My own quake

Coming from Middle America, one thing I haven't had to spend 2 seconds thinking about all my life is...earthquakes. There was that guy who predicted a massive tremor in Missouri on December 2 that one year, but that's it. It was always somewhere far away, like out in California or on TV when I'm tryin to watch the World Series. When I came to Japan, I heard people saying, "Yeah, they have a lot of earthquakes out there." In a way, I was a little excited to experience one. I never felt one before and I had no way of knowing what it felt like for the whole structure of the Earth to be trembling. Of course I stood by the train tracks as the train rumbled by, but was that really what it felt like? Would I soon have an answer to this question? Well, yeah, sort of. Japan is indeed a country that experiences its fair share of quakes. The biggest one in the past generation was the Hanshin earthquake in '95 that killed over 6000 people. October 23, there was a pretty big one in the area of Niigata, 2 hours form Tokyo, 38 people died. I was sitting on my brother's couch back in spring 2003 and there was a slight tremor, could not have been more that a 2. True it was a quake, but very minor. Then came last night. I don't recall what time it was. I was sleeping, of course, when all of a sudden I woke up to my bed shaking. In the confused state of awakening, I just held on tight. In my semiconscious state (and due to the recent publicity), I immediately thought earthquake. It sooned stopped and as I lay there, I heard the heavy machinery continuing work on the main road near my house. I was back to sleep fast. When I woke this morning, I didn't even remember it. Well, I won't say that, it only registered as one jumbled image in the entirety of my dreams during the night. When I got to school, someone mentioned it and I had to think. Oh yeah, that did happen last night. I suddenly became slightly panicked. Wow, what if... Turns out, it was a quake of magnitude 3-4. That's a pretty significant shake, though there was no damage. My supervisor Yuji told me it was the biggest one in about 4 years. I spent a lot of time watching coverage of the Niigata quakes recently, and I can't imagine experiencing a big one like that. This is a land of natural disasters, and last night made me rimind me that anything can happen anywhere.