Destroy All Onions!

Today we wake to more media scaremongering. If you haven’t seen it yet, this page from the UK Embassy (not the Japanese government), from UK nuclear experts makes it clear that Tokyo is safe from radiation whatever happens.

However, the US (followed by the UK, and probably everyone else) has extended their danger zone out to 80km/50miles around the plant, and are advising people to leave that enlarged area. I don’t know about you, but if I had been outside the 30km, but within 80miles, I think I would be out of there already, so I don’t think this is a very bad sign.

Likewise the US has said that he families of embassy staff can leave Tokyo on a voluntary basis – yes that is what they are saying – that the families may leave if they wish. I had kind of assumed that US citizens would be allowed to leave if they wanted at any stage, but the US have now explicitly given permission. They’ve also arranged some flights to help them get out, which is helpful. But it is still not a major evacuation – they are not advising their people to go, just saying that they can. And they’re not saying anything to other American citizens who happen to be in the country, only the families of American Embassy staff.

But anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the Japanese people, and what happens to them next. Japan does not have a welfare state – if you don’t work, you don’t get handouts from the government. When I went walking by the river last Wednesday before all this started, I saw a number of tarpaulin homes along the path. At first it wasn’t obvious what these shacks were – they could have been building or gardening supplies, but then I saw flowerpots outside one, and washing hanging out by another, it became obvious tat people were living in them. And yet in 3 visits to Japan, I have never seen anyone begging, and the crime rate is very low here, so these people manage to get buy somehow without asking for help or stealing it.

I worry that this problem is about to become huge. I don’t know what kind of exceptional payments will be made available to those who have lost everything, but there will be a huge social need here for a long time to come. We’ve all seen the pictures from the north – there are no homes, there are no jobs, there is no infrastructure – there is nothing left. In a state which is not in the habit of giving out money, and may not have the mechanisms to do it, there could be yet more suffering for the survivors. Because of the risk here earthquake insurance is a specific thing, and not included in general house insurance. However, not only is it not mandatory, but quite often people can’t eve get earthquake insurance because of the age, or location, or building style, so a lot of people who have lost homes will get no automatic insurance payout. Japan is a rich country, but not all Japanese people are rich, and I hope that the world’s charities do their bit to help where it is needed in the longer term.

Life is a really strange thing.

I’m here in Japan on holiday, and would normally be out and about, wandering around taking pictures, eating out, singing karaoke, and doing the usual tourist things.

Instead I haven’t been further than the shops in days, and have been contributing to the Belfast Telegraph and the evening news on Radio Ulster. I’m sure I will never live it down. The apartment has been in fits of giggles about it all, which I guess is typical of Northern Ireland people in a crisis – there’s nothing we can do about it, and at least it relieves the tension.

As well as going to the shops today (where there are still fresh strawberries, vegetables, fish, meat and rice, but no pot noodles), we emptied the bins. Emptying the bin hasn’t been a priority, obviously, but today we decided it was time. We expected that the rubbish room in the building would be overflowing, as everyone would be doing the same as us. Nope.

As you can see, the bins have been emptied, and the room is spotless. Again, life goes on as usual in Tokyo. You will probably be as startled as I am that there are 9 different bins for the various types of rubbish. I assume that a degree in rubbish selection is required before you even think about throwing something out.

As for the ongoing nuclear concerns, I just read a brilliant transcript of a conference call run by the British Embassy here in Tokyo. Full marks to them for a clear statement of the situation at the Fukushima reactor, and the risks here in Tokyo. Short summary – it really is safe in Tokyo. The full article is here, but the penultimate statement puts it well:

given the devastation that you’ve got in Japan and the hard work at the Embassy people are having to put in, I would characterise the nuclear issue as a sideshow. You’ve got a massive problem.

And so that’s how we end the day in Tokyo today.

Karen has posted a great rant on her blog.

Today added a new factor to life on the 24 floor. It’s windy. Really windy! Instead of waking up by being shaken, I was woken up by the sound of the wind roaring round the building. This was unnerving, but apparently completely normal – we’re on the 24th floor, and if it is windy on the ground, it really howls up here. But I hadn’t heard it before, as the weather has been very calm so far.

