We woke to news of the earthquake in the Sendai region and reports of tsunami - no idea if you wil read this! anyway, thinking of you and your family, and any other forum-ites in Japan. Hoping you are all safe and well.

^ agree : the news coverage looks pretty shocking. Hope everyone is OK.

Thinking of you. xx

Ditto

The tsunami footage is just horrific. Hope you are OK..

How awful! The news footage this morning was terrible.

Hope everyone is okay.

Me too, desperately worried for you all.

Send you our best wishes and hoping things are ok with you all.

I echo Maggie's thoughts - hope that you and your family and friends are all ok.

Same here. We all hope you and yours are safe and well.

Absolutely. Hope you are ok. Thinking of you and everyone in Japan right now.

I echo all the sentiments expressed above, I only just heard about it when I switched computer on just now.
Hope you and your family are all OK.

I've just heard a report that the Red Cross is saying that the tsunami wave is higher than some of the Phillipine islands - I do so hope everyone is okay out there.

I'll add my best wishes, looks terrifying!

All Ears and family are unhurt.

Thats good news, thank you greentone.

So sorry for the people of Japan.

Thanks to all! All unhurt, Airman's dormitory in Sendai is strongly built and he was fine, Viohazard's school ditto. Viohazard and Mr Ears will be staying elsewhere tonight because trains aren't running.

The Ears mansion was slightly battered (broken window, front door jammed), and I've just spent several hours clearing fallen book cases so that I could get into the house. I just bought myself a coke from the drink machine (trust Japan, houses fall down if you sneeze but nothing breaks a vending machine!) so when I've drunk that and taken a breather I can go and start clearing up broken china! Sort of a pity that it was all our everyday china and not the rarely used teaset that went flying!

Thanks to all...your concern is much appreciated as it's a bit lonely! The house is full of broken things and it's still swaying...kind of like being inside a kaleidoscope!

Yes, good news. We saw the pictures on French TV news this morning and my first thoughts were for all ears and family - the only people I "know" in Japan - and then for all the others. The pictures do look horrifying. Prayers and thoughts to the Japanese people.

This is horrendous. Thinking of all in that region. Glad to hear The Ears Mansion is still standing and that all are safe.

The pictures and footage look shocking...

Car Expert

i hope everyone is ok. my thoughts are with you x

Good news - thanks to Greentone and All Ears for posting. I hadn't realised that Airman's dormitory was in Sendai !! so pleased to know you are all safe. I forget too which area of Tokyo you are in, All Ears.

You made me laugh with the description of the vending machine - rings loud bells. Good luck with the clearing up!

I'm glad you're all safe.
Fingers crossed that there won't be too many after shocks and good luck with the cleaning-up.

Things look pretty bad, especially in Sendai, with the fires as well now. Thinking of you All Ears and family and everyone else out there....

Adding my thoughts to the others - and ongoing ones for you too, All Ears, not least because everything is still swaying. Do watch the shards when you clear up.

So glad you are OK, Ears family.

, glad you're all safe.

So glad you're unharmed and safe.

Thinking of you all, and of all those who have been bereaved, injured or left homeless.

Just to say it looks very scary out there!! Glad the Ears family are safe. Thoughts and Prayers go out to you all.

Glad to hear you are all ok. Terrible terrible thing thats happened.

Dear All-ears - I hope everything is OK with you still. We can only watch and worry over here in England.

PatC

Yes, the news still sounds very grim.
For me you've put the personal face on it as you are the only person I "know" from Japan.
Sounds shallow I know, but thinking of one person's difficulties somehow brings it more into focus than all the news footage. That is just so enormous I can't take it in.

Hang on in there all of you - and hope you are reunited by now...

If they can't get their nuclear reactors back up to speed, it may be a little while before we're able to hear anything. After all, no-one want to waste power on the internet if you need it for cooking and cleaning.

