Dear classmates,

Some of you will remember Osamo Nagatomo, or "Sam," who was an AFS student from Japan during our freshman year. We reconnected with him while we were planning for our reunion. I thought of Sam when we learned of the tragic events in Japan and contacted him and fortunately he and his family are OK and he's sent a note, below:

Hi Claudia,
Thanks a million for your email. I am OK as well as my wife and family in Yokohama. Yes, it was some experience. I was at work in the office when it shook, and the shake was so big and long we scrambled underneith the desks with a sense of eeryness that got us very dizzy in the end. The Microsoft office is a new place we moved into about a month ago, erected in a posh business district but has an absorbent system that sways the building like a willow tree. The shake repeated coming one after another and kept us there for a long time, so we got a sense of seasickness and uncertainty if it would really stop before collapsing altogether. I had an experience before of a history-recorded quake when I was a small child in my old home town, but man, this one was much much bigger, although the apparent mess was less due to the technological readiness of the structure. We were in the 26th story and elevators were instantly shut down, so were the public transportation systems. TV and internet were on so we got a clear picture of the whole incident, and decided that we would stay until we know that we would be safe returning home. All told, some 1,500 of Microsoftees were in the building that afternoon, and 500 of us spent the whole night willingly locked in not wanting to attempt walking home in the night. Well, to make a delight of anythign, we had fun drinking light booze on top of the prepared rations and blankets we were served for the possible disaster.
And this morning, after confirming the public transportation resuming the system at its best, I came home, and found everything was OK. While being away, mobile sound-phones was almost dead, but I could smoothly make connections with my family using instant messaging and skype chat. Internet is so great in time of such.
All the devastated scnes are very awful and damage must be so great eventually as it will unfold its values, but we are lucky being a little far away from it and having no casualties of anyone we know. MS will work out some rescue prpgrams for the victims of the disaster before the week stars.
Like or not, Tokyo would have another such incident much closer anytime, as experts would say the history repeats itself by indicating the Great Tokyo Quake we had about 70 years ago.
At any rate we are safe today, and we want to implement some lessons we took away in this hardship. Thank you very much for your thought about me. Martha also sent me an instant mail while I was still "shaking."
Be good. Sam