As a veteran of the tourism and hotel industries in Japan for more than two decades, Tony Virili says he will "never forget" what took place at one of his firm's franchise hotels in Sendai on March 11, 2011.
The 60-year-old Italian-Australian calls last year's Great East Japan Earthquake one of the two striking moments in the more than three decades he has spent in Tokyo.
In the Sendai hotel of a chain for which he is president and CEO, many of the hotel staff stayed until late that night to finish cleaning up the rooms for guests and evacuees who were to stay at the hotel, even though some of the staff, as it turned out, had even lost family members to the disasters, or their houses suffered varying degrees of damage, Virili said.