After the earthquake, I heard that food supplies were getting dangerously low in Tokyo. The possibility of a mag 7 Earthquake to hit Tokyo is still 40% (reduced from 70%). Many people are worried and started to panic buy staple foods such as bread, rice and instant noodles. Never thought I would see people line up for batteries, toilet paper and rice in modern day Japan.
Evil dealers were even buying up batteries who tried to sell them for extortionate prices on Amazon Japan before they got reported.
After checking to see if our house was still in one piece, we headed to our local shopping area in Musashikoyama in Meguro Tokyo. At the Family Mart convenience store all bread and cakes were gone.
These photos taken on 2011/03/15 at about 21:00.
Plenty of drinks but no milk. Milk, bread, rice, noodles, gasoline, batteries, toilet paper are the main items that folks are buying tons of. Most supermarkets do refill stock in the morning and there is a limit on how many of these items one can buy. Folks should go to the supermarkets early to get these items and expect to queue up for a bit.
Dinner for the night is Okura and Tororo on soba noodles - 400 yen.
Lots of folks have been buying much more rice than they need which is resulting in the lack of rice everywhere. We spotted a queue of folks queuing up leading us to find a small place selling rice - this shop seemed to have plenty of it! Its located in a small road leading off the Palm shopping arcade in Musashikoyama.
All toilet paper gone from this pharmacy too. Never thought I'd see the day where people would panic buy toilet paper. But the most notable thing was that despite the current situation in Japan - there was no looting anywhere. But I guess trying to buy everything up is kinda as bad as looting in a way ^^;
Despite the current news of something very bad happening at the nuclear plants happening up North, folks are going about in a orderly manner trying to get back into the rhythm of a normal life.
More posts regarding the quake listed up below.