Noriko Ogawa arrived back safely from Japan, and here we are playing piano duets for Woman’s Hour. We’re also talking about my book ‘Out of Silence’ which Noriko is translating into Japanese. The broadcast is on Tuesday 29 March sometime between 10 and 11am, and you can listen on iPlayer for a week afterwards. Noriko’s fundraising concert for Japan is on March 30 at King’s Place in London.

Before the interview began, Noriko was describing to us what it felt like to be standing on a train platform in Tokyo at the moment of the earthquake. She said that everyone in Japan is extensively trained in how to respond to the signs of an earthquake, but on this occasion they didn’t immediately realise what was happening because the shaking was not up and down as it usually is, but from side to side. At first this lateral movement was so subtle and unfamiliar that she thought she was experiencing a moment of dizziness and wondered if she might faint, but then she looked around and saw that all the other passengers were feeling dizzy as well. Everyone knew that the side-to-side shaking was something unusual and disturbing, even hundreds of miles from the epicentre of the earthquake.