The strong wind also causes positive and negative air pressure, because the centre of the building is open to the outside, but the apartment isn’t (as we have the windows closed, obviously). That meant that the apartment door wouldn’t open this morning due to the pressure difference. I thought I had broken the lock, and that we were now trapped in the apartment. That was actually one of the scariest moments so far, when I thought I had actually managed to imprison us in a swaying box in the sky. But Karen just gave it a good yank, and it opened with a bang, and all was well again. She also pointed out the many other exits via the balcony doors (we have 5 of them), and the emergency call button to summon the building managers downstairs.

We are also back to swaying. This afternoon has been like last night, with some obvious shakes, and some less obvious. And to be completely honest, there may be some imaginary ones too, as we’ve become a bit sensitive to it all.

Meanwhile, the world looks on. Today the French announced that they don’t trust the Japanese government and are putting on two planes to evacuate French citizens. And some companies are advising their employees to move south, or leave the country. But there is still nothing from the UK government in terms of advice or assistance.

I called my travel insurance company yesterday to see if they would cover the eye-watering price of a flight home. First I couldn’t get in touch with them, because their international 24 hour numbers were all for medical assistance, and I’m not ill. Then when I did ring, they told me that they wouldn’t cover me for a return home unless my airline told me I had to come home. And I’m guessing that if Virgin Atlantic tell me to come home, they would give me a free flight change, rather than charge over 2 grand. The girl on the phone said that a travel advisory from the UK or Japanese government would not be a basis for a claim. So needless to say they are going to get a huge earful when I get home.

Meanwhile, it’s actually a beautiful day outside.

You may not be able to see the workmen on the building site through the middle pane of the balcony window, but they are there.

My post this morning said that the aftershocks had diminished. Well, I’ve now lost my seismology credibility, as we had a fairly major quake again tonight. There were two together with a magnitude of 6.0 after 10 pm, which gave Tokyo a pretty good shaking. They were so big that even I noticed them (I continue to be hopeless at noticing the minor tremors). These struck inland, so the good news is that there won’t be a tsunami, but the bad news is that an earthquake centred on land could be a lot more destructive. Because it was late, and therefore dark, I guess we won’t get a proper damage assessment until morning. But it can’t be good news.

Meanwhile, to the north, the nuclear reactors continue to melt themselves into puddles. I finally found some science in English here, which gives a good explanation of what’s going on inside them. Also had to look up the definition of the sievert on wikipedia, since the media has been full of numbers today to describe the radiation levels in various places. The facts seem to be that yes, the radiation level in Tokyo was higher than usual today (about 3 times usual background), but that this doesn’t represent any kind of danger. Much higher levels have been seen at the reactor sites, but that can’t be a surprise to anyone, and thankfully we’re not there.

We also went out shopping today. We didn’t have any particular need to restock, but as much as anything we just wanted out of the apartment for a while. The media has reported that central Tokyo is quieter than usual, but Karen reckons it’s busier than usual here, so people seem to be staying near home, as expected. The supermarket was busy, and had run out of staple foods (bread and rice), but had plenty of other things, including a lot of fresh looking things – meat, fish, pre-sliced vegetables and things. So although there are some shortages, there are no signs of a problem. The cafes were closed, but the bakery was open. And there was no shortage of face masks to buy, which the Japanese wear to keep their cold germs in, but would be useful to keep radioactive material out.

And so we continue to watch and wait. We finished season one of the Big Bang Theory, which is quality comedy, and has helped to keep spirits up. Meanwhile, Karen continues to turn into Mrs Doyle in a crisis, and bake cakes to deal with her stress and boredom. Marty and I continue to eat them. Life could be much worse.

Was not awoken by a earth tremor this morning, which was positive (and different to the last couple of days). Mind you, a quick look at the Japan Meteorological Agency’s Earthquake Site indicated that after the five hour gap between tremors last night (the longest there had been for a while), they had resumed, and been pretty frequent during the night (there were 4 of them between 5:00 and 6:00). But the good news is that the size of the aftershocks is much lower than it was yesterday.