The situation in Fukushima is really worrying. It shook me, because just a few weeks ago, in a technical interview for a UK nuclear firm, I was asked about contingency plans in the event of cooling system failures: Clearly it is something that is given a lot of attention. Have to admit, I didn't factor massive earthquakes into my reasoning about Layers of Protection, and back up systems!

Well that's not surprising seeing as we don't expect those kind of natural events to happen in our region (we're not exactly sitting on the edge of a tectonic plate). I'd not worry about that omission at all.

The Japan situation is really scary!

I hope all Ears and all the other Forumites based in Japan are safe.

The situation seems to be going form bad to worse looking at the news tonight.

Aidee has just PM'd me : all is OK chez Aidee

That's good.

My teacher did a concert in Japan a few years ago, and made some really good friends out there. He's just heard that the guy he sang with has lost everyone. His whole family, parents, wife, children. He's on people finder desperately searching. Awful.

When you birthday is 6th of August you are only too aware of the fact that the end of World War II happened due to the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the former of those sharing a date with your birthday. Whilst I was growing up I found this difficult to live with, then whilst in the sixth form Chernobyl exploded and now friends of mine regularly take in children from Belarus who need to take radiation holidays.

I have been watching the news from Fukishima with deep concern and a rational head. My hopes are that there are no long term consequences, my fears are that they may be. I find it extremely ironic that a country that saw such destruction in 1945 due to the atom bomb is now so reliant on nuclear power when it is built on the Ring of Fire and the design of these reactors is decidedly suspect. Having said that I would rather work with radiation than biohazards as they are a known nasty.

In many parts of Japan there are biohazards due to the fact that the dead have not yet all been found, and where there is necrosis there will be pathogens.

The tsunami has killed thousands and displaced many more. After the Indian Ocean Tsunami I raised a lot of money to help the victims. I have not been in a position to repeat that this time.

I am pleased to here that the people we know on the forums are all fine and that they only face minor repairs. With the Ring of Fire seeing a period of increased activity my fears are when and where will the next earthquake be, or the next volcanic eruption take place as I fear we will be sending our good wishes to more of our international friends over the next few months.

Now that they are able to send in survey teams rather than focusing on search and rescue, the scale of the tsunami is becoming clear...the wave reached 23 meters in some places (triangular valleys are the worst).

The death toll is currently over 27,000, and while Japan has a big population, the areas that were hardest hit were mostly isolated coastal communities...the government has warned that in some communities, they know that there must have been more deaths than have been reported, but some families had nobody left to report who had died, so it will take time to figure out who is alive but evacuated to the other end of the country, and who has gone.

Even down here in the greater Tokyo area we are still having aftershocks big enough to make everybody move to a doorway.

Regarding the situation at Fukushima, I regret to say that Viohazard and Airman seem to regard it mostly as an opportunity to make up parodies in extremely poor taste and sing them in duet while Viohazard extemporizes deeply purple harmonies on the piano ("Oh Fukushima, why did it take an explosion before I noticed you..?", not to mention "Suit up, Sleepy Jean, oh what can it mean for a TEPCO believer and cheap nuclear dreams?)).

We are well aware that whatever information we get is carefully selected and wall massaged before it is paraded in front of us. But that is the nature of the nuclear power business...the shareholders/investors are the real "clients", and they buy and sell on the company's image. What users think is less important than what the government thinks, and since workers, including many if not all of the Fukushima Fifty are not TEPCO employees but employees of a sub-contractor, TEPCO didn't even tell THEM what the radiation levels they were working in were...nobody believes that they would be telling consumers any more, and the government has let them go their own way for too long to have a reliable grasp on the information coming out now.

Japan noticeably stepped back from alternative energy in the late '90s, and then suddenly we started seeing "Go All-electric!" campaigns at outrageously discounted prices (for example, my friends who signed up for all-electric with overnight water-heating discounts were paying only 20 to 30% of what we paid for electricity plus gas...but I really felt this was a sweetener to make the nuclear pill go down easier, and could not bring myself to sign up). I assume that the plan is to reduce dependence on oil.

