When the earthquake cut communication links, a former Vancouver resident who is teaching English in Japan needed to find out what was going on. Joshua Wheeler called home to Vancouver.
There has been a lot of telephone, e-mail and Facebook conversations during the past few days, as people in the earthquake-ravaged nation share information with friends and family in Clark County.
In most cases, local residents were wondering what’s happening in Japan, but information has been going both ways.
Jennifer Wheeler of Vancouver said her son called “during the earthquake. He was experiencing the quake and the power went out and he wasn’t sure what had happened. He doesn’t know how devastating this has been.
“We immediately turned on CNN and let him listen to our TV over his phone,” she said in an e-mail to The Columbian.
Now, as the death toll from Friday’s earthquake and tsunami has climbed into the thousands, those messages are turning to thoughts of condolence and sympathy for family and friends in Japan — including several sister cities.
Camas has sister-city links with Hosoe and Taki. Vancouver and Joyo are sister cities.
The three Japanese cities are in the southern half of their country, out of the path of the tsunami that wiped away some communities in the northeast coast.
“Knowing a bit of the geography, we suspected it wouldn’t be as bad” as in other parts of Japan,” said Lloyd Halverson, Camas city administrator. “I imagined the tsunami would not curl around to their part of Japan.”
Camas officials e-mailed their counterparts Sunday, to check in as well as to offer support and sympathy.
“They have written to us, and they are OK,” Halverson said.
But that doesn’t mean those cities are unaffected by the national disaster.
In an e-mail from Hosoe (pronounced “ho-soy”), former sister-city coordinator Katsu Shimada replied that tens of thousands of people still are unaccounted for around the country. He wants to believe they took refuge somewhere safe and are still alive, he told Halverson.
Shimada described news coverage of people looking for missing family members, including a young couple whose child had been at a kindergarten.
Shimada added that he could not watch the television coverage “without falling tears.”
Students also participate in the sister-city link, and the quake won’t interfere with a visit next week. A group of 20 students and five adults from Hosoe will visit Camas on March 22, said Aaron Smith, principal of Skyridge Middle School.
Skyridge and Liberty middle schools are teaming up to host the visitors.
The mayor of Taki (pronounced “tah-kee”) said, “The extent of the devastation becomes clearer by the day and is far beyond what we could have imagined.”
His city is not threatened by a tsunami, Mayor Yukio Kubo said, but “it does lie in the area where several major earthquakes are predicted to occur at some point in the future.”
On Monday, former Vancouver resident Tori Sharpe said that people in her neighborhood have plenty of concerns about the immediate future.
Sharpe teaches English in Hirosaki in northern Japan, about 175 miles away from Sendai near the epicenter of the quake and 215 miles away from the damaged nuclear reactors in Fukushima.
“The general overall feeling of the people in Hirosaki is worry,” she said in an e-mail. “They are worried about the nuclear reactors and what it will mean for the people in the surrounding cities.”
They’re also worried about another major earthquake in the next couple of days.
“There is practically nothing left in any of the supermarkets. It is impossible to find milk, bread, ramen, pasta, and meat,” Sharpe said. “People here are worried they don’t know when the next shipment of food will come.”
The son of Kent and Laraine Graham also has been teaching English in Japan for more than three years.
Tristan Graham said in an e-mail that he was at school when the quake hit, and, “We cracked open the emergency trailer and got out the food and water.”
Tristan Graham finished one of his messages with an observation that everybody who might be facing an emergency could take to heart: “Drained the last of my laptop and got my phone up to 50% … gotta do a better job of keeping things charged!”
