I received an email from Aretha Bower asking if we'd felt the Japanese earthquake and no, we didn't. We had some Japanese high school students here several weeks ago and I've been in occasional correspondence with one of them since, so I wrote to her to see if she and the other students were ok. I didn't know how close they were to the quake, though I did know they lived in northern Japan. She wrote back and told a pretty hairy tale of buildings shaking, aftershocks, and power blackouts, but they weren't too near the epicenter so didn't have too much damage. I've been in earthquakes before, though never one of the length and magnitude of this Japanese quake. A few seconds is frightening enough; I can't imagine two minutes of it. The nuclear reactors are the major concern now, but if it anybody can fix them, it would be the Japanese. We'll hear from the anti-nuclear power people about this, of course, as soon as things settle down, but if it took an 8.9 earthquake to create a problem, then I wouldn't think there IS much of a problem. The richter scale only goes to 12; 8.9 is a horrible earthquake, the strongest I've ever heard of....hang on, I just got another email from my Japanese student. The poor girl must be scared to death................well, she sounded a little better. She's heard about how the countries of the world (especially America) are rushing in to help. That's nice to hear; the U.S. is always first in line to help disaster victims and always first in line to get blamed for the rest of the world's problems. She said they'll have blackouts again tonight, which is bad because northern Japan is still under snow and extremely cold weather. It's a sad situation, but that's the world we live in, and the Lord doesn't intend for us to be here forever. Hopefully, we'll all be ready when something takes us to the other side.
Asia is a pretty interesting part of the world.