After a few days, Our Man had a eureka moment: Why not collect personal essays, artwork and photographs inspired by the earthquake and compile them into a book? Within a month, he'd have Quakebook.

2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake, also known Quakebook, is a collection of essays, eyewitness accounts, artwork and photographs sourced almost entirely through Twitter from people around the world. Our Man modestly describes the project as "an idea [developed] in a shower by an English teacher in a commuter town on the outskirts of Tokyo that has blossomed into something massive." But with dozens of personal stories and graphics, Quakebook's two-week turnaround makes the project something of a design miracle.

"I started with a simple call for 250-word submissions, and pics and even tweets," Our Man tells me in a lengthy email discussing the evolution of his project. "Where were you when it happened, what did you feel? How have you helped? Did it change anything in the way you live your life? Are you coping with grief? Or just bewildered behind a barrage of media images? Write anything as long as it is heartfelt." Within a day, he had over 70 submissions.

From the outset, Quakebook was a labor of love, a project undertaken by those who felt the pain of their home -- and in many cases, adoptive -- country from beyond its borders. Our Man notes that his earliest contributors "were all Colonials," mostly foreigners living in Japan and Japanese living abroad.

Aware of the international complexion of Quakebook, Our Man went in search of local contributors, those who had borne witness to the quake's devastation. His mother-in-law contributed, and then his neighbors. His wife, Our Woman In Abiko, searched the Internet for details from people, as Our Man says, "who had witnessed real suffering, and found some blogs and gained permission to translate them and so on." As Our Man sought eyewitness accounts, his international team was editing, designing and networking through Twitter, trying to ensure that the project was finished in a timely manner.

Despite its far-flung contributors, the book itself offers a departure from projects in the traditional post-disaster vein that, while fundamentally well-intentioned, often contribute relief at a distance, in purely monetary terms. Songs for Japan, the star-studded relief album relying on the repackaged singles of high-visibility stars like Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga to raise awareness for the disaster, comes to mind.

"I don't want to trash Songs for Japan because, basically, the goal of that project is the same as ours," says Dan Ryan, one of the first journalists to join the production of Quakebook. "But it is just a compilation of existing recordings thrown together on the fly and packaged rather quickly with a red sun icon on it, isn't it? 'Teo Torriatte' by Queen is the only song in the compilation that I know was specifically written for the Japanese, but it dates from 1976. Personally, 'Songs for Japan seems like just another music industry celebrity project to me. I don't even know if any of the recording artists were directly involved with putting together the two-CD set."