It rained when we got up and looking at the weather map on TV it was the same over most of Japan so we took a taxi to the station that was only 800m away. We were too early at the station and took an earlier Limited Express train than planned. 70 minutes later we were in Kokura. We had reservations on the high speed Hikari almost an hour later but we saw on the screens that an earlier train would arrive a few minutes later so we boarded that one instead. A short subway ride later we arrived at our Osaka hotel. After check-in we went to the Tenjimbashi 2.6 Km long roofed shopping street. This is the longest shopping street in Japan. That evening we had dinner in the Hard Rock Cafe just 2 blocks from our hotel. While we were preparing for tomorrow’s outings and checking e-mail we noticed a slight movement that continued for more than 30 seconds. It took us a few moments to realize it was an earthquake. Just 2 minutes later we found the Japanese meteorological agency had the quake listed already. It was a long distance away and with a strength of 6.9 at a depth of 340Km it was felt in most of Japan. In Osaka it was rated at 2 on the Richter scale (it was a 4 in the Tokyo area). I’m sure that if we would have been outside that we wouldn’t have noticed anything.