Watching the Western media explain Japan can feel like watching a caveman explain the future.
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After Disaster, Laundry.
This is a Japanese poster urging people to conserve electricity after the 2011 earthquake.
I went to work today. Normally that wouldn’t merit a blog post, but in a country with nuclear emergencies, multiple earthquakes, rolling power outages and an active volcano, the normal stuff starts to get noteworthy.
As I write this, rescue squads have barely even started the work ahead of them. Grim scenes told by numbers: 700 bodies found in an incoming tide. 2,300 missing. Estimates of 10,000 dead. 457,000 in evacuation shelters. Numbers this size and beyond are unfathomable.
And yet, we see scenes on NHK: A Sake brewer wanders around the wreckage of his brewery. “I just hope that someday, I can brew sake again.”
In Tokyo, where trains are running on a slower schedule to accommodate scheduled blackouts, workers “returned to work as usual” on Monday morning, which strikes some people as slightly insane. Government officials are in the office, even if their own families are missing or dead.
Why is Japan going back to work?
Posted in Earthquake, Tradition, Uncategorized
31 Comments
Explaining Fukushima to a 12-year-old
Nuclear Power Plant Explodes
As of 12:41 a.m. JPT Saturday, a nuclear power plant had exploded, though there wasn’t a “meltdown.” As of Sunday, there was a second nuclear power plant with reactor problems, also in Fukushima.
Ninety people who hadn’t fled from the rapidly expanding evacuation zone were hospitalized with radiation sickness. Closer to the plant, the radiation exposure collected in a day was equal to typical radiation exposure over the course of a year.
If you want an explanation in technical terms of what happened to the Fukushima Nuclear reactor you can read one here, or a more reassuring one here.
But if you want the process explained as if you were 12 years old, you are in luck. My grandfather designed nuclear power plants in Japan. As a child of the cold war, I had a terrible fear of anything nuclear and I would often probe him about nuclear meltdowns.
Posted in Earthquake, Video
4 Comments
Earthquake, Tsunami Warnings in Japan
I’m in the yellow area in the center of the map, near Korea. So, we’re OK.
Posted in Earthquake, Video
5 Comments
On Being Late to Work in Japan | 遅出
I know people who have shown up to work 3 minutes late to their jobs in Japan. They lost an hour of vacation pay and then sat at a desk with nothing to do for the next 7 hours.
This can tell you a lot about Japan’s work ethic.
Posted in Audio, Culture Shock, Tradition
24 Comments
On Drinking Canned Coffee in Japan | 缶コーヒ
Coffee in Japan is more of a vague allusion to coffee.
Just like Japanese conversations. You don’t really say anything too straightforward. You hedge a lot. You tease out the meanings.
Perhaps it’s coffee. It’s probably coffee.
Posted in Food, Uncategorized
7 Comments
