I SOMETIMES find myself regretting that I don’t write a daily column here at the Variety. There are so many things I’d like to talk about – the plebiscite, sustainability, the buildup, energy, trash, animal abuse, buying local, overpopulation, oligarchies and colonial legacies, the similarities between Japanese and Chamorro culture, and the huge importance of traditional societies ... to name a few.

But today I can’t talk about any of those things. Today is the Variety’s last paper before March 11th, the one-year anniversary of the worst disaster in Japan since the atomic bombs ... and a day that changed my own life in ways I never could have imagined.

One year ago today, March 9th, my wife and I were living peacefully in Nagano City running our small business and finalizing our plans for my 60th birthday celebration on the 28th. In Japan, your 60th birthday is regarded as a time of a new beginning, almost like a rebirth, and so we wanted to make it something really special. We had already made our arrangements for a trip to Paris (our favorite city in the world), and had reservations for a sunset champagne toast atop the Eiffel Tower followed by dinner at a nice little bistro nearby.

But two days later, the earth started to shake – and roll. Having lived for a long time in both Japan and California, we were no strangers to earthquakes, but this one was different. The motion was more wave-like than any I could remember – and it kept going ... and going ... and going.

The moment it stopped, we – like most of the country – immediately turned on our television to see the reports on NHK, the always reliable public station, one of whose main functions is emergency broadcasting. At first, the screen showed only a map of the northeastern part of the country, with flashing red lines all along the coastline from Tokyo to the northern island of Hokkaido, and repeated warnings in Japanese, English, Portuguese and Chinese that a major tsunami was imminent, and that low-lying coastal areas should be evacuated at once.

And then the live pictures started coming in. Scenes like nothing we had ever seen before. Walls of black water rushing across the rice fields sweeping away everything in their path – cars, trucks, boats, houses; nothing could withstand the flood. Worst of all were the cars we could see from the aerial shots fleeing in the wrong directions. We looked at them and soon realized that the people in them were doomed. It looked like nothing so much as some sort of barely-believable horror movie ... but these were no special effects. This was nature in all its fury, reminding us of its true power.

We never imagined that anything could be worse than this.

But next came the bitter fruit sown by decades of greed, pride and all-too-human folly. The tsunami came crashing over the woefully inadequate breakwater of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant and demolished the emergency generators and electronic controls located in ... of all places ... the basement. As so, as the shaking of the earth faded and the water flowed back into the Pacific, the slow-motion nuclear disaster began.

Several days later, after the first fly-over inspections of the devastated plant by U.S. military drones, the American Embassy sent us an evacuation advisory, and 24 hours later we were here on Guam.

And here we still are ... I having been offered a job as the international news editor of the Marianas Variety for my 60th birthday in lieu of my champagne toast.

But I can’t truly be happy. As an American, I had the option of an easy relocation to a tropical paradise, but so many others did not. So very many had their lives completely uprooted by the earthquake and the waves. So many died. And so many will never be able to go home because of the radiation.

Those are the obvious things. But in the longer term, how much radiation has gotten into the food chain in Japan? How many people have already inhaled one too many radioactive dust particles? Twenty years from now, how many people will have died from cancer? And will the governments of the world be willing to admit this time ... unlike after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl ... that maybe, just maybe, the nuclear disaster might have had something to do with it?

To our readers: Do any of you have a story you’d like to share about the March 11th disasters? Did any of you also evacuate to Guam and decide to stay? Please post a comment and share your experience.