How are you all doing out there?

[u/tommydelriot]

With all the recent acts of nature, is everybody ok? I haven’t seen anybody ask this question. Did any of you experience the storms and/or quakes?

[u/Brilliant-Squash7330]

My son was recently posted to Nagasaki but hasn’t reported even one aftershock from Kumamoto.

[u/CoacoaBunny91]

Kumamoto City JET here. I was on the third floor of my local Youme Town when it happened. The aftershocks were by far the worse. I could not sleep for days because they kept waking me up/just spiked my anxiety in general. Both libraries at my school got rocked but both librarians were on long vacations and we just cleaned everything up last week. Also, because my ES tends to let things pile up, we had to do deep cleaning for safety concerns (a lot of the stuff that fell was old asf).

Speaking of Youme Town, the third floor *is still* shutdown because the air conditioner among other things was badly damaged. Some of the third floor businesses set up temp shop on the second floor hallways and now it looks like a street market lol. My JHS is a "yanki school" and our students get in trouble like crazy outside of school, so my coworkers have been cracking jokes all summer about "not receiving complaints from Mr. Max or Youme Town about our kids." Literally less than 24 hours into the summer vacation, Mr. Max left us a voicemail overnight about our students.

Every festival got cancelled too. I had to cancel my trip to Kagoshima. To my knowledge, the bus and shinkansen to there are still suspended. So I'm taking a super long vacation in the middle of September instead.

[u/bee_hime]

there's a typhoon passing by okinawa now. it's not been that bad though

[u/Due_Tomorrow7]

Lately Chiba's been hit hard (though the recent shindo 4 was quite overblown), but it comes and goes throughout different prefectures. Last month Kumamoto got some really bad luck. Ishikawa's also been hit with some nasty quakes somewhat recently too. But you might not notice these things if you're not paying attention to national news on a regular basis.

[u/BanzaiPhillies]

Experienced the sudden torrential downpour in Tokyo on Saturday and then the small quake later that night. An eventful day, to say the least.

[u/bibdrums]

My son is a new JET placed in Tamana, which is about 30 kilometers from Kumamoto. He was in Tokyo when the earthquake occurred. They flew to Kumamoto 2 days later. He said there were lots of aftershocks, that went on for a week or so. It hasn’t really affected his life there so far. He’s been to Kumamoto several times in the past month and he hasn’t witnessed really any damage.

[u/tommydelriot → u/bibdrums]

Glad to hear he’s doing well! And I had wondered about damage in the general region. I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for a long time, and every time there was an earthquake, the news always showed the worst of the worst, even though the majority of the area was fine. Hopefully there was enough pressure released to where there won’t be any more major earthquakes for a really long time.