Japan News (4/9)
Apr. 9th, 2011 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mbarker4/7
One of the French chefs from Tokyo, along with a number of French residents, went out to one of the shelters and served everyone a French meal. The soup and French bread apparently were very popular. Sorry, I missed what kind of soup.
NHK, the national public television, sent what I guess you would call documentary footage about a town to the people in a shelter. So this was video about their town, the people living there, and so on before the disaster. Several hours of video, apparently. The people in the shelter watched the video. Some tears. They asked one older man who said, "It's hard to watch, but it's good to see what we had." I have to admit, I'm not quite sure how I would feel in that situation. Your town destroyed, friends and relatives dead or missing, living in an emergency shelter, and someone provides you with video of life before the disaster. Memories are one thing, but having the video capturing that lost life...
Apparently the Australian government has a website about helping Japan.
There's a 93-year-old woman who remembers the earthquake in Showa 8 (1934?). She said the town was destroyed by tsunami then, but they built this seawall that they said would protect the new building. They show a picture of the town and the seawall before this tsunami -- the seawall is at least two stories tall, maybe taller. It's very wide at the base and goes up at a slope. I think if you cut through it, it would be a short triangle, with a wide base. However, apparently this tsunami went over the wall, and in fact some of the destruction and debris was trapped by the wall as the waters returned. Then they showed the old woman looking over the destroyed town. She looked into the camera, took a band of cloth and put it around her head, caught her fine white hair up, and tied a knot in front. She smiled at the camera, all wrinkles, and said, "Ganbapesu!" Mitsuko laughed, and the commentator was clearly trying not to chuckle. Mitsuko told me that this is an old, country dialect.
4/8
This morning the news said there was a magnitude 7.4 quake at about 11:30 last night. They've got some shots of people wandering around in the dark. They were also talking about apparently at several shelters, people panicked and had to be calmed down by the SDF. They were listing gas, cell phone, NTT, railroad outages. They showed some video from a shinkansen that apparently stopped in a tunnel. They said it was stuck there until about 5:36 AM, when they moved it out with a diesel and put everyone into taxis. The Sendai JR station -- train station -- is closed. They showed the ceiling leaking. I'm not sure if it had broken pipes or the sprinkler system went off.
There's a short piece about repairs. They started in Ibaraki, with a repair company. This man was frustrated, taking phone calls and telling people he doesn't know when he can repair their house. He showed a white board covered with repair work that his company is doing. Most of them have a notation that apparently means stopped for parts. He went out to a house, talked with the owner and agreed that he needed to replace the glass, and do other repairs... but he doesn't have supplies. From there, the reporter went to a glass factory. Unfortunately, while it is nearby, the factory is stopped. The earthquake, lack of power, and as they show -- broken glass and other parts in the production line. Also, the nearby port that apparently was used for shipping glass out and for getting supplies in is broken and flooded. The glass manufacturer said that he needs parts, too. They took it one more step to a company --Combinato? I think this is a plastics manufacturing company. This manager showed that there are oil tanks -- maybe the oil shipping company -- which supply a processing complex, which in turn supplies his complex. He said right now the oil tanks are out, and put a big red X on the diagram. The processing complex is out, another red X. And, his processing complex has breakage. They showed some footage from a helicopter of what I think must be his processing complex. There are several obvious roofs collapsed, what probably was a conveyor belt down in the street, etc. All of which means that the repair man can't get the parts to fix the house
In Iwate, Rikuzen takata, they were talking about moving some people into the temporary housing soon. The earthquake last night has left lots of people scared.
People are still buying bottled water in Tokyo. This news piece started with a small grocery shop owner in the early morning as he drove to the distribution point. He filled his van with various cases of bottled water. Then he put all of it onto the shelves in the store, which has a sign saying one bottle of water per customer. The store opened at 10 o'clock. All of the bottled water was gone at 10:20. It turns out that one of the problems with getting more bottled water for Tokyo is that most of the bottled water companies use white plastic bottle caps -- which are made by a manufacturer in a factory in the disaster area. They showed the factory, which is now not producing plastic bottle caps. They also showed something that made me laugh -- apparently a Korean bottled water company has flown a large supply of bottled water into Japan. However, distribution is being held up because the bottles are all in Korean, and they are printing Japanese labels. I think a sign over the bottles saying "Water" would probably be enough. I mean, it's just water. Even if you accidentally thought it was something else, water isn't very likely to hurt anything?
