I was on a Japanese beach at 2:46pm on March 11th, 2011.

An air-raid siren is never a pleasant sound.

It’s especially unwelcome when you live in a coastal town anticipating a historical earthquake.

I woke up in pure fear to the wails of this banshee more times than I care to remember during my four years of living in rural Japan. It was a device the town was not shy to use. It was sometimes serious, but mostly not.

In all cases, I found out about the reason afterwards. Locals were informed in advance of course as this was a notoriously meticulous and diligent country. The issue was that I was a stupid foreigner who never gave the local newsletter much notice.

The first time it happened I instinctively grabbed a red flashlight and ran out the door to save myself. There were no batteries in it. The last time it happened, I stumbled to the window to see if anyone else was panicking before promptly going back to bed.

An air-raid siren is never a pleasant sound, but it becomes a terrifying one when the everyday familiarity is replaced with something new.

It also doesn’t help if you’re walking on the beach right next to a sign of a Pokémon-esque wave crashing into cartoon houses.

The rusting tannoy speakers that littered the coastal wall crackled into life.

Earthquake. Warning. Big. Tsunami. Alert. Please.

I listened to it three times. There was more said, but my years of casual study taught me to sift out only the essential fragments.

Do you know when you’re waiting on a train and there’s a barely comprehensible announcement? Well, I guess it was quite similar to that except I was discovering that I was about to die.

The real panic began to set in when the usually placid octogenarians of my town began to run. Actually, that’s not true, it was when the large metal gates of the seawall closed whilst I was still on the beach.

Why was I there? Well, I had Friday afternoons free from teaching and I had decided to search for driftwood for my terrapin tank. Yes, that’s correct. My local newspaper at home in Scotland later interviewed me about my experience. I mentioned both the driftwood and the terrapins. I don’t know why I didn’t just say I was out for a walk.

It felt an undignified way to go. A month or so earlier the elementary school had an earthquake drill during my lesson. Nobody had told me it wasn’t real and so I gallantly led my class to the evacuation point thinking I was saving them. That would have been a better front page.

I did think that I was going to die on that beach, but in the end nothing happened.

I climbed over the seawall gates and rushed home to turn on the television. I saw the footage that you have all seen. My prefecture did have a warning to flee to high ground and so many people did this for an hour or two. There was also a 48-hour warning issued as the Pacific Ocean began to churn like a pond that had just had a brick thrown into it.

I was deeply upset watching the disaster unfold. It wasn’t just that I was living in Japan, but that I recognised everything being destroyed. The area of Tohoku was identical to where I lived. The fields. The cars. The people. I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t already been covered with greater care in other articles or documentaries.

My time in Japan came to its conclusion that summer. I failed the listening section of my last exam. There was certainly less incentive involved compared to that afternoon on the beach. I had hoped to head to the area to help out in some manner, but instead I just donated money rather than continue to get in the way.

It’s been twelve years now, but I think often of my life back then. I wonder about the students I taught and the lives they have lived. I reflect on the kindness of the locals who invited me into their homes. I remember the farmers who gave me free crops. I remember the old woman who walked me around the supermarket to help me buy the correct ingredients. I remember the trucker who pulled me into a bar simply because he had never talked to a foreigner before. There are too many to mention.

When I was there, I thought I was simply killing time in the rice fields before my next flight to the big city. But, really, it’s those unique memories in the town I called home that hold the most value as the others slowly recede away.