by Judi McLeod
October 28, 2004
Earthquake-plagued Japan is a lot closer to home with Japanese student Noriyuki Sato in the Elm Street office of Canada Free Press.
Only last Friday, Nori was telling me about the danger of earthquakes and typhoons in his mother country.
Nori, who came to Toronto to build confidence speaking English in an office setting, will be here until February.
Equipped with his own laptop computer, he’s been a Godsend in helping us do Internet work.
Exceedingly bright and well read, he will continue his studies in English Literature when he returns to Japanese university.
Nori has been experiencing culture clash in Toronto. "There’s something happening every day in Japan and here it’s so quiet and boring," the student told me last Friday.
Sendai's teeming population would make Toronto look like a ghost town.
Typhoons pass through so often that battening down the hatches has become second nature, and then there’s the tragic toll of earthquakes.
More than 400 aftershocks have been felt since last weekend’s initial earthquake–Japan’s worst in 10 years.
The quakes came in just days after Japan’s deadliest typhoon in more than a decade. Japan names its typhoons just as North america names its hurricanes. This one, Typhoon Tokage left 77 dead and more than a dozen are missing.
Found alive, in what has to be a miraculous rescue, was a two-year-old boy buried for four days in a landslide from the earthquake in northern Japan.
Toddler Yuta was trapped in the wreckage of a white van with his mother and three-year-old sister. airlifted to hospital. 39-year-old Takao Minagawa was pronounced dead on arrival. Three-year-old Mayu remained trapped in the wreckage when darkness forced rescue workers to suspend their work until daylight. aftershocks prevented them from working at daybreak, and at press time, Takao’s condition was unknown.
The first earthquake, killing 32 people, measured 6.8 on the Richter scale. On Wednesday, a quake measuring 6.0 struck 160 miles northwest of Tokyo, which brought reports of buildings swaying in Tokyo.
In the aftermath of the earthquakes, there are still some 100,000 people, some of them elderly, living in shelters.
as far as he knows, everyone in Nori’s family survived both typhoon and earthquakes.
Nori’s contemplation of what is happening back home only underlines the peace and quiet of Toronto, where his only problem to date has been a run in with local police.
It seems that no one gave the student the heads up about Canadian law upon his arrival. Nori was drinking a beer, surveying the country of his arrival on Yonge Street, when spotted by the occupants of a police cruiser.
When an officer asked him what he thought he was doing, Nori didn’t know. Discovering that he was a recent arrival from Japan and unaware of drinking in public laws, he was let go.
It’s difficult adjusting to life in Toronto when the teeming life of Sendai long ago forced you into survival mode.
But dull as it may be by comparison to Sendai, Toronto is safer.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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