Today the
entire class took a field trip to Ikebukuro to visit the Life Learning
Center. It was supposed to be a two hour lecture on fire and earthquake
safety, and I was prepared to be pretty bored... However, it was
actually quite fun! The building has rooms built to re-enact fires and
earthquakes- rooms that smoke up, rooms that shake, and rooms with fake
fires to practice your extinguishing skills. We all had to make our way
through a maze in the dark while the room smoked up, and afterward we
got to experience what the shaking of a 7.0 earthquake feels like. It
was pretty awesome.
Afterwards, we went back into the
conference room to watch a forty minute propaganda video about “after
the Big One”, in which an 8.2 hits Tokyo and the whole city is leveled.
As corny and as cliche as the film was, it was still better than any
other disaster preparedness video I’ve seen in my lifetime. The title
was “Stay Alive!” but I am as of yet unable to find a copy of it online
to share here. Such a shame!
The Life Learning Center has its own
mascot here, so I bought a small keychain as memorabilia.... Suta-kun, I
think, is his name.
That’s
about all that happened today though. I just went home afterwards and
tried to work on getting some of my money in the U.S. wired over to
Japan. A word of advice: no matter what your bank tells you, their
systems will not work here. Take as much cash with you as you can!