On Friday morning, my French professor came up to me after class and asked me if the earthquake was okay. There was another pretty big earthquake earlier during the week, so I thought she was talking about that. I said, “Well it’s okay, it happens from time to time” — but apparently, some things don’t happen from time to time. I went back to my room and finally saw the news, the e-mails, facebook, the furious stream of tweets… It was just not understandable. I e-mailed my mother right away to ask if everyone was okay.

My host father who works at the Communications Office told me that they were looking for Japanese students who can answer the interview about the quake, and although I had almost no information on whatsoever, I skimmed through the online news and went to McCullough to take the interview. The local televisions were there, and probably newspapers too, who asked me to talk about the disaster. I’m pretty sure they had more knowledge than I did, but nonetheless, I told them all the information I knew and some general stuff about earthquakes and tsunamis from a Japanese perspective.

And then, they took me down stairs to the big screen in front of the box office and I had to read Japanese websites for them. They asked me  to check if I had gotten any e-mails from my family, and thus I checked my Gmail, and saw my mother telling me she hadn’t gotten hold of my sister yet, or my father. But what could I tell the press? Do I have to be the poor little guy on TV not knowing how my family is? I had to tell a lie — “She says everyone’s okay.” Then they zoomed into the screen, filming my mother’s e-mail. So, if anyone who reads Japanese saw the screen, they probably knew what I was trying to do. It was all about trying to be calm. To avoid the craze. But how?

I was literally glued onto the screen of my laptop for the next few days, watching Ustream and twitter and YouTube and the online news. Things seemed to become worse and worse. More and more aftershocks. Explosions at the nuclear power plants. I could not do any school work — fortunately it was weekend, but I still didn’t recover for the next week from the shock and the anxiety.