I know, I know, I wasn't going to go anywhere near anything more technological than my camera whilst on my jolly holiday to the lovely countryside of Northern Japan. But it's not every jolly holiday that one gets to enjoy the delights of a 7.2 magnitude earthquake!

Fighting a rising tide of panic that contained the hint of a very loud, healthy scream, I managed to pull myself together enough to plant my feet far apart, pull the camera out and film the very tail end of it, catching the neighbours antenna falling off.

There's not much you can do in an earthquake - just stand there looking around at the scene and each other waiting for it to end... the 5 of us (3 kids, Misae and I) were just coming out of the house to get into the car as it happened so we had a great view. The house is on the fringes of a big old cedar forest and the noise of the trees shaking back and forth and up and down was a bit like the sound of angry elephants pushing their way through a forest (I guess, not that I've everheard that particular sound...). All around us, houses, trees, cars, antennas... were moving as if they were perilously suspended on top of a giant bowl of jelly. Somwhere down the street there were people yelling. And maybe we were too. Lots of "Oki! OKI!!! KOWAI!!" (it's big, it's big, it's scarey!)

What gets me is that at 7.2, this quake was bigger than the Niigata quake that killed around 40 people last year, and only .1 smaller than the Kobe quake (7.3) of '95 that killed 6 400 people yet only a small handful of people were injured, mostly down in Sendai. Misae says that the local people believe that the Earth here is very strong, solid. And maybe, also, the fact that this is a very rural area with a low population and low density housing. Well, it is up here where I am anyway, (kinda Central\North Miyagi (North of Sendai))

Afterwards the neighbours all came out to check on each other (this is the country after all, where everyone has big gardens and smiles) and have a laugh. We sat around watching the TV news coverage (and checking for damage inside the house - astonishingly, very little, but then they don't have much in the wau of furniture)for an hour then took off to go for a boat ride in a mammoth lotus lake, where the workers were all drunk and laughing about the fun Earthquake. Nice.