At about 4:00am yesterday morning Helen and I woke up to a gentle rocking. In our half awake state it felt like we were on an overnight train. But we weren’t! It was an earthquake. The map from the Japanese Meteorological Agency shows the extent.

If you check out their site you can see many earthquakes each day in the North East.

We checked out the instructions from the hotel. They said wait for instructions over the p.a. There were none so we went back to sleep. Hotel Niwa is very new and has state of the art foundations. Check them out at http://www.hotelniwa.jp/english/info/seismically_isolated.html . The result was a gentle side to side rocking motion.