Japan News (3/28)
Mar. 28th, 2011 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mbarker3/26
22:33 PM -- another little quake, about magnitude 4
Lest we believe that the Japanese are all angels... one of the banks in the disaster area reports that during the evacuation, somebody didn't close the vault door. They believe that 40 million yen (roughly $400,000) has disappeared.
There are also apparently several reports of gas siphoning. Of course, given the shortages of gas and the number of cars and other vehicles seemingly scattered around, I can understand someone deciding that siphoning gas out of an apparently abandoned car is not such a bad crime. Not like taking stacks of banknotes out of an open vault...
There's a report from a SDF base up in the disaster area. It showed helicopters and fighter jets that had been caught in the tsunami. There is a SDF man almost in tears, talking about the flights that were scrambled apparently into the path of the tsunami. He's saying that there were at least 10 pilots that he thought would get off, but were caught in the wave. From his reaction, I think they are all dead. I'm not sure if he was a mechanic, flight controller, or something else.
23:10 PM -- another little magnitude 4 quake
Here in Japan, school starts soon (April). In the shelters, there's lots of concern about where the kids will go. Many of the shelters are schools. There's also a man talking about not wanting to start the kids in one group, and then shift them as they move during the school year if possible.
3/27
7:30 AM there's a report about an old railroad line that runs from the West Coast to Sendai. They also had an old diesel engine (about 40 years old) and a veteran driver. So they hooked it up with gasoline tank cars and he took it into the disaster area. They showed him arriving, three hours late, at Koriyama. He was driving through light snow drizzle, and it was just morning in the town.
Some of the kids at one of the shelters and a young man put together a model of their town. It's on a big sheet of cardboard -- a flattened out box. The houses are mostly cardboard and glue, some with carefully colored roofs. They've made little trees by winding yarn around sticks. There's even a foil reproduction of a tower in town. Streets, bridges, and so forth. They paraded it through the shelter. One of the adults said it was good to see what everyone remembered of their town, captured this way.
There's a little bit of talk about the volunteer symposium being held in Osaka. Apparently there is discussion of the needs shifting in the disaster area from immediate relief to longer term problems.
8 AM there's a power of coverage of the work of a borantiya (volunteer -- pronounced boh-rahn-tea-yah) network set up after the Kobe earthquake. They show the Kobe organizer the night of the earthquake sending young people in a van to Yamagata, in north western Japan, along roads on the western coast. In Yamagata, they meet with a local organizer who opens up his garage to reveal a stack of boxed cooking stoves, several large bottled gas containers, a stack of bundled blankets. He gets on the phone and starts calling. The next morning, other members of his local network start showing up with more supplies. They loaded the van, and sent the young people off into the disaster area.
They have a map showing how quickly this volunteer network got people and supplies into the disaster area. By the 12th, the day after the earthquake, the Kobe people had reached Yamagata, and the local coordinator had sent some of his people into the disaster area. By the 13th, they had more people including the Kobe group. By the 14th, they were into the middle of the disaster area, and by the 15th, were into the northern part of the disaster area.
They followed the Kobe volunteers to one of the shelters. The original organizer in Kobe, and the Yamagata coordinator, had reminded them that they were bringing know-how, more than supplies. When they arrived at the shelter, they met with the local emergency leaders and asked them what they could do to help. They also showed these volunteers doing small things -- as they came into the shelter, the head of the group looked at the shoes and the floor, pulled out a towel and started cleaning the floor. He told one of his group to straighten out the shoes. He told the reporter that this kind of small cleaning, making the emergency shelter neat, was one of the points that helped. He also took one look at the piles of flattened boxes that had been stacked pretty randomly in a corner, and reorganized those.
One of the activities that these Kobe volunteers -- who are now living at the shelter -- organized was a foot onsen. They had some of the small kids go through the shelter with big signs on cardboard announcing it, and then in one place they offered to wash your feet in hot water. The volunteers also massaged hands and arms, and talked to the people as they relaxed. The leader of the group explained that stress relief in this kind of situation is really important, so they listened to the stories. One old woman put her feet in the water, sighed and said, "Oh, that feels good." Then she looked at the young volunteer and told her story of the quake, tsunami, and getting away. There's also a young woman with her feet in a basin, telling another young woman all about the quake from her point of view. They exchange hugs, and maybe few tears.
