going to continue to bang the drum and say get get up tohoku get up to um keep your eyes on on make sure that the people are doing okay they may not reach out for help in japan when somebody sake glass is empty you have to notice it and fill it they won't ask for a refill some people won't ask for help you just have to know don't ask just just help them just listen just stop and listen and for that day with me and my friend mike when we heard the story of the man who lost everything the value in listening is sometimes invaluable um and then and italian bombshell tracy also told me about uh about her own daughter and who's in our prayers um this pandemic has also brought in some very traumatic um situation especially for younger people and it's very hard a lot of depression it felt kind of the same way back in 2011. we're in a way sort of reliving that we're at home we can't really go out there there's an earthquake back then and radiation now it's uh fear of radiation it's okay in japan by the way now it's the pandemic and um you know to tracy uh to italian bombshell and and her that that's her username and her daughter who's in the hospital um from you know hurting herself from from depression caused by the pandemic it's real listen to people again you sometimes you just have to look and you have to notice and you just have to listen you don't have to ask do you need help you just say just ask are you what's wrong tell me about it listen don't talk that can be huge to help people get through something and that's that's what i learned um from that although i talk over peter all the time and i do talk a lot i listen a lot too just so you know that all right i'll take some of your questions for a little bit and then um the bbc contacted me and wanted to talk to me a little bit about about the anniversary so i want to um i think it was like 7 20 greenwich mean time or something thank you for sharing your experience from at a direct um here's hoping scientific breakthrough means we could predict earthquakes better that would be really good and katrina johnson thank you for doing what you do thank you katrina very much um the bug is still here i can't see anything past that um feria 17 thanks for sharing john i had a chance to visit uh oh yeah riku takata yeah this was so this is up in iwate prefecture and was very hard hit a few years ago it's devastating to see how much of it is gone inspiring to see how they're rebuilding but you're right these uh more could be done more needs to be done um and right now just just shining a light on tohoku on this area is a good thing on april 3rd i'm working with japan rail jr east we've got a special shinkansen they give it as a special ceremonial shinkansen to start off a new pass um howard howard hanzawa thank you jr east pass is now open to foreign residents living in japan and i know my friend um um ruth jarman from german international has been working really hard too with jr east uh trying to find ways um to get i don't know more focus on tohoku so this pass again it was just foreign residents that could use this pass and now sorry just foreign tourists but now foreign residents people like me can now use a pass to get up to tohoku um and and help from a promotion take pictures up there take our vacations up there wx turbo thank you um that's a great thing jr east is doing a wonderful thing by offering this pass it's five days unlimited for for 200 which is like a fraction of the cost what just one trip up to almoddy costs like 80 percent of that so i'm gonna be utilizing this pass a lot over the next year filming a lot more in tohoku and i hope this opens it up a lot more and i'm so thankful to jerry's for opening up this jr pass there's a tweet that i have pinned at the top i think that um if you are in japan living here join me on that train there's a hundred people can can join me on this train the whole train is ceremonial all right it's awesome you can join me on the train it's 15 000 yen um at even more discounted price you get a five-day pass um a welcome mask a suica card a little some swag um and there's a ceremony on the platforms of sendai fukushima sendai morioka and shin aomori and tokyo station and i'll be live streaming the ceremony on tokyo station um again this is um all for tohoku to try to get people up there and for me it's very important to do that to get people get their businesses running for me it's about trying to get people to focus and go up there so this is awesome all right so if it's not the tweet's not pinned there there's a press release on japan uh today about this and there's a i'll put a link in the description if you're interested we we we have uh over 100 people signed up but only about 70 people have paid sorry about 30 people have paid because this the payment system is a little bit unusual but we'll get there um yeah wow i really appreciate the wx turbo and and warren von tronto inspirational story coming out of 311 let's not forget about our national hero uh yuzuru hanyu who lives in canada now remember the brave indeed um it's it's these kinds of situations very much so like 2001 uh 9 11 when the twin towers came down the city of new york and america pulled together like i'd never seen it before japan was very much the same way and the volunteers the foreign expats that lived here i salute you all i i you stayed here you did not you were not a fly jean you didn't leave i can't blame anybody who left because we just didn't know about the radiation and what was going on but for those who stayed and put themselves in harm's way just to help other people to use their own savings and money to give to grandmothers and and and grandfathers who had lost family members and to give them food and um i i'm inspired so much by my friends here you have no idea and it's this is the reason why i stay in japan don kennedy hugs from mountain view canada don thank you um that's all i have to say i'm gonna get ready for maybe an interview i'm not sure uh what's going on but uh it was about 2 p.m when when the earthquake hit and we're getting close to that right now in fact um i think we're there yeah um yeah that's actually bbc now they want to talk to me so uh thanks so much for for watching this live stream i let's keep our memories and focus on on tohoku going forward in 2021 um much love if you have any questions you can leave in the comments below and check out the new video that i just uploaded on the on the main channel um what it felt like because i think it's important for you to know on this day what we felt that day so check out that live stream thanks everybody thank you davard ross and by the way let me know your address i sent you a message about that you'd written sweet but not the number i'm communicating through a live stream i sent you a message uh we'll i'll communicate jimbo 386 thank you bye everybody don kennedy i appreciate it have a nice day

Channel: ONLY in JAPAN * GO

Views: 49,482

Keywords: Only in Japan, Japan, John Daub, Japanese, Tokyo

Id: rRH8SHsjEbE

Length: 60min 25sec (3625 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021