8:39 AM another small earthquake 4.2
The evening news talked a little bit about the new earthquake. Apparently there was some additional road damage. There's a little bit of footage from one of the shelters in a school, where a piece of concrete fell out of a wall. Luckily it didn't hit anyone. They also have footage from one of the schools where new students were starting. At this school, some of the ceiling fixtures fell, banners that had been put up for the new students fell down, and so forth. However, they moved to another room and kept going.
Now that's interesting. Apparently one of our large department and supermarket chains, Daei, is offering to give some portion of the profit from sales of their private brand goods to the relief effort. Another chain, Aeon, is matching that with a one percent of all receipts offer? And one of the delivery services also is giving some portion of their profits to the relief effort. So you can contribute to the relief effort by buying things.
There's a lot of discussion about the government relief fund. If I understand correctly, they said that they are going to make payments to people in the disaster area. 350,000 yen (roughly $3500) for each dead or missing person. 350,000 yen for each broken business or factory. 180,000 yen ... I think that was for a lost job. I'm pretty sure there was something in there for houses, too, but I don't seem to have written it down. Apparently part of the immediate furor over this was that a dead person or a destroyed business had the same payout. I'm not sure whether people thought people or businesses should be worth more. I think there was also some complaint about the relatively small amounts, although I suspect this may be due to someone in the government looking at the scale of the claims. After all, there's a large number of dead or missing, and quite a bit of property destruction.
And, there is some concern about other areas. For example, in Kyushu -- the southern island -- the seacoast also got hit by the tsunami. They showed one section where the oyster rafts were mostly destroyed. In that same area, they've lost fish farms -- floating netted areas that were full of fish. One farmer says he had 200 farms, and about 160 were wrecked. But at this point, it doesn't look as if the government relief funds will go to people like this.
There's some footage of one town where the elementary and middle school have started using the same building. They talked with elementary and middle school kids, who both said it's really interesting to be in school together. One young girl said she really liked talking to the middle school kids about what middle school is like. A small gang of middle schoolers giggled and said it was fun having the little kids there.
There's some more news about the new quake. In one town, a large concrete water tank on top of a hill apparently collapsed. I'm not sure whether this quake just hit the right frequency, a fault that had been growing finally gave way, or whatever, but apparently it happened last night. There also were extensive power outages across northern Japan. One of the videos taken during the quake at 11:30 PM shows the dark town, and then what looks like lightning or white explosions in one area. They're talking about a short in a high tension power switching park. They show video of this equipment -- it took me a minute to realize that the little boxes actually were cars, so this is relatively huge towers, inside a very large fenced area. Somewhere in there, apparently there were some kind of shorts.
They've got a picture of northern Japan, with what I guess are trunk powerlines laid across it. They've got three spots in the northern tip, almost up to Aomori, where they have marked red Xs on the lines. The spokesman from the power company is talking about needing balance in the grid, and that these three big breaks are making the grid unbalanced, which is complicating getting power back. I know that some areas were without power for most of the day.
The cherry blossoms at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo are in bloom, and the Emperor invited 40 people from Fukushima to join him at the Palace. They've got some video of these people who had been evacuated from the reactor zone visiting the Imperial Palace.
They've also got predictions for when the peak viewing for sakura -- cherry blossoms -- is going to be in northern Japan. 4/25... 4/29.
4/9
Another report on the outages due to this quake. Apparently 400,000 houses were without electricity. Electricity was out for the day. 152,684 houses lost gas. Over 140,000 houses were without water. I think these were all in addition to previous outages. So the quake really did pretty serious damage to the services, apparently. Of course, if someone said there was a magnitude 7.4 or 7.1 earthquake in that area before the 3/11 quake, we all would've expected serious effects.
There was a special with questions from viewers for the experts talking about what to do after four weeks. They had a short talk with one of the people in the disaster area. Apparently this is one of the people that the Prime Minister talked to, and he was pretty impressed that the Prime Minister had given him a phone number to call and said asked for anything that they needed. They asked him what he thought people should be doing. He said there are three things. Number one, make sure people have food and shelter. Number two, clean up. And number three, start building the new town. He said it, and you could see the commentators and panel nodding. It seems really simple, but he summed it up very well. That's the three priorities right now. It was sort of funny, because after they finished that short video interview, one of the experts on the panel started his presentation. He had one large sheet with five points, and another with several points. He actually skipped through most of his points, I think embarrassed by the clarity of the previous man in the field.
