Earthquake

This morning we felt our sofa vibrating, the dining table lamp was dangling from side to side and our closets were making strange sounds. Automatically we listened with tension to hear if we had made a huge mistake by putting all our crystal glasses on shelves, as we felt our first real, though relative small earthquake.

We cannot say it felt dangerous, but there is some sort of excitement to the virgin feeling of a shaking sofa beneath you. We got a vague feeling of being bystanders incapable of preventing it from happening and of being bystanders to the destined consequences. The only thing to do was to wait until it was over.

The Japanese do not use the Richter scale to measure the earthquakes; - instead they use the JMA scale, where Shindo 7 is the most powerful and damaging earthquake and the Shindo 0 impossible to feel as a human being. (Read more about the Japanese earthquake scale here.)
A little surfing on the internet led us to a huge earthquake that took place by the coast west of where we are living (see picture) just the same time as we felt it here. This earthquake was at the top end of the JMA-scale with a shindo 6 (and 6.9 on the Richter scala according to Danish Newspapers: http://politiken.dk/udland/article271548.ece), which means that it is impossible to move during the earthquake unless you crawl. The epicentre was located 353 kilometres from Koriyama, reducing the earthquakes effect to a shindo 2 for us.