I lost my job yesterday. I want to blame it on the quake, but my company assured me that it had nothing to do with it; Tokyo, financially, was already having hard times to begin with.

After writing my follow-up post about 7 Days on March 22nd, I started wondering if I was wrong. In the wake of what has happened to Japan and the radioactive threat already in Tokyo, maybe just continuing what you are doing is the cowardly thing to do…

During the first week after the quake, even with all the stress and the fear of what was going on at the time, in a way, I felt relieved. I felt relieved because I didn’t have to worry about having a real career, money, and my future which has been plaguing and haunting me everyday for the past who knows how many years; but what I had to worry about was the now, survival, and my friends. In a way, I felt pretty good. But after we escaped Tokyo and had a couple days rest in the southern island of Kyushu, I got an email from my dad entitled with his favorite line, which is definitely my least favorite of all:

What are your plans?

I didn’t have any… because I sadly never do. I was just going where the nuclear tide was taking me, and since nothing was really developing at the plant in Fukushima, and that Yuki, my roommate, would probably have to go back to work after the weekend was over, it seemed like we would have to go back to Tokyo and try to live to our normal lives again, which meant me going back to doing photography on my free time while continuing with my stale, old day job that has absolutely no future whatsoever.

But… it’s easy. It’s much easier just to continue that life even with the rumor of one day puking out black blood from radiation (worse case scenario) then actually figuring out a new one. Therefore, I am sure that losing this job is a blessing in disguise because I would have never been able to figure out what I needed or wanted out of life unless I was really pushed. But since finding the same kind of job, which I have been doing forever, is so easy to come by, I doubt that I have the strength to let myself be pushed.

Now the question in front of me, which is actually the same one for everyone else in Tokyo, who were unsatisfied with their lives before the quake, is do we have the courage to get up and change our lives because finally we have a legitimate reason to do it, which - I’m sure that the Japanese government would never admit to- is that Tokyo is probably a damn dangerous place to be right now and will be for a long time.