3/11 Personal Experience:

At the time of the earthquake, I was a high school sophomore at the American School in Japan, the biggest international school in Tokyo. I was sitting in my english class, when the room suddenly started to shake. Initially I thought nothing of it. Our class paused for a moment. Then, we realized that the earthquake was not only persisting for an unusually long length of time, but also increasing in magnitude. The shaking of the walls and furniture was audible. My teacher was initially at a loss, and suggested that we should probably get down under our desks. At this point, I was still unaware of the fact that this was a serious earthquake, and was under the impression that it would subside within the next few seconds like a normal earthquake. However, it did not. I looked out the window, and realized that the buildings outside were visibly swaying side to side. Some students started to scream or cry. I then realized that this was not a normal earthquake. The shaking stopped, and we heard students running through the hallways, towards the main field. We joined the crowd and frantically ran towards the field. While I knew that this was an unusually large earthquake (and the first time we carried out an all-school evacuation for a real emergency situation), I was still not aware of the extent of the damage. We filed out to the main field and got into the alphabetical lines that we had previously rehearsed. My mother had been on campus by chance that day, and I walked over to where she was to establish a plan. She would go home by car, and I would go home by school bus. We sat on the field for approximately 40 minutes while the teachers and administrators went through emergency organizational procedures. As most of us had smartphones, we were frantically trying to either contact our parents or check the news, neither of which we could do for the first half hour because the cellphone networks crashed. After some time on the field, we were told to board our school buses for the ride home, which usually takes about an hour. Because the highways were all closed, we were forced to take regular roads. However, Tokyo was in complete gridlock. Bumper to bumper traffic persisted all the way from our suburban campus to downtown, and the bus ride that usually took an hour ended up taking six. We could see many businessmen and women who were going home from work walking on the sidewalks having given up on the trains, which were closed. We stopped multiple times at convenience stores and fast food stores for food and bathroom breaks, but most of the places we stopped at were out of stock of food. After a six hour bus ride, I reached my home, and only then could I turn on the news and realize the magnitude of the disaster at hand.