MY LOVE TO EVERYONE GRIEVING NOW.

Thank you to the hundreds of messages I received asking if I was okay. I am safe!

It was terrifying….. one in a lifetime experience….

I was lucky to be in a new house. Actually when we built this house in Ookayama, 2 years ago, I liked the idea that it was located on the top of a hill.

Actually, O-Okayama (Yama means Hill in Japanese, and Oka comes from the Oka-da family, whom are my direct neighbors and the first O means big).

Also I remember looking over the shoulders f the construction workers to see how they were building the ground foundations of my future home, I was interested in understanding how it was made, how it would work. I liked seeing the huge rails to make the house slide from side to side and the huge suspensions on the top of it, like the ones you can see attached to the wheels of your car, that you can see if you bend over and look under the body of your car…. the bigger the better I was told. Ours was HUGE ones… good news.

You might thing it is silly but this all you think about to reassure yourself when the quake start to strike quite too violently to ignore it….

I was seated on my sofa, reading the fashion news when it started. When you lived in Japan for 13 years+ , you get used to it and you just wait for the “big-bang” to happen. But this time I felt that my sofa had attached to a skateboard and that i was on a scary one….. then everything around shacked pretty hard and the noise got louder, dangerously loud…. terrifying shaky.

It was about more than a minute and half later, when I grabbed my computer again and started writing a message to my family, and as I wrote, my message became a bit dramatic and seemed like I was really going to die…. It is true that in events like this one you realized what are your priorities in life. My entire mind what filled with photos of my family. I Skyped my son Ben in Los Angeles, I know he always responds, in fact he is always next by his Mac Pro screen… I saw his face and started to cry and tell him that I loved him so much, and he knew what was happening already because at the same time Hiroko had text-ed him…..

Now think about how long the earth was moving… scary right!? I went outside and hugged Juliet (my housekeeper and friend for 6 years), she was livid and was escaping the highest floors of my home. We held hands and after it was over, I looked at Juliet and said -”OMG! We could just have died together! Like Romeo and Juliet !!!:)”.

And then we checked on the not-young-anymore ladies within the homes next to us in the same streets. One of the husband said: -”I cannot believe what happened. This was the biggest earthquake I ever experienced in my life. At least we are safe regarding the tsunami because here we are on a big hill.”

The phones had died, gas shut down and the TV was screaming words of evacuation for people living in area close to sea. On NHK, they had those warnings in 5 different languages: Japanese, Korean, Chinese, English and Portuguese.

In the meantime, my husband was driving in Singapore, with my 2 sons and he started receiving frantic phone calls & text messages from friends and relatives asking if I was okay and that is how he found out what happened and that I might be in serious troubles in Tokyo…. Of course again the phones were silent.

Ken who was so uninterested in Facebook or Skype had to quickly set up his own account so that he could get in direct contact with me from Singapore and could have my boys see me and talk to me regularly. Life always has surprise… Thanks to Skype with have been all reunited at that time of our life….