I knew this would happen. Five members of the family unaccounted for, a blackout descended across most of Kanagawa prefecture, my new home either standing or not, images of appalling destruction on every channel and an airline sales desk telling me, politely but firmly, that there are no flights leaving Beijing for Japan tonight.
For five hours now we have not been able to track down two cousins, their two-month-old baby an aunt and an uncle. Logic tells me that they are fine. They are hundreds of miles from the epicentre, probably preparing to spend an uncomfortable night in the office unable to get home. The power is out to the entire area outside Yokohama where they live, but they are alive. Probably.
But something dark tells me otherwise. I have wandered around the aftermath of enough big Japanese quakes to be persuaded that they are wild, indiscriminate things. One building falls, its neighbour stands. One bookshelf wobbles, the other dashes someone’s brains out. One driver brakes successfully as the road ripples underneath them, the other ploughs into a wall.
This is Japan, and it is better prepared than anywhere for the Big One, but you do not need to be that imaginative to make some very miserable extrapolations when the phones aren’t working and you can’t hear Atsuko or Tomonobu’s voice cheerfully telling you that the house is standing and all is well.
During my eight years as a correspondent for The Times in Tokyo, I was always the twitchy one. Bolder souls than me took a fatalistic view of huge quakes while I ran regular checks on the batteries and food supplies in the family survival kit. Every time someone left a lighter at the house, I would add it to the emergency pack for good measure: there were 23 at last count, along with other paraphernalia of paranoia.
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I spent a fortune on clamps and sticky patches to secure my furniture to things. I was the one who dived nervously under the table whenever a magnitude 3.0 ruffled the curtains, brushing myself off to barely concealed contempt as I re-emerged.
And as a journalist in Japan, I was unnaturally fascinated with quakes. I have pored over the abominable statistics, calculated the odds and made unnecessary journeys to quake detection centres deep in the mountains — just to confirm to myself that geology has always had something truly atrocious waiting for Japan and everyone I love who lives there.
Back in January, I e-mailed one of the most prominent economists who follows Japan and asked him where a huge earthquake featured in his five-year forecasts for Japanese sovereign debt ratings, the direction of the yen and the Tokyo stock market. “Good question,” he replied, promising to get back to me one day.
When a huge quake ripped through Niigata a few years ago, I joined the first group of international inspectors being shown around the city’s alarmingly cracked nuclear plant. The Geiger counters beeped a bit, and it was all right, but from that moment my quake fears had an even more chilling atomic angle.
And now I am stranded at Beijing international airport wondering about the wellbeing of family, hundreds of friends who have not checked in by e-mail and, in a shocking piece of selfishness, the house that my wife and I bought a month before moving to Beijing.
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It is perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, just down the road from aunties and uncles. The area was promised a 4m (13ft) tsunami and, as I wait for Air China to put me on the first flight to Japan, I’m haunted by the feeling that the house was only 3.5m above sea level.