Quake!

It takes exactly seconds for nearly every persons cell phone to go off in all manner of noise on any given railway car alerting them to a quake.
A rather unnerving thing to be sure. But a necessary one in Japan.

Living out in Kansai region, my experiences with such incidents are few and far between. I am relatively safe from the majority of earthquakes. But living in Japan all phones come with a handy little alert that notifies you of an earthquake so as you can take any necessary precautions. Sure you might think what good is a phone alert going to do if the focal point is right beneath you. Well not much. It will even probably be late. But for those who are city and prefectures away that will still feel it, albeit to a much lesser degree, it serves as a good warning.
These warning actually don't go off for every bump Japan has ever faced now, because really at that point phones would not stop ringing! Typically they will alert you to 5 or greater earthquakes, or if you have a more advanced warning system it might tell you any 3 or greater detection.

So now a little more about earthquakes.
Being in Japan I probably with in all reason should have experienced no less than 10 earthquakes. But it appears that I am especially deaf to the noise of their rumbling. No really, I have felt none save for one. This one had an epicenter in Nagoya and was probably a level 1.5 or 2 when it reached me out in Osaka. It all happened when I was at work and I only remember feeling dizzy and thinking man I should have had a bigger breakfast or man it is way too hot out if I am feeling like this. It was really nothing out of the ordinary. No desks shaking, papers falling, or even phone alerts. The only thing that was off was that everyone else had exactly the same sense. So we all looked around a bit and noticed that each other was looking around to see if the room was swaying or if it was our head. After we realized that we were all under the same dizzy spell, we turned on the TV and checked the recent news. Sure enough there was an earthquake a few hundred kilometers away. So for anyone who thinks the ground will rattle and crack...well maybe it will be that way for a greater earthquake, but to my experience it was just a slow gentle rocking or swaying that was unnoticeable until you realize that it wasn't really your head all along.

Grim news.
So of course after the great earthquake up north in 2011, they bolstered the earthquake programs and reinforced their buildings. When I came here all of the schools I taught at were under construction for additional earthquake support. What they also did was amp up their program for predictions and research. What they found was grim in the news for Tokyo. They have forecasted a great earthquake to strike Japan's capital in the next four years with a 7 or greater magnitude. This news brought a lot of hysteria and a bunch of people saying that it will happen tonight. Of course, it hasn't happened yet.