Japan’s terrible national tragedy continues five days after the strongest earthquake ever recorded here. Cleanup is proceeding, but it’s a painful process at every step, especially as the reality that the death toll will not be merely “more than 10,000” but may exceed that number for Miyagi Prefecture alone, where the city of Sendai is located. Japan remains touched by the warm outpouring of help from the international community including the U.S. military, and there are many media reports following the rescue efforts of international teams from all over the world. In the middle of this sadness, there are rare images of joyous life, including several people found still floating at sea alive, a four month old baby miraculously rescued in a damaged home, and another baby who was born in an evacuation center in Fukushima (her mother named her with kanji meaning “Hope”). There were also plenty of happy images on TV of people reunited with family members they’d feared gone forever. (I am posting Japanese fan-art related to the quake on Twitter and J-List’s Facebook page, if you’re interested.)
We continue to be surprised at the amount of normalcy in Japan. The post office has come every day to pick up outgoing packages and we have been told there should be no issue with delays for international shipping. All of our distributors are operating more or less normally, and orders were placed Monday were delivered the next day — Japan is truly an amazing place. At this point one of the major challenge for us are the rolling blackouts, which cut all electricity (including traffic lights and power to hospitals and mass transit) in three hour blocks in different parts of the Kanto region. J-List has made some schedule adjustments so we can get our work done around these blackouts and shouldn’t be affected. (Our servers are hosted in the U.S., so our website will not be affected in any event.)
Amid the destruction, a rare happy sight.
