Sister City Kishiwada, Japan: "Our Family is All Okay"

Less than two weeks after returning from running a marathon in Kishiwada, Japan, Frank McAuley got an email from his host family late last night.

“Our family is all okay,” Mitsuya Yuchida wrote.

McAuley, public works supervisor and president of the South San Francisco Sister City Committee, spent two weeks in February in South San Francisco's sister city, a suburb of Osaka, population 200,000. The city is 250 miles west of Tokyo, and thus McAuley said it wasn’t hit hard by the recent earthquake and tsunami.

The earthquake struck the northeast coast of Japan on Thursday night.

McAuley stays in touch with two families in Kishiwada, which he describes as similar to South San Francisco in many ways: it sits on the Osaka Bay and stretches from the water to the hills.

The city has an industrial base but also supports farming and residential areas. A sake factory harvests some of the rice grown there.

“When I was there, we did have a small tremor,” McAuley said.

McAuley has been emailing people he knows in Kishiwada today, but hasn’t heard back, probably because it was nighttime for them. He said Kishiwada has been a sister city of South San Francisco for about 15 years.

McAuley’s recent trip was one of several he has made to Kishiwada, and he plans to show photos of his trip and present a gift from the city at an upcoming city council meeting.

As for the marathon he went there to run?

“I finished,” he laughed. “They’re quite tough over there.”

To help people affected by Japan’s recent earthquake and tsunami, you can make a donation to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army.