Today began like just about any Saturday morning in Shin-Urayasu, Japan: breakfast, the morning paper, CNN. We did have a little surprise at about 10 a.m.–the arrival–by special delivery–of 10 stag beetles in a terrarium, complete with pine resin jello (their perfect food)–courtesy of an uncle in Sendai. We set the beetles up in their new home and they went about the business that makes them beloved of Japanese children everywhere, including mine: they began to duel with the special hooked horns on their noses. The Japanese call them “Kabuto Mushi” which means armored bugs, and kids (and many adults) set up matches between particularly “genki” (spirited) candidates. Perhaps because ours are wild stag beetles and not the hot-house grown beetles that are sold in the departments stores for prices ranging from $5.00 to $50.00, they are particularly spirited. (Right now I hear them blurting their wings and making the sound of tiny knitting needles as they charge across the mulch in their cage and tap their horns together. When one succeeds in flipping the other on its back, a neat little trick that they do by instinct, the match is officially over. My wife says that the matches last all night, as these are nocturnal bugs, and grow more active as the night progresses, so I should be prepared.) For whatever reason it has been decided that the cage should be kept in the hall by my office door and during one of my peregrinations, my foot accidently bumped the cage. The beetles momentarily stopped what they were doing, and then proceeded.

As did our routine. In the late afternoon, my wife and kids went to a birthday party, and I went to work out at the gymn. It was around 4:50 P.M., as I was pedalling my way to exhaustion on an exercise bike, that it felt as if a giant hammer had hit the side of the building, propelling us all forward in the direction of the far wall. Women screamed, lights flickered, I pulled myself back to an upright position and looked around. I was awed by the raw force of what had just happened, and was equally awed by the fact that it hit without warning–without affording me time to think, only time to react. The only other situation in which I felt such force was when I was back-ended by a sports car on New Years eve, 1979, on a sleet-slick highway leading from Reisterstown, Maryland to the Beltway.

The Japanese around me shook their heads as the television superimposed the information across the day’s sumo matches that our section of Chiba Prefecture was located exacly at the epicenter of the quake. Its strength was estimated as 5.7.

My first thought was for my family, then for the apartment–particularly for the large water tank with my hapless gold fish inside it. A phone call assured me that my family was ok, so I hurried back to the apartment, fearing the worst. Interestingly enough the Japanese are pretty nonchalant about earthquakes. “This is Japan,” one teacher told me with a grin, “and we take these sorts of things in stride.” I bowed and wished him a safe trip back, hopped on my bike and returned to find my large book case toppled over in my office and lots of water from the tank slopped on the floor, but the fish unhurt. And so were the beetles, by the way, who no doubt thought that someone had accidentally kicked their cage again.

Experts predict that the next great Tokyo Earthquake is due at any time.