Another day, the Kobe volunteers set up a coffee space. Just tables, pulled into a corner, setting it off from the auditorium, with free hot coffee and tea. Again, the leader said that giving people a place to "get away" and relax, to change their surrounding a little, was a good idea.
During this whole time, the Kobe volunteers were talking with the Yamagata coordinator and the original organizer in Kobe.
There's another little bit about Chiba, down by Tokyo. This is kind of the Long Island to Tokyo's Manhattan? Built on landfill. And apparently between the quake and the tsunami, a fair amount of it went back to suspension. They have a map showing that roughly 2/3 of Chiba has been affected. They've had gas, electric, water, and sewage outages, along with flooding and water and mud -- quicksand? -- coming up through various cracks and holes. They show a picture of a schoolyard being used as a local collection point for stuff that has been ruined by the flooding or mud -- it's basically a large pile of trashed TVs, refrigerators, household goods of every size and description. They ask one guy who's digging out the front of his house, and he shows them how the quake has broken his entry gate, and the thick black dirt that apparently ended up covering the front of his house. He's quick to tell them that this is nothing compared to Tohoku.
There's more news about the parts suppliers who are closed down in the disaster areas. Apparently General Motors is saying that their New York and Louisiana plants also depended on parts from Tohoku, and will be affected. There's a report that a car manufacturer in Europe also says their plants in Spain and Germany are going to be affected. The announcer points out that while cars are one of the big products that will be affected, there are many others. He's got a map of northern Japan covered with red measles, each of which has a label indicating several different products and companies that are going to be affected by loss of parts suppliers from those points in north Japan. Apparently especially the Sendai area had a lot of parts suppliers.
They go to talk to one of the parts suppliers who makes aluminum parts for several car manufacturers. He explains that his factory actually is still in good shape, but that he's been asked to stay shut down because of the electrical demand that the manufacturing process causes. He says the two weeks outage so far is going to cost him about $4 million (400 million yen). He's trying to give his employees at least a day of work each week -- just cleaning the factory, though. Then he takes the reporter to another factory that he supplied designs and machines to -- it's an empty concrete shell, completely wiped out by the tsunami.
There's a little piece with a young man -- 33 years old -- who is worrying because apparently people are ordering fish from his company on the network. He takes the reporter to look, and shows him a tile floor in the middle of debris. He says that's his store. The walls and everything else is gone. He also tells the reporter that his fishing boat is gone. I wasn't sure how he even knew that people are still ordering fish from his company -- maybe he's looking at his website on his cell phone?
3/28
There are study groups from Tokyo and other parts out measuring the watermarks, taking pictures of the buildings pushed aside by the tsunami, and so forth. As one man, wearing his helmet, backpack, and carrying a oversized measuring pole, says, "We don't get to actually measure this kind of event very often." They seem to be hurrying to measure things before the people who are trying to clean up can straighten things out.
7:24 another quake. 6.5? They're calling for about a 50 cm tsunami (half a meter) in Miyagi prefecture. There's a five on the north east coast, with fours and threes scattered across Japan.
The national news dropped the study groups. Now they're looking at web cams, talking to a reporter in one of the towns (7:40). He says he doesn't see the tsunami yet. They show a view of the seagulls along the seawall, cars parked along a bulldozed road not too far away. The web cams also don't show signs of the tsunami yet.
7:45 AM. The national channel is looking at the new quake. Minamonte, a popular news host, is talking about the reactors and radiation. The other three main channels are doing regular programming.
One of the reporters talks with people who are living a little beyond the 30 km evacuation zone around the reactors. A 69-year-old couple sits at home with two packed grab-and-go backpacks nearby. They say they aren't leaving unless they have to. An 82-year-old man says he's scared. There is a 50-year-old man who shakes his head and says it's just too much. First the earthquake, then the tsunami, then the radiation. He says he wants to move to a safe place, but he isn't sure where that would be.
They also talk with people in the disaster area. In the Sendai area, one man has managed to reopen his supermarket. He says, "Ganbarou! Fight now!" A nearby convenience store is also open.
They talk with a dairy farmer, in the area where milk is embargoed. He wants to know why Tokyo people are thinking so dark. He's 44 years old, and he sits in his home with his wife, grandparents, and two children, with a small pot bellied stove. He still feed the cows and milks them, and he says he doesn't see why people in Tokyo are so down.
There's a short piece about the ping-pong champion who is very popular here in Japan. They show her loading boxes into a van to be sent to the disaster area. She's got large labels that she's written a short message and signed that she sticks on each box.
