Hiroshima earthquake

A rude awakening at 5:01 this morning. A shake of the earth beneath us, a rattle of the shoji windows, and a roll over in the futon. The quake lasted a little longer than I expected, and I was fairly lucid this time. A quick checklist went through my head. Do I need to get up? Do I need to get the kids? Will we all fit under the kitchen table? Before I had got myself vertical the rumbling had subsided and I went back to sleep.

Not sure if it is just me, but all these quakes seem to hit in the early morning. My first experience of one was in 1989, my first year in Japan. Waken early in the morning by shaking paper doors, head fuzzy from an interrupted sleep, and fresh from England, my fear was from thinking there was a burglar stuck in my cupboards. Slowly the realisation dawned. My first trembler. The big Kobe disaster in '95 was early morning, too. As night turns into dawn, it's as if the earth is groaning at having to face a new day. Can't I have just a few more hours of sleep, please?

This one measured about 5 on the Japanese scale. And when they hit, you never know whether the epicentre is local, or whether the big one has hit Tokyo. They say Hiroshima gets a "biggy" every fifty years or so. In the 1905 quake, eleven died; two perished in 1949; and in 2001 one old lady in Kure died. Last night's quake took no lives, but once again a reminder of the power in the bowels of the earth, particularly here in a country where four tectonic plates meet.