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This page was last updated on September 15, 2001
September 11, 2001. This is a day Americans will remember for a very long time.
One of my friends works in the building next to the World Trade Center (WTC). He left home for work about 10 minutes late that morning, and missed his usual subway connection. For that reason, he is alive today.
When he exited the subway station, the first building was already on fire. He saw the second airplane hit the other building. He saw the terrible fires. He saw the people jumping to their deaths from 100 stories (floors) high. And he saw the buildings collapse.
Luckily for him, he was not injured. Over 5,000 people were not so lucky. The number of dead will certainly be over 5,000. Most who died were Americans, but some of those who died were Japanese, others were British, German, Mexican, Chinese, Korean, and a wide variety of other countries. So this was actually an attack against people from all over the world.
Americans watched the events on live TV in horror. Since I work for the California State government, I was told to leave our building, just to be safe. I work very close to the state capitol building, which was evacuated. There were, however, no problems here in California. However, most of the airplanes that were hijacked were headed to California, so many Californians were killed.
From a human perspective, this is a great tragedy. Certainly this will lead to more violence. The American military will hunt terrorists. We can only hope that not too many innocent people will be killed.
We can also expect more terrorist attacks in America, but we cannot know when, or what, to expect.
For business and the economy, now we anticipate America going into a recession. This will hurt all economies, including Japan's. The damage in New York is estimated at $25 billion ($25,000,000,000 - which is about 300,000,000,000 yen).
For those of us connected to Japan, it is too bad that this terrorist attack is compared to Pearl Harbor, and the hijackers are called "Kamikaze" pilots.
People in America are mad, of course, but mostly they are very sad. This is the worst attack on America. Most people realize that this attack was done by terrorists and fanatics, not by another country. There are many Arabs living in America, but there have been few incidents of violence against them since the attack.
September 11 - Since September is the 9th month, we write the date like this - 9-11 (month first, dates second). 9-1-1 is the emergency telephone number when you call the police or fire deparment. It is an easy date to remember.