Heather and Mark are staying with Aya and Mino in Japan.

The street sirens just went off, followed by a calm Tsunami warning - the TV is broadcasting more details on all channels. I rushed to get passport and mobile, but the warning is for a possible two metres wave in three hours time, so we have plenty of time to get to higher ground.

The tsunami, if it happens, will be a result of Chile's devastating earthquake (the Pacific is a big ocean, and waves take a while to cross it), rather than the Okinawan earthquake yesterday morning. We will be in no physical danger in this very well prepared very rich country - but it is possible that there may be some disruption in communications and/or that our flight might be delayed (the local Nagoya airport at Tokoname is on an artificial island).

[As it happened, the tsunami was 30cm high in Nagoya, 60cm at it's highest in Japan - bit of a storm in a teacup, so to speak ...]

Our trip up to now has been very useful - a productive and interesting "Symposium" in Tokyo for a couple of days comparing "community cohesion and integration" in Japan and Europe, to which the four of us made a good presentation and at which we generally played a useful role, I think. Japan has very different struggles to face around racism in a number of ways, including for example that the great majority of "foreign residents" look Japanese - it's behaviour, heritage and language which are used to divide people rather than primarily appearance. More about that later!

We've also had some chance to catch up with Aya's home town and neighbourhoods around here where Aya and Mino hope to be working - and to visit Mino's family in the countryside for a very different slice of Japanese life.

As for tsunamis - we'll keep you posted when we can, including putting up news up here when possible. Meanwhile, try here for google's collection of recent tsunami news from Japan ...