Remember kids, safety first. Especially out here when an earthquake can strike without any warning and decimate an entire city within minutes. In response to questions I’ve fielded from various teachers about whether or not there are any earthquakes in the UK, my answer’s always been no, of course, and followed up with a little anecdote. Back when I were a wee nipper in pre-school, I remember a page in this large picture book with a map illustrating the locations of all major earthquake activity throughout the world, as indicated with a small red dot. The green landmass of Japan, I recall, was completely concealed beneath a sea of red. Thank goodness we don’t have any earthquakes in Britain, I thought to myself. They look really scary. That place Japan has loads. Why would anyone want to live there? As they say, with age comes wisdom.

Because of this ever-present threat to lives of Japan’s citizens, all public and private institutions regularly hold disaster training exercises as a matter of course. Last Wednesday it was the turn of Kii Cosmos yogo gakko or ‘special needs’ school. I had been present at the one held at Wakayama High a few weeks earlier, so had a rough idea of what to expect, though the Cosmos one seemed a bit more engaging.

Having caught one or two utterances of the word jishin (‘earthquake’) during the morning meeting, I was quite chuffed at knowing a drill was to take place before my non-English speaking supervisor at the school, Kurayama Sensei explained it to me in more basic terms. Thus, at 10 O’Clock I was already on my way to the assembly point outside, when I was somewhat surprised to hear a cacophonous rumble, building to tremendous roar blaze out of the school’s high-quality PA system. This struck me as quite a good idea, adding realism to the role-play aspect of the exercise, but at the same time potentially troublesome for the kids in a school such as Kii Cosmos. When some of the more severely mentally disabled students barely know what day it is or what someone is saying to them at any given moment, I thought it entirely possible that some may get hysterical. Well, more so than usual, anyway.

As it was, the timed evacuation of the building clocked in at a total of six minutes, rather than the recommended five, as the visiting fire chief took pains to explain to everyone above the usual clamour of some of the younger students howling and trying to climb over each other. What struck me as rather amusing, but really shouldn’t have, was the fact that all the students emerged with small cushions or pillows wrapped around their heads, presumably to protect them from falling masonry. A sensible precaution, obviously, but it did mean that the massed ranks gathered on the school’s baseball pitch rather resembled a multi-colored Ku Klux Klan rally having just raided a branch of World of Bedding.

After the fire chief had done his bit, we all then got to go on the ‘Insta-Quake’ machine. There’s some other name for it I’m sure, but what it basically consists of is a small room on the back of a lorry which can be made to sway and violently vibrate from one side to the other in emulation of an earthquake. Don’t believe me? That’s it up there. Of course, yours truly gave it a try and I can report that going on past experience, its emulation of a lower-level tremor is uncannily accurate. As the intensity increases, it becomes like some demonic fair ground ride, quite good fun in this context but rather frightening when you imagine how accurate to real life it probably is. I was in it with another teacher and about six students, at one point having to put my arm around the girl with down’s syndrome sitting beside me to stop her from banging painfully into the wall. This was then followed by a short skit acted out by the teachers in the school’s gymnasium, basic ‘What should and shouldn’t you do in an earthquake’ type stuff. All in all, diverting, but also highly thought-provoking.

Oh yeah, and that afternoon myself and another teacher gave a heartfelt rendition of Peter, Paul and Mary’s peacenik anthem classic ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone’, followed by explanation of the words ‘flower,’ ‘young girl’, ‘husband’, ‘soldier’, and ‘graveyard’ complete with my own lurid chalk illustrations and arrows so as to explain the cyclical nature of the song. And to think that The Sun labels the teachers in Britain all loony lefties, they’re just not looking in the right place, are they?