Friday's (JST) 8.8 earthquake off the northeastern coast of Japan's main island Honshu at Miyagi-ken and it's resulting tsunami has caused severe damage throughout Japan's eastern coast. Watching the homes in Sendai city and other coastal areas being washed away was devistating to watch. The structural damage and overall loss of property is enormous. So many people's lives have changed as a result.
But Japan is a strong nation. They will pull through this as they have pulled through previous disasters. The latest death tool I have heard since 8AM MST (Midnight JST) was about 60 people. This number could be much higher but because of preparations and the proper notification systems, the Japanese people were able to respond in an expedient manner.
We must also not forget the threats of tsunami to other parts of the world as a result of the earthquake.
Right now, our thoughts are with our J1 listeners and our friends in Japan. For this incident, we have decided to continue J1 in our normal music format instead of running special programming related to the disaster. Japan has many terrestrial information sources within the nation that do not require the use of IP networks to deliver emergency information. J1's task was more to aggregate from various Japanese and world sources and aggregate them through our social network channels.
We will do our best to update J1 this weekend. We are only limited by our Japan resources necessary to make these updates. We understand the priority of Japanese FM broadcasters is to disseminate emergency information and updates.
Please keep the residents and visitors in Japan in your thoughts as they attend to the injured and piece through the damage, mourn their losses and then rebuild. REC believes in Japan and the Japanese people and we will do everything within our extremely limited resources to help.
Michi Eyre
founder, REC Networks
director, J1 Radio
