Please Donate to Help Rebuild Japan

As I write this on a quiet, sunny Sunday in northwest Tokyo, other parts of the country are in complete ruins. My adopted country of almost 11 years - a place I now consider home - has been devastated. Watching and reading about tragedy after tragedy has been exhausting. People's lives have been swept away in tsunamis, crushed under tons of debris, and now irradiated by damaged nuclear power plants. There are conflicting reports on how far radiation particles may reach, and to what levels.

The official magnitude of Friday's earthquake has been upgraded to 9 and the chance of a magnitude-7 aftershock is currently at a worrying 70%. The death toll is sure to climb into untold thousands. It's a nightmare. A nightmare now known alternatively as "The 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami" / literally "Tōhoku region Pacific Ocean offshore earthquake" (Tôhoku Chihô Taiheiyô Jishin) 「東北地方太平洋沖地震」) or "The Great East(ern) Japan Earthquake" (Higashi Nihon Daishinsai「東日本大震災」).

There are several articles a minute being published by media outlets across the world (in the English language alone). You can find them through Google News' stream here.

But the resilience of people in this country is legendary. A microcosm of this: a 60-year-old man adrift on top of his house in the ocean 15km off Futabachô, Fukushima Prefecture has just been saved. Japan will recover. The rescue effort is in now in full force, with physical and monetary international aid coming in. And the use of SNS services to stay in touch and offer assistance has been astounding.

I can't thank people enough for all the phone calls, emails, Facebook comments, tweets, and mobile phone texts to confirm that I and my loved ones were okay. We are.

My experience of the quake that hit on Friday afternoon was minor compared to those in the Tôhoku region, but at the time it was the single most frightening episode of my life. I was working at home - I live on the 5th floor of a wide, terraced apartment complex that is seven stories at its highest point. When the tremor suddenly upgraded to severe shaking things began to rain off the shelves. I had the presence of mind (stupidity?) to place fragile items on the floor before they fell and shattered, buffered my flatscreen TV and Mac computer with pillows, switched off the electricity mains (gas turns off automatically) and quickly left the building via the stairs. The ward office is right across the street so I took refuge there and watched the TV in the lobby with a crowd of local residents. Moments later came those unforgettable aerial shots on NHK of the tsunami swallowing up farms, houses and highways near Sendai. New video and photographs from previously unreachable areas are coming in constantly. The scope of destruction is beyond words.

My wife was working near Tsukiji (famous for its fish market) and had no choice but to walk all the way home -- a trek of almost 4 hours. With no mobile phone communication possible, I rode my bicycle to a pre-arranged meeting point roughly half way, near Ikebukuro. Along the usual route I take I was amazed to see thousands of people walking the streets, all talking to each other. Tokyo has a reputation for being a place where people mind their own business but on this day everyone was in it together. Throughout Friday and Saturday there were unnerving aftershocks, which has made it difficult to sleep. I pity people stranded on rooftops and other locations in the wintry north and hope Japan's amazingly capable rescue teams reach them soon.

Chris Magee of the Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow sent out a group email to writers in the Japanese cinema blogosphere in an effort to coordinate donation efforts among our little community. We ended up selecting the Japan Society in New York, both for its strong ties to Japanese cinema and of course its legitimacy and trustworthiness in getting money directly to those in need. Please donate by clicking the widget at the top-right corner of this blog. This link will also be present on a host of other well-known sites in the community (full list to come soon).