There's also a piece about one of the shelters. In this particular auditorium, people are using cardboard boxes as walls around their space. A Tokyo chef has brought 30 cooks and staff, along with food, to give the shelter a special meal. So they set up a field kitchen, and cooked. Seafood, pasta, ramen, sushi. There was even a sweets camp for the kids, with small individual cakes and a chef to help them frost the cakes and decorate them with strawberries and other toppings.
There's another piece about distribution logistics. They go through the warehouse, the trucks going out to distribution points, the distribution points making up orders that are then sent either in SDF or a familiar delivery company trucks. They showed the order forms. In the town, the delivery man ends up going to an individual house. The woman takes the stuff, and says if there's any flour, she'd like to get some tomorrow. The driver explains that this was his route before, and he knows them. He goes back to the center, and enters information into a database. They do show a complaint, one of the shelters asked for 500 pieces of bread and got 250. But at the warehouse, the man in charge there shows that he has orders for 200,000 pieces of bread in total, and has 100,000 pieces to send out. He runs his finger down the order versus inventory, and he has just about half what he needs in many cases.
At lunch, they're talking about I think Sendai having the supermarket open, delivery trucks running -- you can send stuff -- and even some limited bus service. They talk with an old woman who says it's great to have the bus, since she does not have a car. I guess she's going to the supermarket.
They also say that this morning's earthquake at 7:24 produced a tsunami at 9:05.
The toll of dead and missing is now up to 27,000.
There's also a very sad picture of one town, Ishinomaki, from the air. It's basically foundations, with brown dirt between them. There's an occasional building or a framework of a building here and there, and once there was a tile roof sitting by itself, but mostly it's just gone.
And at one of the shelters, there is a special load of supplies. It's brand-new school bookbags (leather backpacks -- randoseru in Japanese, it's apparently from a German word -- raenzel), clothes, notebooks, pencils -- the normal elementary school kit that kids would need for school next week, which I'm sure they lost in the flood or at least can't get out to buy now.
Life goes on. One of the things I'm noticing is that the background piles are starting to get more regular, as if people piled them rather than the tsunami simply dropping things. And in some places, they are starting to be cleared out.
22:33 PM -- another little quake, about magnitude 4
Lest we believe that the Japanese are all angels... one of the banks in the disaster area reports that during the evacuation, somebody didn't close the vault door. They believe that 40 million yen (roughly $400,000) has disappeared.
There are also apparently several reports of gas siphoning. Of course, given the shortages of gas and the number of cars and other vehicles seemingly scattered around, I can understand someone deciding that siphoning gas out of an apparently abandoned car is not such a bad crime. Not like taking stacks of banknotes out of an open vault...
There's a report from a SDF base up in the disaster area. It showed helicopters and fighter jets that had been caught in the tsunami. There is a SDF man almost in tears, talking about the flights that were scrambled apparently into the path of the tsunami. He's saying that there were at least 10 pilots that he thought would get off, but were caught in the wave. From his reaction, I think they are all dead. I'm not sure if he was a mechanic, flight controller, or something else.
23:10 PM -- another little magnitude 4 quake
Here in Japan, school starts soon (April). In the shelters, there's lots of concern about where the kids will go. Many of the shelters are schools. There's also a man talking about not wanting to start the kids in one group, and then shift them as they move during the school year if possible.
3/27
7:30 AM there's a report about an old railroad line that runs from the West Coast to Sendai. They also had an old diesel engine (about 40 years old) and a veteran driver. So they hooked it up with gasoline tank cars and he took it into the disaster area. They showed him arriving, three hours late, at Koriyama. He was driving through light snow drizzle, and it was just morning in the town.
Some of the kids at one of the shelters and a young man put together a model of their town. It's on a big sheet of cardboard -- a flattened out box. The houses are mostly cardboard and glue, some with carefully colored roofs. They've made little trees by winding yarn around sticks. There's even a foil reproduction of a tower in town. Streets, bridges, and so forth. They paraded it through the shelter. One of the adults said it was good to see what everyone remembered of their town, captured this way.
There's a little bit of talk about the volunteer symposium being held in Osaka. Apparently there is discussion of the needs shifting in the disaster area from immediate relief to longer term problems.
