Miyagi

Last Friday I went back up North to Miyagi prefecture with Yoshida-san, the guy from East Wind Ministries that I met at Second Harvest Japan over a month ago. Seven weeks after the tsunami and some supply lines are starting to get re-established but there's still a long way to go. Small businesses, supermarkets, corner-shops and home centres are opening up around Ishinomaki, which is one of the main towns on the coast not far from the capital Sendai.

The main goal was to deliver food and supplies to home refugees in Onagawa and Minamisanriku. Others set up soup kitchens in Nobiru which is on the other side of Ishinomaki and others were cleaning up houses and clearing out the sewers and drains in Ishinomaki itself.

It's been seven years since I first came through this area. Living in Sydney at the time, a surf-trip through Tohoku (NE Japan) helped me decide to move to Tokyo in 2005. I took the coast-road wherever I could and ended up passing through what seemed like every small Pacific-facing coastal town in Tohoku. The beaches and ocean reminded me of Australia, the hills and forests reminded me of Wales. 

It was one thing to watch the endlessly repeating tsunami scenes on TV; what one reporter called 'earthquake porn', but to be back in Onagawa, in the carpark of the Hospital and look down over what was left was a humbling experience.

The telegraph pole in the foreground is 10 metres tall. The height of the tsunami is usually given at around 16-18 metres but the Japan Times reported in this article that in Iwate prefecture just to the North of here, it may have even reached 38 metres. That telegraph pole is 10 metres tall.

Click on the pano below for a closer look.

The guy who took us here said that when the tsunami hit, the water completely covered the grey five-storey building in the middle of the photo above. A few people had escaped to the roof-top but then had to climb to the very top of the water tank. They managed to hold on and survived.

I took all these photos above from the hospital car-park which is up on a hill. If you look out to sea in the photo above, you'd think this carpark would be a safe evacuation zone but even this wasn't high enough. The tsunami overflowed the whole car park by a couple of metres and went on to fill the whole first floor of the hospital behind. Every car in the car park and most of the people trying to shelter here were washed away.

This is the other side of the hill from the hospital and just beyond this picture there are people living in houses which are pretty much OK. Water-damaged but structurally sound. These were the home refugees who we'd brought the food and supplies for. The evacuation shelters now have their established lines of supply from the government and other agencies but these people can't register as their homes are still standing.

Those who can leave have left, but those who are still here can't sell their house and move (would you want to buy?) they can't sell their car as it's gone, they have no other family plus they've lost their jobs. Eventually the shelters may find room for them as others move out into temporary housing, or they may find a way to move out for good but in the meantime they just need help while things get figured out.

We hadn't arranged a specific time to drop the stuff off, but when we pulled up in the truck, people just appeared. Some of them came with wheelbarrows, some just carried stuff home in their arms but they all just took what they needed. No hoarding, no rushing for the best stuff, just very practical and deeply grateful.

Before I left I'd heard that nearby Ishinomaki didn't need additional food supplies any more but the tears of appreciation from one of these old ladies in Onagawa showed it's different around here. 

It's great that In Ishinomaki the focus seems to be shifting to cleaning-up and rebuilding, but when you're talking about the whole situation in Japan, there just isn't one answer to the question, "what do they need now?" It changes every day and varies hugely place to place.

Back in Ishinomaki there were still long lines at the supply points in town. The team I was with have been here since the day after the tsunami and came in from Yamagata. They know the people running the evacuation centre in town well and are organizing a kids concert on Thursday so we stopped off for a bit.

 I didn't feel comfortable taking photos inside, and anyone who knows me knows me knows I'm not really an "aren't they cute" kind of kids person, but you'd have to be nearly dead yourself not to be struck by the the optimism in these kids' paintings stuck up on the walls of the evacuation centre.

 Crossing paths with the Second Harvest Japan guys in Ishinomaki. They've been doing these runs non-stop.

Overnight lodging was free in a log-house at a campground with a volunteer-friendly owner. Before kipping down for the night, I checked facebook on my mobile and realised it was the day of the royal wedding. 

 Welsh landscape in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan

My ten-foot-tall, six-speed, five-litre, six-wheel, two-ton truck. What would Isuzu call such a beast? The Isuzu ELF. This is Yoshida-san getting ready to help load up. We travelled up together from Tokyo on Friday morning and I dropped him off when I left on Sunday so I was pretty much with him the whole time. His English is better than he thinks so we spoke some English but mostly Japanese.

He was a good guy and as I could tell from his East Wind Ministries business card, a devout Christian. I hardly knew him before we left and had been a bit worried he was going to bang on about faith the whole way. Just what you need on an 11-hour drive. All Friday and Saturday he was fine but then on Sunday morning I was sure the moment had arrived. He asked me in tentative English, "So, Phil-san, do you.... do you... do you pray...?" Ah, here it is I thought. Then he said, "...sports?", "Do you pray sports?"

