Earthquake Update

Thought you might find these photos interesting. This is Shubya Kosetan. Normally these buildings are brightly lit with multiple TV screens.

Its all been switched off to save power.

Its been a pretty tough week here. The kids school decided to shut much to our disgust. This meant that Julie was not able to return to work. There has also been a mass exodus of expats. The majority of our friends have left the country. Julie stuck it out until Tuesday but a mixture of aftershocks, scary reporting in the news, every decreasing group of friends and concerns about the nuclear power plant led us to the decision that it would be better to ship them all of home for a break. Tokyo is a pretty stressful place to be right now.

They took the plane back to UK on Wednesday morning and our staying with our friends Jo and Simon in Bedford. The school has just announced that it will be closed for another week so they will probably think about returning for the 28th March

I have stayed to keep work going. The transport system has been running pretty well this week. For the first two days I carried my bike on the trains so I had an another option if the train stopped working.

The Japanese are very calm and working hard to get their country running again. By today we had nearly all of our staff back at work and some have made huge effort to get into work. Travelling for many hours or searching all over to get petrol. One of our supervisors is even staying in a local hostel so he can be at work having left his family at home.

The challenges of getting our factory running are huge. We have threats of power cuts, fuel shortages, suppliers factories that are not working, and no transport to ship our products out but we are getting there. It might be tough and a little scary at times but it's not often you get to experience a situation like this. As they say 'what doesn't kill you will only make you stronger' The team here have been great. There is a huge committment to work and your colleagues, and people are prepared to put in very long hours to get things sorted.

Hoping for a rest at the weekend and that some of the expats will still be around to have a beer. I'll post another update in a few days