Marriott Hotel, Ginza, Tokyo. On a chilly March morning less than a week after the earthquake and tsunami, a group of almost 60 people were brought together through Twitter. The purpose of this 7:50 a.m. hotel-front gathering was to collect donated goods to be taken up north to areas devastated by the twin disasters. The meeting was organized in under 12 hours.

Unknown to me, earlier that week my friend Ai had been asked by a friend to find a ride to the northern disaster zone for a Swedish TV crew. I spent the immediate days after the tsunami trying to head north to cover events there, but in the end it was my friend who got me a lift in the same van as the two Swedes.

Ai tweeted for a driver who can speak English. Hiroshi Yashima from Nash Inc., a van hire firm specializing in fashion shoots, tweeted back: Photo shoots were down because of the economy, Hiroshi said, so he had decided to try media location work.