Tokyo Disney Resort, Japan. March 11, 2011.
That night, about 20,000 guests stayed inside the resort's two parks. Not one of them had planned to.
Hours earlier, it was an ordinary Friday afternoon. At Tokyo Disneyland, people were lining the route for the 2:45 afternoon parade, and next door at Tokyo DisneySea, a show on the harbor was about halfway through. Around 70,000 people were in the two parks, many of them college students on spring break and families.
At 2:46, the ground began to shake.
It was the Great East Japan Earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded in Japan. Inside a Tokyo Disneyland gift shop, chandeliers swung and shelves of merchandise shook. Out on the parade route, cast members, as Disney calls its park staff, stopped the show and told guests to crouch where they stood.
When the shaking stopped, no one in either park had been hurt. But the trains that had brought most of these people were not running.
Getting 20,000 of them through the night would mean breaking some of the resort's most carefully kept rules.