Berkley Center

I wasn’t in Tokyo when the earthquake happened. I was at home, taking a break from a wild spring break of couch-surfing across Europe. I knew nothing about the earthquake until I came down for breakfast the morning of March 9, and my mom told me that she had been answering worried phone calls from relatives all morning. I spent most of the day sitting on the couch, keeping one eye on CNN and the other on Facebook.

It still amazes me that half a world away, even as trains came to a halt and people had to spend the night in elementary schools and subway stations, my friends in Japan were able to reassure everyone elsewhere that they were fine. And all of this via Facebook, which is where I generally go to look at embarrassing pictures of people I don’t like and link humor sites or movie trailers to people I do. Never had I used any social website to make sure that no one I cared about had been hurt in anything like a massive earthquake. But by the end of the day I was reassured that all of my friends in Tokyo were shaken, but safe. It was only later that I realized that there was still one piece of my life in Tokyo missing.

On New Year’s Eve, a group of friends and I went to Zojoji Temple in the Roppongi district of Tokyo, right by Tokyo Tower. The temple was packed with people, and in the crowd we befriended a group of other short-term Japan inhabitants, visiting Tokyo for the holiday. They were English teachers with the JET Programs, and they came from all over the world, places like Trinidad, Australia, and Ohio. Our groups came together in the way you do on nights out where details like names are an unimportant and quickly forgotten detail. We spent the whole night drinking and singing karaoke until it was after 6 a.m. in the morning, then we all got on our trains and went home. I was content to have the fantastic memory of the night and was happy to have met them, but never expected see them again. How could I even contact them, without remembering their names or phone numbers?

The only thing I remember about them with much clarity is that they were teaching in Sendai. It’s a city to the north of Tokyo, and it was also the city closest to the earthquake’s off-shore epicenter. Sendai was one of the areas ravaged by a devastating tsunami, resulting in incredible devastation and huge loss of life. All of my friends and the people I knew in Tokyo were safe and sound after the earthquake. It’s only a small group of strangers I met one night that are unaccounted for. I don’t remember their names; I can’t even remember how many of them I met. I have no way of finding out what happened to them. Facebook here doesn’t help me at all. I am so connected, able to access people in every part of the world, but there are some questions even an internet connection can never answer.