Although the aftershocks haven’t made a lot of news internationally, they have remained a part of the problem, since a number of them have been centred on Fukushima itself – while they have been working on the dodgy reactors, they have been shaking for days.

The aftershocks have also been one of the major concerns for the whole country, as we were told over the weekend that here had been a 70% chance of another quake of a magnitude of 7 or above. Again, the good news is that this probability has been reduced, so there is less likelihood of a really serious shaking happening.

Which leaves the nuclear reactors. Some of the technical coverage has been poor, but the internet has made up for that. Yes, reactors have melted down, and the fuel rods are becoming a puddle at the bottom of the core. They’ll never generate power again, but as long as the core doesn’t breach, they can cover the whole thing in concrete for a thousand years, and there won’t be a serious risk (future earthquakes notwithstanding). Someone was apparently out with a gieger counter in Tokyo yesterday, and their readings showed no change in the background radiation since December.

The government have put out some serious warnings this morning, and extended the safety zone to 30km. People within 10km have been asked to get away – that implies that their buildings can no longer protect them, and the risk of being outside getting to safety is less than the risk of staying put. Out to 30km, they feel people are at less risk staying put than being outside heading away. That must mean that there’s something in the air, but not a long-term risk, or they would want those people out of the way too.

There is still no advice at all for the rest of the country, in terms of going in or staying out, and so life continues as normal – Marty got the train to work this morning, and we can hear the trains running outside.

Life goes on.

It’s about time for bed. Not a lot to report today, as once again I spent all of it inside, watching the coverage on tv, most of which I wrote about earlier. There were no more on-screen arguments on NNN, which was a shame. As the day has gone on, the news has alternated between pictures of the destruction in the north, diagrams of how nuclear reactors work, and reports of trains running or not running. Well, and one cardboard model showing how the sea bed had shifted. Where the western media like to use computer models for everything, the Japanese TV prefers to hold up cards or models, or even write things on a whiteboard (which took ages, because Japanese is so complicated to write).

The planned power cuts never did come to this area, but apparently my happen tomorrow. But another insight into the mentality was provided by the fact that Marty had to submit his tax return this morning – the deadline was not extended unless you lived in a town that had been impacted by the tsunami. This may be because the government is now even more desperate for money, but it’s still a bit wierd.

In other news, the Belfast Telegraph were in touch today, and included some of my stuff in this report. BBC Northern Ireland also called for a chat. Don’t know how to follow that, so I won’t. G’night.

Was awoken by a tremor this morning, as the bed moved around. Got up, had a look around, checked the internet, then went back to bed; there didn’t seem to be anything else more useful to do.

Today was meant to be the day of the power outages, as the power companies tried to deal with their diminished power generation capacity, but it hasn’t happened. The outages were announced late last night, after midnight, so the outages were not well planned, and as each of the outage slots came and went during the day in each of the regions, they didn’t go through with them. At the time, the announcements were apparently very confused, and had the feel of a process where people were working out the impact of the power cuts as they thought of them (for example, how are trains supplied?).

Today the tv coverage has changed; we are seeing advertisements again on one of the news channels, which is a bit of normality. But the tv channels have changed their earthquake notifications – they are now beeping each time there’s an aftershock, which is new. Each channel now has it’s own beep, but none of them had them yesterday.

We’ve also decided on our favourite station – NNN, where the presenters started arguing earlier about how bad the government announcements were. The male presenter started waving his arms around, and shouting. According to Karen, he completely lost his cool and stopped using the polite formal language expected of a news guy, which is unheard of. They then cut the studio feed, and went to an ad break! But unfortunately this channel keep losing their signal, and putting up an apology message, so we keep having to move on. They also seem to have changed their strategy, and they are spending less time with that studio team, which is a shame.

But here, in the apartment, everything is still pretty normal. We watch tv, we read stuff on the internet, and we hope things will get better elsewhere.

