Eyeworld

EW NEWS & OPINION 13 Japanese ophthalmologist recounts great earthquake disaster A ll days of horror seem to start the same way— with simple, benign nor- malcy. For Hiroko Bissen- Miyajima, M.D., Ph.D., Friday, March 11, 2011, began with a buzzer nudging her out of her dreams around 6:30 a.m. From there she headed into the kitchen to make tea and breakfast for her family, in- cluding her husband and 13-year- old daughter. An hour later she was on the road, driving her daughter to school, just like she had hundreds of times before. March 11 was overcast and 54 degrees in lively and ultramodern Tokyo, where Dr. Bissen-Miyajima is director and professor of ophthal- mology, specializing in cataract and refractive surgery, Tokyo Dental Col- lege Suidobashi Hospital. She was in a conference room meeting with col- leagues when the day suddenly shook itself out of ordinary. The building wobbled and swayed, tee- tering back and forth like a game of Jenga. "We heard the movement," she said. "We heard a sound we had never heard before. It was the sound of the building cracking." The Japanese people know earthquakes. The country sits in the Pacific Ring of Fire, home to 90% of the world's tremors. Japan can have up to 1,000 quakes yearly, although they are mostly minor. "We are trained on what to do when an earthquake comes," Dr. Bissen-Miyajima said. "Everyone has extra water at home, toilet paper. We know what to do." No one, however, could be trained for this earthquake, the fifth strongest in Earth's modern history with a 9.0 magnitude, an earthquake so severe it moved the island closer to the U.S. by 13 feet and shifted the planet's axis by 6.5 inches. For 5 har- rowing minutes, Dr. Bissen-Miyajima and her colleagues helplessly held onto each other, opening interior doors to mitigate structural damage and looking out of the window to see people on the street looking up at them, watching the tipsy hospital rock. "Usually after a couple of min- utes, the shaking stops," she said. "Those are the earthquakes we've gotten used to. Usually the motion will slow down, but this time it only became worse. We heard the build- ing moving all around us, and we looked at each other thinking this might be the end. "Everyone thought we were going to die, that it might happen," she said. "It was terrible. The worst things happened after the quake. All the trains in Tokyo stopped. Electric- ity was OK so we could watch TV, and we saw the tsunami washing away all the houses and buildings. I thought, 'Is this the end of the world?'" It sure looked like it. Tokyo was far enough inland not to be affected by the nightmarish tsunami that en- gulfed the northern coastal region with its monstrous 40-foot-high waves, gulping up towns whole. Res- idents had mere minutes to flee to higher ground before a crushing wall of water swept everything in its path—cars, planes, mothers, chil- dren, yachts, homes—out to sea, leaving in its wake a trash heap of gnarled wood, twisted metal, and the bodies of thousands. The recov- ery process is ongoing, but an esti- mated 27,000 people lost their lives in the earthquake and tsunami com- bined. "It looked like a movie, not real- ity," Dr. Bissen-Miyajima said of watching the tsunami footage on the news. "But it was real. There are a lot of reports that in buildings, people went upstairs but it wasn't high enough. Someone reported he went to the fourth floor but the water came. He held on to some kind of pipe. Because he was holding on, he survived. All of his colleagues went into the water." Fortunately, Dr. Bissen- Miyajima's family and friends are accounted for. It took a few hours to reach her husband and daughter be- cause of disconnected landlines and busy cell signals, but they were fine. "I have just finally come from school 10 minutes ago," wrote Dr. Bissen-Miyajima's daughter in an iReport to CNN under the screen name GirlinJapan. "I was in the courtyard playing table tennis when a large shake hit the floor. We hid under the tables until the shaking stopped. The shaking was for about 3 minutes, and I was so scared and nervous." After the initial chaos quelled, Dr. Bissen-Miyajima and her col- leagues waited a bit before devising a way home, finding all the trains out of service. Some patients and staff decided to spend the night in the hospital, although bed space was scarce. Others opted to walk or bike the 5 or 7 hours home. "There was no way to go home except cars," she said. "In Japan, most people commute via train. I had my car and asked my staff to come with me because I could bring them closer to their homes and from there they could walk." Dr. Bissen-Miyajima took three people in her car but quickly found that they were in a hurry to wait. Streets were jammed with cars and no one was moving. The Earth, how- ever, still occasionally was, with af- tershocks registering up to 6.0 every hour or so. It takes Dr. Bissen-Miyajima, on average, 1 hour to get from the hos- by Faith A. Hayden EyeWorld Staff Writer Shaken foundations continued on page 14 May 2011

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