This particular expert did show us his picture of a concept for the new towns. Basically, he wants to build enormous concrete stilts, holding up a concrete base, and then build the towns on top of this elevated base. He showed that if the stilts are 2 to 3 stories tall, a tsunami could wash in underneath without damaging the town. I suppose he has a point, bridge building is reasonably well understood.
Still, I'm not sure that he's thought about the civil engineering problem of trying to build these concrete bases for towns. I'd also be really concerned about what happens when the earthquake snaps the supporting structure and the entire town suddenly sinks. If you're trying to build at a higher level, maybe you should start with ground that isn't quite so low? It's an interesting idea, but...
This panel talked a little bit about the need for better communications between government organizations, volunteers, and the people in the disaster. They mentioned the need for regular practice, maybe once a month, and a real network of communications and data. The volunteer coordinator, a young woman who has turned up on several news shows recently, suggested that realistically, though, the best communication is still person-to-person. As she pointed out, it's when one person in the shelter says, "Have you tried this?" And somebody else talks to their friend about what's needed that you really get things going. One of the news people laughed and commented that if you hand him a pamphlet, he can read it, but he doesn't really know it. If he takes notes on it, so that he writes his own pamphlet, he does better. And if you talk to him about it, that's when both of you will know the most.
There was also a segment about studies that are going on now with experts in various parts of Japan. For example, they showed an expert in Osaka who is doing simulations of what would happen to Osaka if a similar quake and tsunami occurred in this area. There are also apparently various citizen groups and others going around identifying tall buildings, talking to people about how to open the doors to the public in case of an emergency, and so forth. There was what I'm sure was intended to be a very serious little video about three older men who had identified possible safe buildings in their area and were talking to people about using them. However, in talking to one woman at a tall apartment building, she was not at all sure whether they could open the doors to the public in the event of an emergency. The old man shook his head even as she looked very puzzled about how to get permission to arrange to open the door. The good news is that people are making better preparations for possible future disasters. The bad news is the some people don't seem to know what emergency and disaster really mean.
It's an odd mix of urgent practical thinking and needs with Monday morning quarterbacks happily figuring out what everyone shoulda done and really oughta do next time. And the occasional stumble as oughta runs into concrete steps and stubs its toes. And cherry blossoms with the Emperor.
One of the French chefs from Tokyo, along with a number of French residents, went out to one of the shelters and served everyone a French meal. The soup and French bread apparently were very popular. Sorry, I missed what kind of soup.
NHK, the national public television, sent what I guess you would call documentary footage about a town to the people in a shelter. So this was video about their town, the people living there, and so on before the disaster. Several hours of video, apparently. The people in the shelter watched the video. Some tears. They asked one older man who said, "It's hard to watch, but it's good to see what we had." I have to admit, I'm not quite sure how I would feel in that situation. Your town destroyed, friends and relatives dead or missing, living in an emergency shelter, and someone provides you with video of life before the disaster. Memories are one thing, but having the video capturing that lost life...
Apparently the Australian government has a website about helping Japan.
There's a 93-year-old woman who remembers the earthquake in Showa 8 (1934?). She said the town was destroyed by tsunami then, but they built this seawall that they said would protect the new building. They show a picture of the town and the seawall before this tsunami -- the seawall is at least two stories tall, maybe taller. It's very wide at the base and goes up at a slope. I think if you cut through it, it would be a short triangle, with a wide base. However, apparently this tsunami went over the wall, and in fact some of the destruction and debris was trapped by the wall as the waters returned. Then they showed the old woman looking over the destroyed town. She looked into the camera, took a band of cloth and put it around her head, caught her fine white hair up, and tied a knot in front. She smiled at the camera, all wrinkles, and said, "Ganbapesu!" Mitsuko laughed, and the commentator was clearly trying not to chuckle. Mitsuko told me that this is an old, country dialect.
4/8
This morning the news said there was a magnitude 7.4 quake at about 11:30 last night. They've got some shots of people wandering around in the dark. They were also talking about apparently at several shelters, people panicked and had to be calmed down by the SDF. They were listing gas, cell phone, NTT, railroad outages. They showed some video from a shinkansen that apparently stopped in a tunnel. They said it was stuck there until about 5:36 AM, when they moved it out with a diesel and put everyone into taxis. The Sendai JR station -- train station -- is closed. They showed the ceiling leaking. I'm not sure if it had broken pipes or the sprinkler system went off.
