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Charlie Kime, senior investment analyst at American Century Investments, was headed to Narita Airport near Tokyo when the earthquake hit.

Kime’s bus got stuck on the highway, and passengers initially thought the tires had been blown out. Kime eventually got to the airport on March 11, but it wasn’t until days later that Kime learned of the scope of the destruction of earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

“My heart goes out to the Japanese people,” says Kime, who is based in New York.

While firms rushed to update websites and blogs to provide shareholders with investment commentary on the impact of the disasters, companies industry-wide have also been reaching out to colleagues and contributing to relief efforts on the ground.

As of midday Friday, the National Police Agency of Japan put the official death toll from the nearly 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami at 6,406 people. The agency said another 2,409 were injured and 10,259 remained missing, according to Dow Jones. Reuters reports that about 410,000 people were in shelters, displaced from their homes, which had been destroyed or abandoned amid the ongoing threat of a radiation from the badly damaged Fukishima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

Although Kime reached Narita that Friday, it was Sunday before he was finally able to fly out. Travelers hunkered down, listened to radio reports of the threat of the tsunami, ate Ritz crackers and drank water, and slept in blue sleeping bags provided by officials. Eventually, the sleeping bags ran out, and in some cases, people sprawled out on their luggage. Meanwhile, “constant aftershocks” jolted the building, he says.

Kime drew comparisons between the recent events and the quake that rocked the city of Kobe in 1995. At the time, Kime was living in the Hyōgo prefecture, of which Kobe is the capital, teaching English. The area affected by that disaster, which also includes the city of Osaka, is more densely packed with manufacturing companies. The cities clustered in that region, which is further south on Honshu Island than the area now in distress, represent about 4% of the country’s gross domestic product, or an economy the size of Canada’s.

The area affected by the most recent disasters, by comparison, is less densely populated and represents about 2% of Japan’s GDP, he says. Still, the rebuilding of Kobe represented a cost of about $110 billion, whereas early estimates for this month’s disaster are near $250 billion, he says. He also cited the need for basics like drinking water and fuel, such as kerosene, in the North, especially since about one third of the country’s energy comes from nuclear power.

“Clearly, the loss of life is on a different scale [than in 1995 in Kobe]. The tsunami just took entire villages,” he says. Kime points to the resiliency of Japan’s economy and its people but says he worries about friends in Tokyo, where many companies are operating under business-as-usual standards. “Imagine the stress they are under while doing all of this,” he says.

Kenichi Amaki, co-manager of the Matthews Japan Fund, was also witness to the devastation. Amaki landed at Haneda Airport, near Tokyo, about seven hours after the earthquake.

The pilot had made an announcement about the quake about an hour before landing. Earthquakes are relatively common in Japan, but the magnitude of the one that struck 81 miles off of the coast of Sendai was not clear until passengers were on the ground, he says. In Tokyo, all public transportation had been suspended when Amaki arrived.

By Saturday, however, restaurants, supermarkets and transportation were all operating again. But in the convenience stores, non-perishable food, batteries and cell phone chargers were all scarce, he says. Amaki had meetings scheduled with companies in which his fund invests or is considering investing. Several, perhaps out of courtesy he says, agreed to keep their appointments. Amaki decided instead to reschedule his trip for a time when companies would be able to better understand the quake’s impact on their businesses, he says. He returned to the U.S. after four days.

He also endured the 1995 Kobe earthquake. “I know firsthand what people go through after that type of devastation,” he says. Amaki was attending high school in Kobe at the time. Although his family’s home withstood the ’95 earthquake, everything inside was destroyed.

After Kobe, the country went to work quickly to rebuild. Amaki remembers many miles of an elevated highway near his house collapsed in that disaster, which killed more than 6,400 people. Within two years, the highway had been reconstructed, he says. “If any country can come back from such a disaster, it will be Japan,” he says.

But the country has some real and immediate needs, he notes. The area that has been hardest hit is still quite cold and was blanketed in snow last week. “There are people who have lost their homes or whose homes have literally been washed away,” says Amaki. That created a need for temporary shelter away from the stricken area. People need food and other supplies. The Los Angeles Times reported that worries about the possibility of a total meltdown at the nuclear plant had scared some aid workers from the region, leaving area residents more vulnerable.

Gas, water and electric lines are another concern. Electric grids can be restored relatively quickly, but concerns about gas leaks can mean it takes longer for that to come back online. In Kobe, Amaki’s family went for between two and three months without gas, he says.

Many firms, including Matthews International Capital Management and American Century, have opened matching gift programs, corporate grants or fundraising efforts to assist with the relief efforts. Please see the chart below for a listing of several industry efforts.

Meanwhile, the Japanese people appear to be bravely carrying on with their daily work. “On Monday, I had a friend who posted on Facebook, ‘It’s going to take me three hours, but I am still going to work,’” says Amaki. When he asked his friend why not take the day off, his friend responded that he had customers to tend to. “He said, ‘I need to go into the office and call up my customers and make sure they are OK.’”