Alyssa Post was buying groceries Friday afternoon when the store went dark and started trembling.
Post, a 21-year-old East Asian Languages and Literatures senior at UF who is studying in Tokyo, had just put cream cheese into her grocery cart when the city was rocked by the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that began off the country’s northeast coast.
She and the other 11 UF students who were in Japan at the time are safe, said Kirsten Laufer, UF’s study abroad assistant director.
She said one UF student was in Niigata, about 100 miles from the center of the earthquake, and four were in Tokyo. The rest were in cities farther south and west, away from the heart of the earthquake and the path of the tsunami that tore through Japan’s coastal towns.
Post, who is from Miami, said store employees told her to abandon her groceries and get outside. None of the food fell off the shelves but she saw a 7-story building sway like a palm tree in a hurricane.
She fell asleep in her dorm room to the rocking of aftershocks, which she stopped feeling around midnight.
She had read how-to booklets on what to do during an earthquake, but she said they didn’t help much.
“I feel like I wasn’t really prepared, so I was probably lucky that I was at the store, where people knew what to do,” she said.
She said none of the buildings near her fell, mainly because newer Japanese buildings are made to withstand strong earthquakes.
Taka Hamada, a 23-year-old UF journalism junior, said he couldn’t believe what had happened. His mom and younger sisters live in Hiroshima, which is on the country’s west coast. He said they are safe.
He kept watching news broadcasts and saw the death count and floating bodies.
“It’s cliche, but it’s like a movie,” he said. “It’s like something that you never expect to happen in Japan.”