There's a short piece about repairs. They started in Ibaraki, with a repair company. This man was frustrated, taking phone calls and telling people he doesn't know when he can repair their house. He showed a white board covered with repair work that his company is doing. Most of them have a notation that apparently means stopped for parts. He went out to a house, talked with the owner and agreed that he needed to replace the glass, and do other repairs... but he doesn't have supplies. From there, the reporter went to a glass factory. Unfortunately, while it is nearby, the factory is stopped. The earthquake, lack of power, and as they show -- broken glass and other parts in the production line. Also, the nearby port that apparently was used for shipping glass out and for getting supplies in is broken and flooded. The glass manufacturer said that he needs parts, too. They took it one more step to a company --Combinato? I think this is a plastics manufacturing company. This manager showed that there are oil tanks -- maybe the oil shipping company -- which supply a processing complex, which in turn supplies his complex. He said right now the oil tanks are out, and put a big red X on the diagram. The processing complex is out, another red X. And, his processing complex has breakage. They showed some footage from a helicopter of what I think must be his processing complex. There are several obvious roofs collapsed, what probably was a conveyor belt down in the street, etc. All of which means that the repair man can't get the parts to fix the house
In Iwate, Rikuzen takata, they were talking about moving some people into the temporary housing soon. The earthquake last night has left lots of people scared.
People are still buying bottled water in Tokyo. This news piece started with a small grocery shop owner in the early morning as he drove to the distribution point. He filled his van with various cases of bottled water. Then he put all of it onto the shelves in the store, which has a sign saying one bottle of water per customer. The store opened at 10 o'clock. All of the bottled water was gone at 10:20. It turns out that one of the problems with getting more bottled water for Tokyo is that most of the bottled water companies use white plastic bottle caps -- which are made by a manufacturer in a factory in the disaster area. They showed the factory, which is now not producing plastic bottle caps. They also showed something that made me laugh -- apparently a Korean bottled water company has flown a large supply of bottled water into Japan. However, distribution is being held up because the bottles are all in Korean, and they are printing Japanese labels. I think a sign over the bottles saying "Water" would probably be enough. I mean, it's just water. Even if you accidentally thought it was something else, water isn't very likely to hurt anything?
8:39 AM another small earthquake 4.2
The evening news talked a little bit about the new earthquake. Apparently there was some additional road damage. There's a little bit of footage from one of the shelters in a school, where a piece of concrete fell out of a wall. Luckily it didn't hit anyone. They also have footage from one of the schools where new students were starting. At this school, some of the ceiling fixtures fell, banners that had been put up for the new students fell down, and so forth. However, they moved to another room and kept going.
Now that's interesting. Apparently one of our large department and supermarket chains, Daei, is offering to give some portion of the profit from sales of their private brand goods to the relief effort. Another chain, Aeon, is matching that with a one percent of all receipts offer? And one of the delivery services also is giving some portion of their profits to the relief effort. So you can contribute to the relief effort by buying things.
There's a lot of discussion about the government relief fund. If I understand correctly, they said that they are going to make payments to people in the disaster area. 350,000 yen (roughly $3500) for each dead or missing person. 350,000 yen for each broken business or factory. 180,000 yen ... I think that was for a lost job. I'm pretty sure there was something in there for houses, too, but I don't seem to have written it down. Apparently part of the immediate furor over this was that a dead person or a destroyed business had the same payout. I'm not sure whether people thought people or businesses should be worth more. I think there was also some complaint about the relatively small amounts, although I suspect this may be due to someone in the government looking at the scale of the claims. After all, there's a large number of dead or missing, and quite a bit of property destruction.
And, there is some concern about other areas. For example, in Kyushu -- the southern island -- the seacoast also got hit by the tsunami. They showed one section where the oyster rafts were mostly destroyed. In that same area, they've lost fish farms -- floating netted areas that were full of fish. One farmer says he had 200 farms, and about 160 were wrecked. But at this point, it doesn't look as if the government relief funds will go to people like this.
There's some footage of one town where the elementary and middle school have started using the same building. They talked with elementary and middle school kids, who both said it's really interesting to be in school together. One young girl said she really liked talking to the middle school kids about what middle school is like. A small gang of middle schoolers giggled and said it was fun having the little kids there.
