The Life Safety Seminar

How to do the robot?

 Japan is prone to disaster. Cheeks open and all. Let's think about it. The country's sitting on a bunch of tectonic plates, most of them undersea. On top of the resulting vulnerability to earthquakes, tsunami are a serious source of worry. The big cities are clustered with thousands of small houses packed together in impossibly small spaces; fires could be catastrophic if allowed to spread. In reason of all this, Japanese schools drill safety measures to children at a very young age.

And for the rest of us, there's the Life Safety museum in Ikebukuro. Aala and I venture in.

 The museum, located on the 4th floor of the local fire station, is free of charge and tours people through different scenarios. It's genuinely educational, and, frankly, a little fun! Let's take the tour, shall we?

Listening for instructions.

Being free and all, the tours fill up pretty quickly, so it's best to go in with a reservation if you want a specific time. If not, you can just walk in and they'll put you in a time slot that makes everyone happy. Yippee! Oh, and no, you can't go in without a tour.

 The first part of our tour was the seminar room about earthquakes. Educative, but not exactly fun. There's very little talk, and most of it is a video compilation of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. And the video is subtitled, so hurray for gaijin-friendliness. Super interesting though. Mad points for that. Educational videos rarely are.

 It starts getting fun from here though. The second part of our tour was on how to deal with fires. Each person is given a fire extinguisher and made to shoot at a fake fire on a screen. It's so...satisfying!

 The third part is a smoke-room simulation. Each person gets to navigate a series of rooms filling up with thick black smoke. It's actually steam, but the simulation is quite realistic. Aala and I, much to the amusement of the Japanese people taking the tour with us, crawled through this one like soldiers. I even crawled back into my seat like a soldier. I would make the Navy proud. Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of this part, since it's kind of difficult to take one through artificial smoke and all.

 But the last part takes the cake! There's also an earthquake simulator. Within it, one can experience a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Man, it shakes hard. To think the March 2011 one, a 9.0, was 1024 times more powerful that the one in this video. How were people, like, not sent flying into orbit?

And that concluded our tour. What have we learned today? Things seem so much nicer when they are free!