Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 03

You know you’re in trouble if when you wake up your alarm clock has been replaced by a military helicopter flying overhead, and the world is still going to hell. While Mirai’s line “This isn’t a dream, right?” is terribly clichéd, I guess it is pretty jarring to wake up to the aftermath of a magnitude 8.0 earthquake.

The show somewhat fulfils its premise here too. Did you know that convenience stores may give out food at times of crisis? Did you know that aftershocks can be as large as magnitude 5.0 and continue for three days? Well, now you do. Given that this could happen for real soon, I suspect people will be lapping up this info, especially when it’s presented in the form of an anime.

So after leaving the protective shelter (of course) of the Fuji TV broadcast centre, our three protagonists begin to set out on a journey home, when we find that there are boats that will cut the journey short. Hooray!

But you’ll have to walk there, and we’ve just learned thanks to television that 6.5 million people will be in the same position. That couldn’t go entirely smoothly, could it?

Well, we start out alright, sans some nasty rubbing with sandals. Then, we walk past an overturned train with rescuers presumably trying to find survivors. At the very least, it’s not a great omen.

Seeing situations like the mother with the stuck pram and the screaming child, with hundreds of people walking past not helping until Mari does something about it, really makes you think about the anonymous culture of Japan. Would so many people just make it someone else’s problem? Human nature, it seems, can be a real bitch sometimes. When the people start to crowd up, crowd mentality comes in to play, and in a situation where ones life is at risk, people have a tendency to only think of number one. When the shuffling of feet gets louder and faster, everyone starts to think they are being betrayed by those in the queue behind them, so they move faster too. Throw in some aftershocks and the end result? Panic.

The people falling like dominoes on the slipway to the boat? That’s a real, tangible sense of panic right there.

It’s not just that that scares the crap out of me, it’s the scenes like this…

You’ve got a grade school pupil and a middle school pupil, and they’re seeing stuff like this trying to get home!? It really makes you think about what they are thinking. Even discounting Yuuki, who is obviously going to be scared by this, Mirai isn’t exactly normal at the moment either. ‘If we hadn’t stopped to put plasters on my feet, we’d have been dead’ springs to mind as a possible thought. It gives us a real sense of empathy for the characters.

That’s to say nothing about COLLAPSING BRIDGES.

Even just the thought of the Rainbow Bridge collapsing is incredible, but to see it happening, and taking the boat of escapees with it, is positively mind-blowing, even if you’re not Japanese and/or don’t live in Tokyo.

So. I would say TM8.0 has been full of win so far, but that probably wouldn’t be very politically correct. It’s kind of like being enthralled by the coverage of 9/11 – you really shouldn’t be, but disasters are really watchable for some reason. I guess it’s because we like to put ourselves in the place of the characters and think about what we would have done. Would I have been like Mari, and helped the woman with the pram? Or would I have been the one to tell Mirai to get the hell out of his way? Or would I have been one of the nameless ones who just walked on by?

It seems that this is more than a glorified public service announcement.