Her two other brothers and her twin sister, all of whom still live in Japan, also heard nothing from Masaaki. Their phone calls weren’t picked up, their e-mails went unanswered.
At night, when she couldn’t sleep and couldn’t bear to watch any more televised news coverage, Keene climbed onto a stool in front of a small Shinto-inspired shrine to her ancestors, rang a small bell, pressed her palms together and prayed.
“When I saw that my brother’s beach house area had been washed away, I just gave up,” Keene said Monday. “I tell you, I couldn’t sleep. All I could think of was to pray.”
For many Washington region residents with connections to Japan, the waiting after the quake was agonizing. Unable to reach their family members and friends in Sendai and surrounding areas, they constantly checked e-mail, Facebook and Twitter accounts for word that their loved ones were all right. For many, word came quickly through a brief status update — cold, shaken, but safe.
For others, such as Keene, however, the silence was frightening.
For Keene, who is in her 60s and runs a workshop in her basement on the traditional art of Japanese Kimekomi doll-making, it was the latest in a series of emotional family tragedies: Her husband, David, a retired Air Force officer, died at 68 of Alzheimer’s disease in 2008, just 18 months after their younger daughter, Sayuri, died at 33 of complications from childbirth.
Alone in her home, with her other adult daughter in Chicago, Keene relied on her 49 adult workshop students, a mix of Japanese and non-Japanese women, as her surrogate family. After her husband and daughter died, Keene said, the women cooked her dinner each night for a month.
“This is how I survived — because of all the people in this class,” she said.
It was Jean Kariya, a Japanese-American who has been Keene’s friend for 20 years, who broke the news of the earthquake with a brief phone call about 6 a.m. Friday.
“I said, ‘I have bad news,’ ” Kariya recounted Monday while sitting with five other women in Keene’s basment as they made Kaibina dolls out of clamshells wrapped in brightly patterned fabric. The dolls were to be used at the coming National Cherry Blossom Festival.
“She said, ‘Oh, my God!’ She didn’t know,” Kariya said. “I hung up because I knew she had to call Japan.”
Keene wanted to cry when she turned on the television news and saw footage of the wall of water crashing through Japanese villages. But her students were already coming to the house for a class, so she tried to keep her emotions in check. She eventually reached her twin sister, who lives in Yokohama, near Tokyo, more than 200 miles south of Sendai.
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