Dear friends, thank you very much for all your supportive messages, emails and even phone calls. Here in Tokyo, barely 24h after a massive earthquake hit the north of Japan, everything seems to be back to normal. Actually, it seems to be pretty quiet, well more quiet than the usual where I live, with empty streets and no cars passing by.

I am sure that you all saw these horrifying pictures and video of what happen in Sendai, and good lord there are no words to describe how horrifying they were. People living in Tokyo must feel very lucky. After all, a few broken things and spending the whole night without really sleeping is nothing compared to what many others are experiencing even now.

Already terrified, the people of Sendai and surrounding areas are awakening to discover more atrocities, entire life completely wiped out by tsunami waves going up to 10m high. Japan is without a doubt ready for earthquake, our houses are strong and can resist better than any other ones, but there is almost nothing we can do to stop a tsunami.
A tsunami, a gigantic and powerful wave, is like a bullet train running over you at full speed. There is nothing you can do, nowhere you can hide, and you can run or drive as fast as you can, but it will ultimately catch you due to the nature of roads and traffic in Japan.

To make things even worse, the situation of several nuclear plants in Japan is not so good and some radioactive steam had to be released to help reduce the pressure on at least one reactor. The earthquake damaged the cooling system of some of them beyond immediate repair. The Japanese Prime Minister even increased the evacuation radius from 3km up to 10km around one of the plants. Some pretty scary TV programs, mostly from foreign origin already announced a second potential Chernobyl… Scary but who really knows?

Finally, there are some reports suggesting that one of the major electric companies, who owns the faulty nuclear plant, will have to drastically reduce power in some areas, even forcing black-outs tonight in Tokyo (waiting for official data on this one).

Despite all this surrounding sadness, a few good things came to life literally, among my Twitter followers a baby was born a few kilometers away form Sendai, both the mother and the baby are fine, a tiny light of hope for many in these dark hours.

Good lord, hope this will be over soon with a Hollywood-style happy ending!