An e-mail I received in the midnight on Thursday March 10th was something I had difficulty distinguishing whether he was joking or not. And I received the wall street journal alert saying about the earthquake with 8.7 magnitude. Since I don't have TV in my house, I didn't have any way to see what happened in Japan actually other than through internet. I was very frustrated because of less information in New York about the earthquake. But I found that a junior high student in Hirosihma(supposedly) was streaming NHK through Ustream though it was illegal to do so. That was a night before the final of Strategy Formulation, but I got glued to U-Stream... Everything aired in NHK was hard to believe... I couldn't sleep at all in the night. Needless to say, I couldn't concentrate on the test with my concerns just increased.
Then we got into very long, painful, strenuous and persevering three days. Right after the earthquake, Chazen institute, our sponsor of Japan Study Tour, said that we must cancel the tour. But with tremendous efforts and kind of optimism that earthquake was not so severe that we couldn't go to Japan at all but media sensationally reported it, we couldn't accept it and tried to convince them to continue the tour. The vice dean of the school and a director of the institute gave us OK to continue the tour under the condition that the tour was no longer "official". So, we contacted all tour participants whether they would like to go to Japan even though the tour was no longer official. The majority of students said they would like to cancel because of concerns caused by the earthquake but some students still showed interests to go to Japan. In addition, there were some students who strongly wanted to continue the tour: students who were already in Japan and students who were stacked in Alaska because of the earthquake on the way to Japan. In the midnight of that Friday, we finalized the number of students in the group and called it a day for going home to prepare, just hoping things got better.
On the contrary, it didn't get better, rather got worse. The 1st nuclear generator of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant blow off. The death toll and the number of missing people were increasing with unprecedented speed and size. The accident in the power plant seemed so shocking to some students who had shown their interests to go to Japan even after the earthquake. Some of them dropped off from the tour in the morning. It was 8 hours before the flight. Then we got together in the school and discussed whether we should continue the tour or not. Though we were on the same page that we should not go back to Japan, the only concern that dragged us was students in Japan. Thinking them as like "Private Ryan", we were coming to the conclusion that even if we canceled the tour, the organizers should fly to Japan to help them. At that point, we might have lost objective views to the situation. But, one of the members raised the point that her parents objected her to going back to Japan. Actually, I received the mail from my wife in Japan for the same request. Then, we took a step back and tried to see the situation as calm as possible. Finally, we decided to help remotely students in Japan four hours before the flight. It was a tough decision but it worked fine in the end. Fortunately, a tour in Korea kindly offered to accommodate refugees. Since the school also committed to paying any extra costs to get them go out of Japan, we persuaded them into going to Korea. Thanks to business school students' wilderness and mental toughness, everybody coped with the situation well, booking flights to Korea and leaving Japan just in two days. Our long, long three days ended.
Like many universities in United States, several fund raising activities are going on in Columbia University. I received many e-mails from my friends who worried about my family, relatives and friends and every friends in the school talked to me and asking safety of my family in Japan. As a token of their deep worries about Japan, the amount of donation exceeded our expectation. I really feel grateful to Columbia Business School students. At some point after the earthquake, I felt some sense of guilty by being outside of Japan while many people in my country were suffering. But now I think differently. Then my wife's words echoed: "You need to think what you can do in New York. Even if you come back to Japan, you cannot do anything. " She always makes me aware of something.
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