There's some more news about the new quake. In one town, a large concrete water tank on top of a hill apparently collapsed. I'm not sure whether this quake just hit the right frequency, a fault that had been growing finally gave way, or whatever, but apparently it happened last night. There also were extensive power outages across northern Japan. One of the videos taken during the quake at 11:30 PM shows the dark town, and then what looks like lightning or white explosions in one area. They're talking about a short in a high tension power switching park. They show video of this equipment -- it took me a minute to realize that the little boxes actually were cars, so this is relatively huge towers, inside a very large fenced area. Somewhere in there, apparently there were some kind of shorts.
They've got a picture of northern Japan, with what I guess are trunk powerlines laid across it. They've got three spots in the northern tip, almost up to Aomori, where they have marked red Xs on the lines. The spokesman from the power company is talking about needing balance in the grid, and that these three big breaks are making the grid unbalanced, which is complicating getting power back. I know that some areas were without power for most of the day.
The cherry blossoms at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo are in bloom, and the Emperor invited 40 people from Fukushima to join him at the Palace. They've got some video of these people who had been evacuated from the reactor zone visiting the Imperial Palace.
They've also got predictions for when the peak viewing for sakura -- cherry blossoms -- is going to be in northern Japan. 4/25... 4/29.
4/9
Another report on the outages due to this quake. Apparently 400,000 houses were without electricity. Electricity was out for the day. 152,684 houses lost gas. Over 140,000 houses were without water. I think these were all in addition to previous outages. So the quake really did pretty serious damage to the services, apparently. Of course, if someone said there was a magnitude 7.4 or 7.1 earthquake in that area before the 3/11 quake, we all would've expected serious effects.
There was a special with questions from viewers for the experts talking about what to do after four weeks. They had a short talk with one of the people in the disaster area. Apparently this is one of the people that the Prime Minister talked to, and he was pretty impressed that the Prime Minister had given him a phone number to call and said asked for anything that they needed. They asked him what he thought people should be doing. He said there are three things. Number one, make sure people have food and shelter. Number two, clean up. And number three, start building the new town. He said it, and you could see the commentators and panel nodding. It seems really simple, but he summed it up very well. That's the three priorities right now. It was sort of funny, because after they finished that short video interview, one of the experts on the panel started his presentation. He had one large sheet with five points, and another with several points. He actually skipped through most of his points, I think embarrassed by the clarity of the previous man in the field.
This particular expert did show us his picture of a concept for the new towns. Basically, he wants to build enormous concrete stilts, holding up a concrete base, and then build the towns on top of this elevated base. He showed that if the stilts are 2 to 3 stories tall, a tsunami could wash in underneath without damaging the town. I suppose he has a point, bridge building is reasonably well understood.
Still, I'm not sure that he's thought about the civil engineering problem of trying to build these concrete bases for towns. I'd also be really concerned about what happens when the earthquake snaps the supporting structure and the entire town suddenly sinks. If you're trying to build at a higher level, maybe you should start with ground that isn't quite so low? It's an interesting idea, but...
This panel talked a little bit about the need for better communications between government organizations, volunteers, and the people in the disaster. They mentioned the need for regular practice, maybe once a month, and a real network of communications and data. The volunteer coordinator, a young woman who has turned up on several news shows recently, suggested that realistically, though, the best communication is still person-to-person. As she pointed out, it's when one person in the shelter says, "Have you tried this?" And somebody else talks to their friend about what's needed that you really get things going. One of the news people laughed and commented that if you hand him a pamphlet, he can read it, but he doesn't really know it. If he takes notes on it, so that he writes his own pamphlet, he does better. And if you talk to him about it, that's when both of you will know the most.
There was also a segment about studies that are going on now with experts in various parts of Japan. For example, they showed an expert in Osaka who is doing simulations of what would happen to Osaka if a similar quake and tsunami occurred in this area. There are also apparently various citizen groups and others going around identifying tall buildings, talking to people about how to open the doors to the public in case of an emergency, and so forth. There was what I'm sure was intended to be a very serious little video about three older men who had identified possible safe buildings in their area and were talking to people about using them. However, in talking to one woman at a tall apartment building, she was not at all sure whether they could open the doors to the public in the event of an emergency. The old man shook his head even as she looked very puzzled about how to get permission to arrange to open the door. The good news is that people are making better preparations for possible future disasters. The bad news is the some people don't seem to know what emergency and disaster really mean.
It's an odd mix of urgent practical thinking and needs with Monday morning quarterbacks happily figuring out what everyone shoulda done and really oughta do next time. And the occasional stumble as oughta runs into concrete steps and stubs its toes. And cherry blossoms with the Emperor.
