(This one’s a personal post from me. I’ll be back to the “regularly scheduled” Iron Chef posts later this week. –Keith)<\/p>\n
March 11, 2011, 2:46 PM.<\/a><\/p>\n Today marks the two year anniversary of the 2011 Touhoku Earthquake and Tsunami<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n The earthquake was centered off the northeast coast of Japan<\/a>.\u00a0I visited Sendai<\/a> 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,\u00a0Maynard Plant<\/a> and Blaise Plant<\/a> of the Japanese music group Monkey Majik<\/a>, who\u00a0stayed 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<\/a>, which he wrote<\/a> after the earthquake hit.<\/p>\n