8 AM there's a power of coverage of the work of a borantiya (volunteer -- pronounced boh-rahn-tea-yah) network set up after the Kobe earthquake. They show the Kobe organizer the night of the earthquake sending young people in a van to Yamagata, in north western Japan, along roads on the western coast. In Yamagata, they meet with a local organizer who opens up his garage to reveal a stack of boxed cooking stoves, several large bottled gas containers, a stack of bundled blankets. He gets on the phone and starts calling. The next morning, other members of his local network start showing up with more supplies. They loaded the van, and sent the young people off into the disaster area.
They have a map showing how quickly this volunteer network got people and supplies into the disaster area. By the 12th, the day after the earthquake, the Kobe people had reached Yamagata, and the local coordinator had sent some of his people into the disaster area. By the 13th, they had more people including the Kobe group. By the 14th, they were into the middle of the disaster area, and by the 15th, were into the northern part of the disaster area.
They followed the Kobe volunteers to one of the shelters. The original organizer in Kobe, and the Yamagata coordinator, had reminded them that they were bringing know-how, more than supplies. When they arrived at the shelter, they met with the local emergency leaders and asked them what they could do to help. They also showed these volunteers doing small things -- as they came into the shelter, the head of the group looked at the shoes and the floor, pulled out a towel and started cleaning the floor. He told one of his group to straighten out the shoes. He told the reporter that this kind of small cleaning, making the emergency shelter neat, was one of the points that helped. He also took one look at the piles of flattened boxes that had been stacked pretty randomly in a corner, and reorganized those.
One of the activities that these Kobe volunteers -- who are now living at the shelter -- organized was a foot onsen. They had some of the small kids go through the shelter with big signs on cardboard announcing it, and then in one place they offered to wash your feet in hot water. The volunteers also massaged hands and arms, and talked to the people as they relaxed. The leader of the group explained that stress relief in this kind of situation is really important, so they listened to the stories. One old woman put her feet in the water, sighed and said, "Oh, that feels good." Then she looked at the young volunteer and told her story of the quake, tsunami, and getting away. There's also a young woman with her feet in a basin, telling another young woman all about the quake from her point of view. They exchange hugs, and maybe few tears.
Another day, the Kobe volunteers set up a coffee space. Just tables, pulled into a corner, setting it off from the auditorium, with free hot coffee and tea. Again, the leader said that giving people a place to "get away" and relax, to change their surrounding a little, was a good idea.
During this whole time, the Kobe volunteers were talking with the Yamagata coordinator and the original organizer in Kobe.
There's another little bit about Chiba, down by Tokyo. This is kind of the Long Island to Tokyo's Manhattan? Built on landfill. And apparently between the quake and the tsunami, a fair amount of it went back to suspension. They have a map showing that roughly 2/3 of Chiba has been affected. They've had gas, electric, water, and sewage outages, along with flooding and water and mud -- quicksand? -- coming up through various cracks and holes. They show a picture of a schoolyard being used as a local collection point for stuff that has been ruined by the flooding or mud -- it's basically a large pile of trashed TVs, refrigerators, household goods of every size and description. They ask one guy who's digging out the front of his house, and he shows them how the quake has broken his entry gate, and the thick black dirt that apparently ended up covering the front of his house. He's quick to tell them that this is nothing compared to Tohoku.
There's more news about the parts suppliers who are closed down in the disaster areas. Apparently General Motors is saying that their New York and Louisiana plants also depended on parts from Tohoku, and will be affected. There's a report that a car manufacturer in Europe also says their plants in Spain and Germany are going to be affected. The announcer points out that while cars are one of the big products that will be affected, there are many others. He's got a map of northern Japan covered with red measles, each of which has a label indicating several different products and companies that are going to be affected by loss of parts suppliers from those points in north Japan. Apparently especially the Sendai area had a lot of parts suppliers.
They go to talk to one of the parts suppliers who makes aluminum parts for several car manufacturers. He explains that his factory actually is still in good shape, but that he's been asked to stay shut down because of the electrical demand that the manufacturing process causes. He says the two weeks outage so far is going to cost him about $4 million (400 million yen). He's trying to give his employees at least a day of work each week -- just cleaning the factory, though. Then he takes the reporter to another factory that he supplied designs and machines to -- it's an empty concrete shell, completely wiped out by the tsunami.
