Preventing disasters

Japan is country that's at great risk of all kinds of natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, etc. Therefore the population is asked to do trainings regularly in order to learn how to react correctly when natural disasters occur. So every city has training facilities.

We really wanted to get a first hand experience of the training - and who knows, we might also need it. Fukuoka has a "disaster prevention center" near the Momochi beach area. So we went there after school.

We were four foreigners and the center deemed to be enough to do a training in English. First stop was the earthquake simulator. The simulator was a mochup kitchen and we had to sit down at the kitchen table and sip from our "Hello Kitty" cups. They simulated a grade 5 and a grade 7 earthquake and we had to hide under the table as soon as it started. The grade 7 "earthquake" was really rather scary - not to speak of a real earthquake of that strenght. My wooden bracelet broke, otherwise we managed to escape in pretty reasonable condition... Next we entered a typhoon simultator. Since the school had told us that there might be one on Saturday, this seemed to be the most urgent training need. We were a bit disappointed though, the whole thing was rather lame ass. Ok, we were wearing special glasses which we normally wouldn't, but still.
Finally we had to go into a dark, smoke filled room and escape the "fire". There were a series of small smoke-filled rooms that you had to cross crouching. The smoke was smelling pretty nasty, but we made it back. The fire extinguisher training was closed that day unfortunately, so we didn't get the full fire training.
The training was concluded by a movie on Japan's natural disasters of the past, underlined with dramatic music that enhanced the scary impression that the pictures gave. We also tried to do the Q&A, but most of the questions we didn't understand, neither the answers. The helicopter was a great opportunity to behave like kiddies in the end :-)