Another aspect of nuclear power in Japan (and elsewhere) is that while oil-producing countries have become more powerful, African uranium exports seem to be vulnerable to deals with aid as both carrot and stick. TEPCO is the major shareholder in companies such as Overseas Uranium Resources Development which not only mines in the Republic of Niger...the Republic of Niger's Japanese consulate is housed in the OURD's Japanese head office. To put things in perspective, France takes most of Niger's uranium export, and Chinese business interests are also active in uranium mining in Niger, but Japan has no such carrots to offer most oil-producing countries or Canada and Australia (other major uranium exporters), however.

Even though Airman had barely started school when TokaiMura caused an accident by mixing their uranium in buckets, the sole warning we got regarding the dangers was to have kids wear long-sleeved shirts for a couple of days, and itt wasn't long before my kids started bringing heavy, glossy, full-color brochures about "CLEAN GREEN" ENERGY" home from school science classes, featuring an implausible TEPCOFukushima green-leaf nuclear soccer player character. The country sprouted similar fuzzy cutesy nuclear energy cartoon characters called things like Genta (suggesting something like "bouncing healthy nuclear Jack") and Atomin ("min" means folk/people). Japanese education is very centralized, and I am sure that pamphlets from nuclear power companies don't come home with the empty lunchboxes by chance.

What concerns me most about the cosy, zip-lipped relations between government/bureaucracy and monopoly power companies is the effect that it has on safety. As Tamsin no doubt knows, nuclear power plants along with hospitals and airlines are the Big Three in safety/crisis management, and TEPCO's response is bad enough for any company, given the level of safety knowhow that exists for nuclear power companies, it is almost impossible to believe. 15 years spent translating air safety regulations, research, and accident investigations gives me a particular interest in the field, and it is obvious that they didn't have the levels of redundancy that they needed, they did not have their crisis-management priorities clear or plans in place, they neither informed the PM (who found out on the TV news like everybody else) nor had a ready-to-roll plan for power management for the Tokyo met area. Don't let me get started on this area....THIS kind of thing is just basic, yet there's not much sign of it in what I'm reading in the news here.

Thank you, All Ears for your update. Interesting stuff.

We continue to hope for the best.

I heard a few minutes ago that our friend in Sendai, and her husband and his mother are all safe.

That's good news!

Yes, thank you! we were mightily relieved. They have just had their gas supply re-connected. Glad to have hot water!

But for all those who are safe, there are many who are not.

Thank you, all ears, for your post. So good to read something so sensible.

What she said

Maggiemay, glad to hear that your Sendai friends are safe. Sendai is really divided into the "flat" and the "hilly", and the hilly areas had much, much less damage. Airman reports that utilities are now being restored day by day, and his university is planning to re-open at the end of April, so life is slowly returning to normal.

Dawn, that's very sad...the number of people who have lost multiple family members is particularly tragic.

One thing I meant to mention...in all this confusion, the efforts people have made to get information onto person finder and similar sites is amazing. It started with mobile phone photos of handwritten name lists stuck to the windows and walls of evacuation centres. People uploaded these photos to Picasa. And then...

From all over Japan, people started noting in the comments section that they were digitizing the name-lists, and checking for duplication. Once they posted the finished names, other people came by and checked for mistakes and illegible characters. Once the lists were checked as complete and correct, other people posted that they would format this or that list, or post each name on the list to Person Finder, while others made PDFs of the completed lists for multi-platform distribution. This work went on day after day, round the clock. Nobody organized it, but within hours, a system had developed enabling people to work efficiently without doubling up. Many of the foreign women here spent days trawling through the lists for foreign names and ensuring that Person Finder listings were correct and updated, and available in the appropriate language. Just amazing what a few people can do when they all want to get something done!