There's a little piece with a young man -- 33 years old -- who is worrying because apparently people are ordering fish from his company on the network. He takes the reporter to look, and shows him a tile floor in the middle of debris. He says that's his store. The walls and everything else is gone. He also tells the reporter that his fishing boat is gone. I wasn't sure how he even knew that people are still ordering fish from his company -- maybe he's looking at his website on his cell phone?
3/28
There are study groups from Tokyo and other parts out measuring the watermarks, taking pictures of the buildings pushed aside by the tsunami, and so forth. As one man, wearing his helmet, backpack, and carrying a oversized measuring pole, says, "We don't get to actually measure this kind of event very often." They seem to be hurrying to measure things before the people who are trying to clean up can straighten things out.
7:24 another quake. 6.5? They're calling for about a 50 cm tsunami (half a meter) in Miyagi prefecture. There's a five on the north east coast, with fours and threes scattered across Japan.
The national news dropped the study groups. Now they're looking at web cams, talking to a reporter in one of the towns (7:40). He says he doesn't see the tsunami yet. They show a view of the seagulls along the seawall, cars parked along a bulldozed road not too far away. The web cams also don't show signs of the tsunami yet.
7:45 AM. The national channel is looking at the new quake. Minamonte, a popular news host, is talking about the reactors and radiation. The other three main channels are doing regular programming.
One of the reporters talks with people who are living a little beyond the 30 km evacuation zone around the reactors. A 69-year-old couple sits at home with two packed grab-and-go backpacks nearby. They say they aren't leaving unless they have to. An 82-year-old man says he's scared. There is a 50-year-old man who shakes his head and says it's just too much. First the earthquake, then the tsunami, then the radiation. He says he wants to move to a safe place, but he isn't sure where that would be.
They also talk with people in the disaster area. In the Sendai area, one man has managed to reopen his supermarket. He says, "Ganbarou! Fight now!" A nearby convenience store is also open.
They talk with a dairy farmer, in the area where milk is embargoed. He wants to know why Tokyo people are thinking so dark. He's 44 years old, and he sits in his home with his wife, grandparents, and two children, with a small pot bellied stove. He still feed the cows and milks them, and he says he doesn't see why people in Tokyo are so down.
There's a short piece about the ping-pong champion who is very popular here in Japan. They show her loading boxes into a van to be sent to the disaster area. She's got large labels that she's written a short message and signed that she sticks on each box.
There's also a piece about one of the shelters. In this particular auditorium, people are using cardboard boxes as walls around their space. A Tokyo chef has brought 30 cooks and staff, along with food, to give the shelter a special meal. So they set up a field kitchen, and cooked. Seafood, pasta, ramen, sushi. There was even a sweets camp for the kids, with small individual cakes and a chef to help them frost the cakes and decorate them with strawberries and other toppings.
There's another piece about distribution logistics. They go through the warehouse, the trucks going out to distribution points, the distribution points making up orders that are then sent either in SDF or a familiar delivery company trucks. They showed the order forms. In the town, the delivery man ends up going to an individual house. The woman takes the stuff, and says if there's any flour, she'd like to get some tomorrow. The driver explains that this was his route before, and he knows them. He goes back to the center, and enters information into a database. They do show a complaint, one of the shelters asked for 500 pieces of bread and got 250. But at the warehouse, the man in charge there shows that he has orders for 200,000 pieces of bread in total, and has 100,000 pieces to send out. He runs his finger down the order versus inventory, and he has just about half what he needs in many cases.
At lunch, they're talking about I think Sendai having the supermarket open, delivery trucks running -- you can send stuff -- and even some limited bus service. They talk with an old woman who says it's great to have the bus, since she does not have a car. I guess she's going to the supermarket.
They also say that this morning's earthquake at 7:24 produced a tsunami at 9:05.
The toll of dead and missing is now up to 27,000.
There's also a very sad picture of one town, Ishinomaki, from the air. It's basically foundations, with brown dirt between them. There's an occasional building or a framework of a building here and there, and once there was a tile roof sitting by itself, but mostly it's just gone.
And at one of the shelters, there is a special load of supplies. It's brand-new school bookbags (leather backpacks -- randoseru in Japanese, it's apparently from a German word -- raenzel), clothes, notebooks, pencils -- the normal elementary school kit that kids would need for school next week, which I'm sure they lost in the flood or at least can't get out to buy now.
Life goes on. One of the things I'm noticing is that the background piles are starting to get more regular, as if people piled them rather than the tsunami simply dropping things. And in some places, they are starting to be cleared out.
