Edinburgh teacher tells how he fled from Japan quake

A TEACHER has told how he feared for his life as he fled a swaying building on the day Japan suffered the most destructive earthquake in its history.

Joseph Power, from Leith, was teaching English to a group of Asian students when his Tokyo classroom began to shake and rock all around him.

As the class frantically ran for the exits, the 29-year-old said he feared the building would collapse and he would be killed.

The force 5 quake that hit the capital was a minor tremor compared with the huge 8.9-magnitude trembler that flattened buildings and triggered a devastating tsunami 250 miles further north.

Mr Power, who has lived in Japan for the last year, said it was one of the most frightening experiences of his life.

He said: "There were two major shakes, the first lasted about two minutes and 20 minutes later we all went back into the building and another one happened.

"It was a very surreal day, I went to work as normal and it was just another day until around 2.40pm. I felt something like a pulsing throughout the building, which was quite strange.

"My three students, who are all middle-aged Japanese ladies, were immediately alarmed and said 'let's get out of here', so we ran.

"As we were leaving everything was shaking and rattling. Just as we got outside everything started to swing, the whole world started to swing.

"The buildings we had just left were basically doing the can-can. They were moving as if they were being shaken by a giant - they looked like toys, not buildings."

He added: "I was terrified the building was going to come down. Imagine running out of a building being chased by a giant monster that was trying to chew you up. I was thinking, if I don't get out of this building I am going to die."

The former Trinity Academy pupil said Tokyo's resilience to the quake was due to intelligent engineering and design, but with transport links down he said thousands of people were stranded in the city centre unable to get home.

He said: "I can't get home and don't know what I'm going to do. Everyone will be fighting for hotel rooms and it's going to be cold tonight, so sleeping outside is almost out of the question.

"People seem to be walking around very shell-shocked and I'm sure it's going to take some time to process everything that happened today.

"I think everybody is shocked, there's a lot of people waiting at the station who don't have an idea what to do next.

"The disaster in New Zealand was only a few weeks ago and people were talking about that here because a lot of Japanese people died in that event.

"It was fresh in everybody's memories and two or three weeks later it's happening to you."

Meanwhile, Kazunori Hosoya, the deputy consul general of Japan in Edinburgh, said there had been a handful of enquiries from the city's 460 Japanese residents concerned about family in their native country.

Edinburgh-based crisis charity Mercy Corps has not ruled out travelling to offer humanitarian support in Japan, but says it is currently only monitoring the situation.

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