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A day later I will be in Mos Burger with her and she`ll tell me a Twitter friend knows someone whose dad works at the exploded oil works in Chiba. She will tell me if it rains on you you`ll get chemical burns and I will shrug my shoulders and say nothing. I get a call from my friend Colin, now a salary man in Tokyo. He says that when they had been dispelled from work he had gone heavy drinking, and finally made it home with the emergency supplies of a big bottle of tea and a Cadbury's Twirl he'd been amazed to find.
A couple of hours later I am with some other foreign pals, and when one of them gets the same mail about the Chiba chemical plant and wants to go home, and I will look at the afternoon sun and say there is no wind nor rain cloud, and see my friend cannot hear me, the work of Chinese whisperers will be well done.

Ten minutes after my friend calls, the train has an emergency stop. I think someone has jumped under the train. Then the train moves and outside moves too. It`s a really big one. People are quiet on the train but strangers start to talk to each other in hushed voices but not to me. The train creaks and rocks and does not rattle like a house. When it ends an announcement is said but I don`t know what. A constant stream of people start walking through the train right to left in front of me and no-one talks much. Some people stay sitting and I do too. There are no foreign faces to talk to because we are out of the city. When the walkers have all gone I ask the people left what`s going on. An old salary man talks to me in too difficult Japanese. A middle-aged man walking through had sat with us, and he makes an effort for me. They are both smilers. A girl with oriental face says she is not Japanese either. Her Japanese is much better than mine. A train official walking through the train hurriedly tells us there won`t be a train for a few more hours. There won`t be any more trains today. The few of us left sitting get up to leave the train and an old woman nearby who had been listening says in English Oh my goodness, what`s happening to me? It`s to no-one in particular and it pisses me off.

We leave the train, the front of which had reached a station. The smiling middle-aged business man talks to the Chinese girl in Japanese. I stay near them and they try to speak some English and I try Japanese. At the gates a large screen is showing newsreels. Waves violent and high are swamping close to the top of street lamps in what must be a coastal area. I have no idea where it is. As the crowd watches another big quake hits. Signs hanging from the ceiling swing and pull at the fittings. The middle-aged man is underneath one looking up at it. I pull on the sleeve of his leather blazer to move him and without words we decide to leave the building. An ancient woman is at the top of a long flight of stairs. The man stops to talk to her when everyone else is ignoring her.

Outside a taxi line is already long. Clusters of confused folks mill around without direction. Mobile phones do not work. At the police box the man asks police for bus timetables, which he seems completely unable to fathom, so he does introductions and produces his name card. He is a tea salesman. The Chinese girl is a student. Her electronic dictionary has a photobooth photo of her and a male child.

They tell me there are no buses. I try to say that it could be a good idea to get many buses into Tokyo, one step at a time. They say there are no buses. They start going from one bus stop to another and I follow. He seems to be looking for a bus to get the girl home and every driver tells them that there are none. After fifteen minutes more of this I ask her how far is her home by train and she says it is one stop more, so I tell her that I will walk her the one stop because I have decided I am going to walk all the way back home to Tokyo. She says she doesn`t like walking, so I laugh, tell her I am walking her, and start walking. They follow me.