The seven Tufts students studying abroad in Japan are safe after Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit the country's east coast, according to Director of Programs Abroad Sheila Bayne.
Five students are studying on the Tufts program in Kanazawa, located on the west coast of Japan, while two other students are enrolled in Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, located in the southern part of the country, with a non-Tufts program, Bayne said.
At the time of the earthquake, four Tufts students were in Kanazawa, though the program is currently between semesters. A fifth was traveling in Tokyo, while the other two students were in Osaka, according to Bayne.
Bayne e-mailed students at 9 a.m. EST on Friday to check that the students were safe. She received news about all the students, either through e-mails they directly sent or through friends of the students by 10:20 a.m.
Ezra Salzman-Gubbay, a Tufts junior studying in Kanazawa, did not feel any of the tremors from the quake, he said in an e-mail to the Daily.
"Kanazawa seems like one of the safest places to be right now," Salzman-Gubbay said.
Japan seemed well-prepared for the earthquake, he added.
"Japan is no stranger to earthquakes. They happen often, and they're accepted as part of life," he said.
Japan has strict building regulations to ensure that buildings can survive earthquakes. The government also circulates educational literature about earthquakes, equips workers with emergency supplies and maintains shelters in the case of a disaster, Salzman-Gubbay said.
But the tsunami hit Japan too quickly for many measures to be effective, he said.
"The size of this quake was unexpected, and the proximity of the plate shift to the water surface caused one of the worst tsunamis possible," he said. "The wave made certain preparation measures irrelevant," he said.
Salzman-Gubbay said it was difficult to cope with such a large-scale disaster.
"We're definitely shaken up emotionally. The loss and the heartbreak is immense," he said. "I think the whole country is feeling quite a bit of psychological turbulence," he said.
He noted that the Japanese people are not outwardly emotional about the disaster, adding that he has seen many people forgo their own concerns to help each other.
"In the States, we wear our hearts on our sleeves, but here people express themselves much more subtly, so it didn't surprise me when people seemed no different than usual," he said.
"The Japanese have a strong sense of community," he said. "I think this results in a much different person-to-person reaction than in the rest of the world."
Though Salzman-Gubbay plans to remain in Kanazawa, several friends of his who were not Tufts students had decided to return home in response to the unfolding nuclear crisis. As of yesterday, four nuclear plants in the country's northeast region have been affected by the natural disaster, including a nuclear plant in Fukushima, which exploded due to the shutdown of its emergency cooling system, two other plants which have experienced or are at risk of partial meltdown and one which has emitted high levels of radiation.
"After the news about the explosion at the nuclear plant in Fukushima, some of the other international students made the decision to return to their countries," he said. "Clearly everyone is having a unique reaction."
Salzman-Gubbay thought the earthquake — a disaster that can touch nearly any part of the world — drew attention to Japan's plight in a way that other enduring global issues may not.
"It's easy to feel disconnected from the millions that die each year from poverty-related causes because we can't empathize with such a dramatically different experience from our own," he said. "It's unfortunate, sad and took a tragedy in the developed world for me to realize it."
