a message from Tokyo

Dear GHC users and Haskell community members, I'm writing this message to tell you the situation of Japan. As you know, the biggest earthquake since 1900 occurred. North-east of Japan is now like hell. Many towns were destroyed due to Tsunami. Many fires still continue. I guess some of you have been to Sendai which is a central town of North-east of Japan. The situation of Sendai is really really bad. I'm concerning whether or not people of Tohoku University are safe. Thanks to twitter, Eijiro Sumii, who is the chair of ICPF 2011 programming contest is safe. Fortunately, Tokyo is fine. I was working at my office in Tokyo and experienced the biggest earthquake in my life. 16 years ago, I was living in a place which is 200 km away from Kobe. At the time, the earthquake was the biggest for me, of course. But this time, quake was worse than that. All trains and subways in Tokyo stopped. Some people had to stay in their companies. Some chose to walk for many hours. Some had to stay in schools which were opened to everybody. In my case, I got home by my bicycle. I could not communicate with my wife by mobile phone. But my wife walked for four hours with our son and finally got together yesterday. All members of Haskell community in Tokyo are fine. Some of them are twitting. Probably we will be able to hold a study meeting on Yesod tommorrow. I believe this earthquake will not stop ICPF 2011 since Tokyo had little damage. I hope people living in North-east Japan can go home as quickly as possible and their town will recover. If you have any questions, please tell me by e-mail or twitter(@kazu_yamamoto). And I hope you kindly pray for them. Sincerely, --Kazu