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Sparkle (3)
It's now been a full month since a devastating magnitude 9.0 earthquake, and even more destructive tsunami, hit the eastern shore of the Tohoku region, located on the northeastern side of Honshu, the main island of the Japanese archipelago. To many, including myself, it has seemed like a lifetime.
I'm sure you have seen the pictures of utter devastation along the north-eastern coastline; the survivors sitting patiently (some not so patiently) in shelters, of Self Defense Force soldiers and others including the U.S military digging through rubble in the increasingly futile hope of finding more survivors -- or now, for bodies so that at least families can find out what has happened to their loved ones. The death toll, now well over 13,000, is still rising. And I'm sure you have seen the scary looking images of the damaged nuclear power plants on the coastline of Fukushima prefecture and read some of the often hysterical coverage of the events there in the media.
What has struck me so much about this month is, despite what I thought was increasing interest in Japan over the last few years, how very little most people do know or understand about Japan. The language barrier plays a big role in this for sure, but there are other factors. The mainstream overseas media for the large part have been shown to be particularly lacking, I'm sorry to say. It's rather funny when Fox News mistakes a night club in central Tokyo, the Shibuya Eggman, for a nuclear power plant, but when even more respected news outlets mess things up time and time again, it's no wonder that some people think that the entire nation of Japan is either a pile of rubble or covered by a noxious, highly radioactive cloud.
The fact is, most of Japan, outside of the disaster-struck areas of Tohoku, people are fine for the most part. The areas to the west and south and far north of the country, including places that you may have heard of -- Sapporo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Kobe, Fukuoka -- have seen almost no physical effects at all, save for an influx of refugees from the north. (When the quake struck, I received several emails and tweets from people concerned about their relatives stationed at the U.S. military base in Futenma, Okinawa. I had to gently tell them that Okinawa in the far south is about as far away from the Tohoku region as Chicago is from Florida.) Even in the Kanto-Tokyo metropolitan area, where I am now, things are almost back to normal. The initial earthquake was a magnitude 5.8 to 6.5 around here, making high-rise buildings sway like trees a storm and knocking things off shelves. There have been aftershocks almost every day since, most fairly weak but still disconcerting. (The biggest aftershock occurred just last Thursday, and just today, Monday, we've experienced several fairly strong aftershocks.) Then there's the fact that many power plants that supplied electricity to the area, the Fukushima nuclear plants among them, have been knocked out of commission, leaving the area with insufficient power for its factories and shops and homes. Rolling blackouts were announced about 3 weeks ago, but so far only actually taken place for the first couple days, largely due to voluntary power saving measures by companies and private individuals alike. Trains are running at slightly reduced schedules. Offices, stores, train stations have dimmed their lights down. People are refraining from turning on the heat on all but the coldest days. (I'm wondering if this combination of dealing with continuous earthquakes and rolling blackouts sounds familiar to Californians.) There was a scare regarding the tap water a couple of weeks ago for about 2 days, when the radiation levels of water in a reservoir that serves much of central Tokyo reached higher than officially allowed levels for infants. And there is the worry about contaminated vegetables and seafood from the farms and fisheries to the north-east.
Despite all of these issues though, life here is almost back to normal. Hard to believe? Well, I'd like to introduce you to three ladies, all in their 30s to 40s, from the Tokyo-metropolitan area. I asked them all some questions about the events of March 11 and afterward, and here's what they told me.
Mari
Mari is the head stylist and store manager of one of a chain of beauty salons in Yokohama. (Yokohama, the