Things are not going well in Japan unfortunately.
After the earthquake and tsunami, there are some reports of a volcano starting off on one of the southern islands. It’s not being widely covered yet, but I guess we may be waking up to it tomorrow, especially if that creates an ash cloud that disrupts air travel. The only bright side there would be that this volcano has a name that newsreaders should be able to pronounce.
Another problem is that the people are losing confidence in the government – people are complaining that their statements and news conferences aren’t giving clear information, which is making people more worried rather than less.
We’re also now preparing ourselves for rolling power blackouts tomorrow, which may or may not mean that people won’t go to work. If there is no power, there will be train disruption, and that means people will stay put.
No power also means no Internet for me, so I’ll probably go quiet in the afternoon for the duration of the outage.
Off to bed now. G’night all.

Yesterday (Saturday), I didn’t leave the house, and spent most of the day watching the news on television. The choices were a little tricky – we could watch local television which was in Japanese and therefore really hard to follow, watch BBC World which was in English and easy to follow, but a bit out of date compared to the Japanese, or watch CNN, which made me want to rant about how stupid it was.

So let’s start by getting that off my chest. There’s one quite good guy on CNN, who shows the wind direction around Japan for nuclear fallout – he knows what he is talking about, and he’s quite helpful. But at other times it was completely moronic. They put some quack on who said that recent events had revealed how resilient people were, and how much they could deal with. What kind of recent events? The first world war? The eruption of Krakatoa? The great fire of London? She was a complete muppet. Then we had the surprise news that America had not been asked to lead the relief effort. It really was reported as news that the Japanese government was running the relief and rescue operations. Of course they are!! This isn’t Haiti!! The final straw was last night where the screen banner said “Breaking News: Glued to tv by striking images”. It’s not news that people are watching tv! People watch tv all the time! It’s just pathetic. Anyway, rant over. Suffice to say that CNN doesn’t impress, despite their very slick and glossy presentation, because every so often they make me want to throw things at the television.

Next let’s talk about the BBC. The BBC is of course what I am familiar with, and therefore it brings comfort. I was really surprised to see that it is what was showing in Marty’s building, when he works for an American company. But the BBC has the advantage of being calm, rather than trying to create panic, and was sometimes streaming the Japanese channels, with a translation, so it was up to date. But as time has passed, it has become less useful, as the coverage has become less timely. Also an issue is that BBC World has reverted back to scheduled programming, so yesterday they were showing programmes about tourism in Turkey and safaris in Africa. There’s a certain comfort in knowing that the world news agenda has moved in, and other stories are creeping back, but we still kind of want to know what’s going on here.

So what about the Japanese media. Well, it is different to ours. The news presentation is much, much less slick. Where CNN and the Beeb have fancy computer graphics for maps and diagrams, the Japanese have pictures on bits of card to hold up. And even after 24 hours, the Japanese presenters are much less confident, sometimes even flustered. I know this is probably because people are constantly firing bits of paper at them, and they can’t use the autocue, but sometimes it has looked a bit like the placement students have been put in charge. Especially the guy with the tie hanging off him (I reckoned his wife would kill him when she saw him). And don’t get me started on the experts and managers who were doing live press conferences – some of them were just terrible. One guy had a dozen microphones, but still couldn’t speak clearly enough to be heard. And didn’t realise there was writing on the back of his page. They moved to other speakers at that press conference, one of which just didn’t say anything, and another who mainly said Oooh and Ahh. I know I don’t speak Japanese, but it was fascinatingly unprofessional, and not at all what we would get in the UK.

Another difference in the presentation style was that all of those experts giving press conferences were wearing properly technical looking uniforms, which does inspire confidence that these are people who know what they’re talking about (when they manage to talk), instead of just putting suits in front of the camera like we would.

But the best part was the television presenters wearing helmets in case the studio roof came down.

This was last night. They were still at it today.

This I do find interesting. If BBC newsreaders were wearing safety helmets, viewers would assume the world was ending. In fact, they’d assume the world had already ended. Here, it’s seen as a perfectly reasonable precaution in case the roof comes down. It’s also interesting that some people in the studio are wearing them, while others are not. Maybe people sitting in different places at different levels of risk depending on what’s above their heads.

But ultimately, we had to turn the news off, and watch something else instead. As human beings, we can only take so much relentless bad news, especially when there’s no new information, just an endless re-stating of what has already happened (the earthquake and tsunami), and what might happen (the reactor problems). I have to admit that we watched Glee and the Big Bang Theory, and felt a whole lot better.