Harvard Workshop at ASIJ

At the time of the earthquake, I was in third grade. I only found out about the tsunami and earthquake when I got to school. The teacher showed us the news and, because I'm half Japanese, everyone looked to me. That was the first time I was hearing about it, though, so I don't remember saying anything about it. We were watching news coming from Sendai, and I remember saying that my uncle was living there. Luckily, no one in the Japanese side of my family was really affected. This was fortunate, given that my grandparents and cousins lived in Hanamaki, Iwate, I had an uncle in Morioka, and another in Sendai. My dad was in Tokyo at the time, but and said that we was actually at the airport at the time he felt the earthquake. When we returned to Tokyo at the end of the summer of 2011 (for my dad's work) my mom, who is American, was really worried about drinking water and was meticulous about where she bought vegetables and fish from. For a while we drank a lot of bottled Evian water and avoided buying food from anywhere up north. Still, over the holiday we went to Iwate to visit my grandparents, although my mom was worried about the Shinkansen passing through Fukushima. Throughout the experience though, I didn't really understand the human toll and so I never felt the sadness or fear that I think effected a lot of people.