(This one’s a personal post from me. I’ll be back to the “regularly scheduled” Iron Chef posts later this week. –Keith)
March 11, 2011, 2:46 PM.
Today marks the two year anniversary of the 2011 Touhoku Earthquake and Tsunami. I remember staying up all night watching pictures/video of the devastation and just staring at the screen not believing what I was seeing. Buildings washed away in a matter of minutes. Families separated, wondering if they would ever see each other again (and the sad realization that many would not.) I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through something like that.
The earthquake was centered off the northeast coast of Japan. I visited Sendai on my trip last summer, but our schedule did not really leave time to get out to see any of the areas that had been hardest hit by the tsunami. I was able to meet a couple of guys who live in Sendai, Maynard Plant and Blaise Plant of the Japanese music group Monkey Majik, who stayed to help the community in the weeks that followed the disaster when they probably easily could have called their record company and said “get us out of here.” That’s one of the reasons I have so much respect for them and was so honored to have met them. I still get goosebumps when I watch the video for Blaise’s Take My Hand, which he wrote after the earthquake hit.
I saved a lot of videos of the events as they unfolded and in the weeks that followed. I’ll watch a few of them tonight. (It’s still weird to see the Music Station episode from one week later with no audience, messages of encouragement from the various musical artists between performances, and a heart wrenching PSA encouraging people to reassure their children that everything is OK and that they not alone.) I’d encourage you to send a thought/prayer/whatever-you-do for the people of Japan as they remember that day and hope they don’t ever have to see another one like it. がんばって日本