Japan

So I was walking down the street late last Saturday night, checking out the bar scene with some friends, when I uttered the following: "Dude, did anyone else just see two gorillas walk around that corner?"

While the world focuses on the devastation in Haiti, millions of people in Japan — including tens of thousands of U.S. troops and their families — sit on their own seismic time bomb.

U.S. military and local Japanese officials are looking to fine-tune their emergency response systems after reviewing lessons learned from the Feb. 28 tsunami tidal swells that threatened coastal areas on the mainland and Okinawa.

U.S. military officials closed Misawa Air Base on Wednesday as a blizzard swept across northern Japan, dumping a record-setting 20 inches of snow on the base by mid-afternoon.

The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics provided an interesting dilemma for two military family members at Misawa: whom to cheer for.

Base leaders here are sending a message to the military community: Stop drinking and driving or face some serious consequences.