When Life Shakes You Up
When our itinerary read, “Go to the Disaster Prevention Center,” I was sure I knew what to expect. I was also sure my college students would not only balk at going, but be stifling yawns of boredom and jet lag while we sat there.
It was our second day in Japan, and the university we are partnering with had scheduled this event. A number of their employees and students had shown up on a Saturday to shepherd us through the busy and disorienting subway system. Then, we climbed up and out into the oppressive heat and humidity. The sweat stains on everybody’s shirts soon turned into Rorschach tests. I saw mostly butterflies, which seemed to bode well for these dazed and confused students of mine, because what is an experience like this but an opportunity for transformation?
I had to smile, though, when I overheard one group’s conversation. It was far from existential. “I don’t think this Japanese deodorant I bought is working.”
About half an hour after we had set off, we arrived at a fortress of a fire station. It sat hulking on the corner with massive bricks and impressive steel girders.
Inside, we discovered that apparently firefighters all over the world can be calendar models.
We were led up to a theater and divided very neatly in groups. The woman in charge began to speak at 10:29. Then, she stopped. When the clock turned to 10:30, she began again. Her Japanese flew so fast into her tiny microphone that she sounded like an old family friend who used to be an auctioneer. The only words I understood were “Ohio gazaimus!” (good morning!) and “Kudasai!” A fervent please she repeated again and again.
When an animated video began, it showed a classroom of elementary school kids. Again, I worried about what my college-aged students would think, but that lasted only a few minutes, because the video soon showed these kids visiting the horrific destruction of the worst earthquakes and tsunamis in Japanese history.
Real photos were interspersed with the animation, and the theater took on a grave silence. The juxtaposition of animation and devastation unsettled me. How were my students receiving this, because suddenly, I had all kinds of fears about earthquakes and tsunamis that I hadn’t had before.
I wondered what a video like this would show back home. Cows spinning inside tornadoes? Families trapped in cars during a blizzard?
What struck me about that video is that it was the kids who saved so many people, because they refused to listen to the adults who were telling them to stay put. They knew they needed to get to higher ground, and the video showed actual pictures of kids holding hands, leading one another up, up, up to safety and salvation.
Something else I will remember had to do with a gesture one of the characters made. When I teach yoga, I often ask my students to create mudras: powerful gestures with their hands.
As she stood in front of a monument that honored the victims of an earthquake, one of the characters held her right palm up. Then, she took her left hand and gently wrapped it around her right wrist. She bowed, and her quiet blessing almost moved me to tears.
When the video was over, we were efficiently split into groups and led through four simulations. The first one my group did involved entering a confusing warren of dark rooms and hallways filled with smoke. All of us crouched down, lightly touching walls and the shirt of the person in front of us to make it out alive.
After that, we donned rubber boots and rain slickers and looked like Oompa Loompas as we entered a room designed to simulate what a typhoon felt like. Rains fell, then wind whipped as we held onto metal poles. A student and I talked about it later, and we both agreed this was the one that disappointed us, because the simulation separated the wind and the rain. I, for one, wanted to shout like Albert in The Count of Monte Cristo, “Do your worst!”
Next, we went to the urban flood section. Here, we were asked to push against a big steel door as the “flood waters” pressed back. Even though I regularly lift weights, I barely managed to push the door open, and it offered a potent reminder of how defenseless we can feel and be in the face of forces bigger than ourselves.
Lastly, my group went to the earthquake room. We took off our shoes and knelt on colorful mats that looked like they belonged in a Kindergarten classroom. Our earthquake went from a nine on the Richter Scale to a seven, and when the room started to shake and buck, my body flew up and around, even though I had taken the required “roly poly” position. The student next to me exclaimed, “Holy shit!”
When we all gathered back together, my students’ eyes were bright. The experience had been part warning, part history lesson, part theme park, and it reminded me that we never know what is coming. We never know what experiences might shake us up or surprise us or ask us act bravely and intuitively, even when other “wiser” voices are telling us to stay put.
The experience also taught me that the next time something makes me sweat in fear or uncertainty, maybe a good course of action would be to clasp my right wrist with my left hand and be ready to receive both the challenge and the blessings.
Or at the very least, I hope I can remember my students’ backs, how they’d bravely shown up for this new and wild experience, and how on day two, they were already wearing their own set of wings.
And who knows. Underneath my red backpack, I might have sprouted a pair of my own.