Aftershocks still rattling Japanese people

[AsahinaKimi]

By John M. Glionna
Los Angeles Times

TOKYO – A few days after Japan’s magnitude-9 earthquake struck, physician Munetaka Ushio was making his rounds visiting patients when he felt the unnerving sensation of the earth moving beneath his feet.

Dizzy and unsettled, he fell into a chair and waited out what he thought was another of the hundreds of aftershocks that have rocked Japan since the disastrous March 11 earthquake and accompanying tsunami.

“I felt something was shaking. I didn’t know whether it was an aftershock or if my mind was playing tricks on me,” said the 38-year-old ear, nose and throat specialist at Tokyo Medical Center.

What happened next really shook him, Ushio says. When nobody else in the room said they had felt any tremors, Ushio checked an earthquake-monitoring website to confirm his suspicion: It was all in his head.

Ushio had experienced a mysterious condition known here as jishin-yoi, or “earthquake drunk,” an illness in which people feel as if they are swaying, as though moved by a phantom temblor.

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