User blog comment:Yountoryuu/Good Luck, Oda-sama!/@comment-3435506-20110312192616/@comment-3213092-20110312213733

On wikipedia says:

At 08:55 EST on March 12, 2011, an unconfirmed report of Tajiri's death in the 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami was posted to Twitter, resulting in a deluge of retweets and syndication of the information to various blog posts concerned with gaming, manga and anime and major news websites.[21] However, the posts were refuted with new information regarding the safety of Nintendo of Japan employees (including Tajiri), with Nintendo of America confirming that no employees of Nintendo of Japan were harmed by the catastrophe nor was any significant property damage sustained