Tokyo Apocalypse Diary

The rumours are conflicting. Some 600,000 people more left the City today, driving battered cars through the quagmire of people. I saw some guys on crutches dragging their bloody limbs off on the long road South. All they had was a flashlight and a sack of instant ramen. Some of the roads and bridges leaving the city have broken down. There are reports of some exit ways being clogged by bands of uniformed guards. No-one in, no-one out.

All supermarkets in Tokyo are sold out of bread and related products. Some sweet cakes can still be found. Pasta remains in certain places though. The locals seem unaware of its stodgy qualities. The 99 yen shop down the street was sold out of all instant ramen except a suspicious looking pot covered in flame drawings. I had to club an old lady with my bike chain to get to it, but I'm eating it now, crumbling it in my hands and licking up the grease. That could last me another 24 hours.

I've been boiling water and adding mouthwash to it instead of iodine, which is hard to find since the pharmacies were looted. I'm concerned that my sixpack of Listerine "Cool Blue" won't last the week. Milk and dairy products are to steer clear of. The putrescence of the cow population is common knowledge. "So fresh you can hear it moo" is no longer comforting.

What will happen when the food runs out? I've been reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road for recipe ideas. I just opened the window with my head in a paper bag to catch the definite whiff of burnt popcorn. What's going on out there?

The bread stockpiling is a mystery. Not a single egg can be found either. Secret French Toast parties. Probably the brain-addled freaks of the northern sector. It makes me sick to my stomach, but all I can retch up is a green, oily substance that reminds me of when I used to smoke Royals.

On the way back home today the subway broke down and we had to get out and push. All the men in their identikit black suits and the ladies with their shopping bags. The suits are filthy, have been for days, the shopping bags empty. People carry on.

Messages are sent through social networking sites. People who I haven't seen since Kindergarten urge me to flee. Don't they understand it's too late? The poison in my system has to be sated by continued ingestion. Or my organs will collapse. I read it on the BBC.

The wound I sustained during the Quake has start to glow faintly. I used it to heat up my last apple and then sprinkled it with the last of my cinnamon.

Better order pizza tonight.

Quake and Bake - Shinjuku Fallout

I just got back home at 9:10am, 18 hours or so after the Quake, to find the fridge had journeyed to the center of the room and a sprinkling of shelf contents on the floor having bounced off my computer. Working backwards, there was a cold sunshine bike ride back from the station, a horribly packed and painfully slow train journey on the first train, some long waiting, a nocturnal ramble, a witnessing of the insane fallout when an urban machine goes haywire.

I was in Japanese class when it started, leaning back against the flimsy interior wall. I have had a few minor quakes here so was quicker this time to realize it was not a machine dryer on in a nearby room. At first everyone giggled - small quakes happen all the time and are fun. But this was already too much. The earth heaved to and fro like the deck of a ship. It's very unsettling to feel the terra not firma. I remembered the old maxim and placed myself in the doorframe. It might have worked if I wasn't barged out of it as everyone escaped in a mad panic. Outside the sun shone and drivers stood by stationary vehicles. Suited businessmen milled on the pavement. Japanese girls were witnessed without make-up - a once in a lifetime opportunity. Small dogs were comforted. One ran round in very small circles looking like it might explode. A distinct odour of sulphur in the air - was it Japan's geothermal water table or a burst sewage pipe?

Aftershocks bubbled for an hour. Sometimes you thought you'd felt a tremor and had to look up at the buildings' antennae, or the rocking trees to be sure. Phones were inoperable, classes, work, trains were cancelled, some people went bravely off on bikes. Buses moved by packed with people who already knew they had to get out of the city any which way - and fast. The organizational fallout had begun.

Streams of people filled the avenues, haemorrhaging in all directions. Worried faces were outnumbered by ones happy to be off work early. Hundreds congregated outside the many exits of Shinjuku station, trying phones again and again, looking lost. Squadrons of uniformed guards stood in front of every box or ticket gate, patiently answering questions from the onslaught. Every public telephone had at least 20 people waiting to use it. A vindication of old cable technology. In a pub images of destruction appeared on the screen and punters bedded down for a long wait.

In a sushi place I chatted with a guy whose office was on the 38th floor, which had led to chairs being thrown about. He wanted to talk about Premiership football and insisted on paying for my meal as a point of samurai honour. I decided to try make it home.

I bumped into an Israeli friend heading back on foot. He lives one stop away from Shinjuku. My place was at least 3 hours walk away in uncertain directions.

Walking through one side of the massive conglomeration that is Shinjuku station, thousands of people stared helplessly at closed ticket gates, repeatedly asking the same questions of the guards, sitting on the floor to wait all night. Would trains be running later? No. Tomorrow morning? I don't know.

The bus terminal was comical. Every stop bore a queue stretching downstairs through tunnels to curl around the bowels of the station. No buses were turning up. I pulled off a coup by finding a little-known bus stop with a mysterious route direct through to my neighbourhood. But it all turned out to be a cruel hoax.

The patrons of Shinjuku's million tiny bars had the same silent glumness they always have. It was difficult to tell the difference. A street tout from Togo invited me on a little tour of some bizarre places ending up in a weird subterranean R&B bar where he unexpectedly produced his father and brother. I sneaked past the check-in counter of a karaoke place and into a recently vacated booth where I slept comfortably for a couple of hours. By now it was 5:30am - time for the trains to start?

People slept, stood, stared with glazed eyes. Japan Rail's finest were maintaining a solid defensive line against an increasing multitude. Complex messages were communicated via megaphone. I don't know how long I stood there, at the front, watching these bizarre procedures go on. Stretches of yellow tape were stuck here and there. Pieces of paper were moved around. A tiny woman in an air hostess get-up would come over now and again to the yellow hard-hatted guy with the bearing of a lieutenant. A big guy in a suit strode around looking menacing. In their Japanese way, the masses silently waited. Astonishingly, one guy started shouting complaints at a bespectacled guard in a comedy Gestapo uniform. Everyone was quietly enthralled.

When the floodgates opened it was all elbows. My pass didn't work so I kicked my way through the barriers. No-one cared. And up on the platform was Heaven's First Train. Implacable and gleaming, closed doors cruelly keeping us in the cold but nevertheless, magically there. The means of escape. A bedraggled man next to me touched his hand to the metal, softly, with love. Half an hour went by until we could stuff ourselves on and inch along the line at 5mph all the way home. The urban machine was functioning again and as I rode my bike back I was amazed to see people starting their Saturday where they should have been after all.