After 6 years here I'd been caught out by the old "r" and "l" mix-up again, and should have known better anyway!

We stopped off to buy some veggies at one of the local businesses that are back up and running for today's run to Shizugawa which is bascially the old name of Minamisanriku. The owner of the veggie shop was a good bloke who when he realised I was from Wales, supportively said he loved Old Parr Scotch. Good on him though, he gave us a couple of extra trays of bananas and kiwifruit to take with us.

About 32 trashed cars.  

Putting the poles back up.

 Driving into Minamisanriku the Japanese Self-Defence Force (JSDF) tents and trucks were everywhere. These are the guys doing the real heavy lifting. They were the guys who cleared the main roads for traffic in the first few weeks and there is still no end in sight.

Coming over the hill into Rikuzentogura, the main bridge in town had been washed away so the JSDF had built this temporary replacement. This one small bridge cuts 15 kms off the journey from Ishinomaki and opens up a much wider area South of here for the recovery workers.

Minamisanriku; what's left of the town where Miki Endo saved thousands.

 We were heading about a kilometre further round to deliver food and goods to more home refugees whose houses were on higher ground. There are about 100 homes in the area without power or water but in good shape and providing shelter for about 400 people.

We'd called the town's officer-in-charge, the chief, on his mobile phone beforehand and arranged to meet him at a specific meeting point at 11am. We had a good run and got there early at about 10:15 but there were already about 30 smiling faces there waiting for us. Most were over 60s with a few youngsters. A lot of working-age families in rural Japan move to the big cities for work then only move back to retire.

The chief was full of energy and doing a great job in keeping everyone's morale up. When they'd received some food parcels the week before he had them all playing rock-scissors-paper to decide who got the tastiest goodies.

Everyone helped to unload the truck. I was in the back pasing down boxes and was trying to keep the lighter ones for the older women. It was nearly impossible though and as I slowly passed down this box of food weighing about 10 kgs to one frail looking old lady, I warned her it would be heavy. With a big grandmother's smile she said, "the heavier the better!"

While we were in the area, the chief recommended we carry on further round to towns along the coast to see what their needs were. We found an old people's home being used as an evacuation centre who said they were basically OK for food but needed a generator, and work. No-one has jobs any more but there is a ready and willing workforce of small industry workers and fisherman who are out of work and willing to do anything. We couldn't help with the work, yet, but Yoshida-san has already sourced a generator for them in Sendai and will be taking it back on Wednesday.

On the way back we found a restaurant overlooking the ocean which was open for business, no meals, but selling fresh-roasted coffee and ice-cream. The owner had always had his own generator for backup purposes so was one of the first to re-open a week or two ago. This spot would have been idyllic under normal circumstances but we spent a pleasant half-hour with the owner and three others. Two of them were old regulars from Sendai who had come down to help with the clean up and another guy had driven all the way from Fukuoka on the Western-most island of Kyushu.

From the deck there was a sweeping view of the coast. The owner was there when the tsunami came and showed us pictures from that day where you could see the water reaching about halfway up to the first window of the building on the left. You could also see islands of debris, what was once Minamisanriku, being swept out to sea.

As we were paying to leave I noticed a home-made mix CD by the till with tracks like Back in Black by AC/DC and Rock'n'Roll by Led Zeppelin. The music he was playing though was very different, very Norah Jones, laid-back, smooth jazz type of stuff so I asked him if he was into a bit of heavy rock. He told me it was a CD his son had put together of his favourite tracks which he liked to play when he was in.

One of the old locals asked how his son was, and where he was... the owner just shook his head. His son was in Ishinomaki when the earthquake struck and had been killed by a head injury when the house he was in collapsed. He took some solace from the fact that his son had not known anything of the tsunami that he'd seen so clearly and had just been showing us pictures of, and the fact that his son was not one of the more than ten thousand still missing.

Oh No!

Changing the subject; Ono (小野) is a pretty common Japanese surname, it means small field.

Dr "Oh-No" is the dentist across the road from my work. He probably doesn't get too many native-English-speaking customers.

Toyoma

Iwaki City, Fukushima is a three-hour drive NNE of Tokyo and about 50kms south of the reactor, well outside the 20km and 30km exclusion zones. These days Fukushima is only mentioned on the news when they're talking about the nuclear situation so it’s easy to forget the hundreds of coastal communities there that were also washed away by the tsunami.

Radiation readings around Iwaki have been back to normal since late March so last week was an interesting time for our illustrious leaders, who increasingly look like they’d struggle to organize a piss-up in a brewery, to announce the jump up to Level 7. Dodgy? Yes, but Fukushima does not equal Chernobyl.

