In Tokyo we live in a concrete apartment. Ground floor. Apartments on the ground floor seem to be cheaper than those further up. There are a number of reasons why a ground floor apartment is cheaper: it’s easier to steal from a ground floor apartment; it’s easier to lose your privacy and have peepers peep into a ground floor apartment; it’s more likely that a collapsing apartment block will crush lower floors. Because of the March 11 earthquake our ground floor apartment has a crack in the concrete wall. But being on the ground floor is also nice because you never really sway that much when the earth shakes. For a while the aftershocks seemed to be missing Tokyo, but then they came back and I became aware of the high rise factor. Now I’m thinking about the storey’s of Tokyo. Occasionally I work on the seventh storey of a building, and during those times of work the earthquakes feel much stronger. One day I was sitting at a desk when a magnitude 4 aftershock hit. The sensation is like being spun rather than being shaken, because the buildings sway so much. Looking outside only makes it worse because all the other tall buildings in Shinjuku are swaying gently too, absorbing and throwing off all that built up geological energy.

In Tokyo many people live and work up in the air because there is not enough space for everyone to live on the ground. A friend works on the twentieth floor, and another works on the forty sixth floor, but I don’t know anyone who works higher than that. Some people choose to live up high because of the view. Example: a woman lives on the fourteenth floor of an office block in Shinagawa, overlooking Tokyo bay. She has a nice view, “the city, the ocean, Mt. Fuji.” After the March 11 earthquake hit she stayed under a table for three hours, and her husband ran to her because he knew she was phobic of earthquakes and would be immobilised with fear. He took three hours to run (but she suspects he walked some of the way because it’s only about 15km). This woman goes to a gym on the twenty seventh floor; an open air gym with an outdoor spa bath. She often soaks in the bath looking out into the grey air, and looking out at the entire city, the bay, and Mt. Fuji (if the weather is clear). When the March 11 earthquake hit, people were getting fit and sweating in the gym. A friend of the woman was soaking in the spa bath at that exact moment. She was looking out at the entire city, the bay, and Mt. Fuji through the entire earthquake. After the building stopped swaying she noticed that all the bathwater was gone.

Photo of a tall building in Shinjuku taken from our rooftop.