[  Mood: Scared ]
On Facebook, I’ve been keeping a running commentary on the unfolding disaster here in Japan, and I posted an entry to my family-and-friends blog on that as well. All this is mostly just to let people know I’m OK. Junko and I and the kids are well outside the danger zone.

In a way, I’m kind of used to this sort of thing. On a per-square-kilometer basis, Japan has the most earthquakes of any country in the world, and every time we have one big enough to make the news, I get emails from overseas making sure I’m OK. Naturally, few of those quakes are close enough to my city for me to notice. I’ve only been in one significant quake in my entire life (Texas doesn’t have a whole lot of them), and while terrifying, the only thing that fell down in my apartment was my Shakespeare Action Figure.

This, of course, is different. This is one of those events that Japan will be marking with about five minutes of silence (the duration of the quake) at 2:46 in the afternoon every March 11th for at least a generation. I haven’t felt the main quake or any of the dozens of serious pre- and after-shocks, and Fukuoka was very fortunate in experiencing only minor tsunami swells. But the effect on Japan as a whole, and all of us living here, is profound. Exactly what those effects will be are still unknown–with aftershocks and radiation leakage from damaged powerplants, this catastrophe is still developing.

Here is an article with links to international aid groups that are providing disaster relief.