Tsukuba Monogatari: Tenth post
Around 9:30 am on Wednesday (Oct. 18) Hori-san (the HR manager) came over to our cubicle and said there had just been a big earthquake, and a bridge had collapsed. “Where?” I asked. “California,” he said. He didn’t say which city. David asked (hopefully, I thought – but this may have just been wishful thinking), “Los Angeles?” “No,” Hori-san said. “San Francisco.” “WHAT??” I blurted. “Which bridge??” “The Bay Bridge,” he said. “The Bay Bridge COLLAPSED???” I couldn’t help but note that this was a perfect example of Japanese indirectness – building slowly to the point when delivering bad news so that the person has time to prepare. An American would’ve just said, “Good god! The Bay Bridge just collapsed!”
Of course, later, I found out that the bridge was still standing, and one small section of the roadway had collapsed. But at the time, I was in shock, and we went downstairs to watch the news on the security guard’s TV monitor. He seemed delighted to have something on besides The Company’s front entrance.
Yamazaki-san is convinced that The Company saved my life. If I hadn’t been here, he said, I would have been driving home across the bridge, he said. “At 5:04 pm?” I snorted. “No way.”
I was doing pretty well at suppressing the panic, but when Kimura-san poked me in the back and said, “How’s your mother?” I almost lost it. I almost cried on his chest. (I missed a good chance – Kimura-san is a hunk!)
Hamada-san took the cheerful approach. He saw me, broke into a big smile, and asked cheerfully, “How’s your house?” It took us ten weeks just to get that guy to even crack a smile, and now he does it in the most inappropriate of situations…
Koizumi-san, who had just visited my mother with a gift at the beginning of October (she had hosted them for Thanksgiving when they were in training in California), reassured me. As we watched the bonfire in the Marina District, he said, “It’s far from your mother’s house,” and pointed to the area around the Presidio. “Your mother lives there,” he said (as if I didn’t know). Then he gave me five beautiful Japanese greeting cards so that I could write to my friends to see if they had survived.
“Epicenter“: Courtesy of Ray Krebs. Licensed under cc by NC-ND 2.0
No Comments Yet