I just wanted to write a quick thing or two about my first trip to Japan, which has so far comprised of visits to Sapporo and Hakodate in northern Japan (Hokkaido). I was going to mention my appreciation for the Japanese love of serving meals in so many tiny plates, the overall high level of manners, the taxi drivers wearing white gloves, the bottomless variety of sodas, the local dishes like mutton bbq and curry soup, the toilet seats which will, in the words of my new friend Akira, “solve all your problems,” or even—strangest of all—the eerie Hakodate-Hamburger Chain, Lucky Pierrot, famous for its chicken and whale burgers (since discontinued), served up with all the uncanny chaos of Coney Island’s Steeple Jack (see cover image).

But that would be to ignore the most exciting part: what was to be my penultimate date in Hakodate (July 30th), an historic 8.9 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Kamchatka rocked the seas at about 8:30am, leading to an international tsunami advisory. This meant Hakodate shut down, and I struggled to find any open restaurants despite my heroic hobbling in my boot (foot broken, don’t ask). This also meant I had to take another day in Hakodate because all transporation out of Hakodate, aside from private cars, was canceled.

Is there anything more Japanese than getting stuck in a tsunami?

8.9/10 bathymetric scientists say no!

Absolutely no damage occured to Hakodate as a result of the tsunami, and it looks like the majority of the worst of it was relegated to Russian coastal cities. This whole thing reminds me a bit of my lecture “There’s no such thing as a natural disaster” in which I argue that there is no such thing as a natural disaster, only human-made disasters. Case in point: Fukushima. 2nd case in point: this earthquake. We received notification of the earthquake over the emergency alert system within an hour or so of the earthquake, which gave basically anyone in Japan plenty of time to get out of any danger-zone. And due to seismological specifics I can’t claim to fully understand, this earthquake hardly generated a wave, certainly not anything comparable to 2011 or 2004, thankfully.

So I’m ending my two month trip from Hong Kong to LA to San Diego to New York to Boston to Mystic Connecticut to New York to Santa Barbara to San Diego to Japan with a massive earthquake and a tsunami. It’s been quite a trip.

Lucky Pierrot’s: Not even the slightest bit sinister.