In Iwaki on the day of the earthquake, more than 1,500 people crammed into the evacuation centre, a local elementary school. A lot of those have since got out of town but it still houses about 150 people and there are many more in surrounding houses who either have nowhere else to go, or have no way to get there.

Living in an evacuation centre obviously has its own problems, but people in the centres are now mostly able to get basic food, water, and nourishment. If you lived just beyond reach of the tsunami though and your house is still standing, you can’t register at your local evacuation centre and just have to go back and live in your home with basically no food, water or other services.

Yesterday I hired a van to take food and supplies from Second Harvest Japan up to Iwaki. The four people I delivered to were lucky enough to live in a house that was only built 6 months ago and wasn’t damaged much by the earthquake but still has no tap water and very intermittent power. Their house was far enough inland not to be affected by the tsunami and has now become a makeshift warehouse and distribution point for them to deliver to those who weren’t so lucky.

For the first week or two they’d be lining up for six or seven hours to get water from one central point in town a few kilometers away, but as people left it’s now dropped to about two, or one hour if you’re lucky. Some shops are just starting to re-open again as supply chains start to get reconnected, but its very slow going.

I asked them what they thought about leaving. It seemed an obvious question and they said they had thought a lot about getting out, but felt that since they were old folks anyway, they’d be more help if they stayed put to provide food and support for those who couldn’t leave.

A lot of their friends would also leave if they could, they just don’t have the money or the connections to make it happen. They seemed to have a faint hope that this far outside the exclusion zone things might soon start getting better, but once you leave the larger towns with manufacturing jobs there is a heavy reliance on farming and fishing, so the outlook doesn’t seem too good.

The government and Tepco currently have no responsibility for the costs of moving, housing and feeding anyone outside the 20km and 30km evacuation zones but have recently added five more municipalities NW of the rector outside 30km. Tepco announced on Friday a one-off compensation payment of 1M Yen per family (no matter how many kids) which has been roundly criticized as too little, too late and nowhere near wide-ranging enough for the full effect on Fukushima prefecture. A bit of quick hush money.

About 8km toward the coast from where I dropped the supplies off was the coastal town of Toyoma. When I used to come here surfing I remember thinking the huge sea-walls just looked ugly, spoilt the view and were a pain in the arse to drag your gear over. I say “was”, because there’s very little of it left now.

Five weeks on and there are still months or even years of clean-up work ahead. Seeing all the stock TV images from Miyagi and Iwate concentrated in this area of Fukushima was sobering to say the least. A car bent in half, a single house left standing while all around was wiped out, a cuddly toy on top of a pile of rubble, a kid’s school painting that should have been stuck on a fridge somewhere, some Buddha statues retrieved by rescue workers lined up waiting to be claimed.

 

This  house was tucked up against the south-facing side of the headland (the ocean is on the right) which despite the front windows being smashed in and one end of the balcony being ripped off somehow managed to protect the two perfectly manicured trees in front of the porch.

This beachside road heading south just collapsed almost exactly where a really cool little surf shop used to be.

On the other side of the headland at Numanouchi looking north, those “ugly” sea-wall defences held firm and the town is still basically intact.

Fukushima is Japanese for “fortunate island”.

Art for Japan

Striking image from Chris Mackenzie.

This Japan Times article explains that the proceeds will go to the Japanese Red Cross Society, Second Harvest Japan and the Japan Emergency Team, operated by Jhelp.com

This poster is only on sale to folks in Japan but don't let that put you off. Donate the 5,000 yen anyway to any one of the three above, then instead of waiting a few weeks to receive a bulky 50x70cm poster, simply print out this minimalist 8x11cm happy-snap and frame it with a near foot-thick border.

Or maybe just splash the cash anyway in appreciation of a job well done.

Tsimulation

If the image below isn't moving, click here to see the full animated version of this incredible tsunami simulation from Prof. Takashi Furumura and Project Researcher Takuto Maeda of the Earthquake Research Institute, University of Tokyo.

The blue areas show areas where the ocean drew back to below the normal level before the red tsunami hit.

Miki Endo

This website has a bunch 360º panorama photos of various locations up North and puts you uncomfortably close to the disaster sites. Click here  

The red frame above is all that's left of the crisis management centre in Minamisanriku's town hall. It took me a while to realize that this was the same building where immediately after the earthquake, 24-year old Miki Endo stuck to her post on the second floor shouting out tsunami warnings over the town's loudspeaker system telling people to run for higher ground.

She played a huge part in saving the majority of the town's survivors, and remained in the building shouting out warnings until the tsunami struck. One of her colleagues saw her swept away and her body has not yet been found. 

A 60-year old survivor who heard her warnings and headed for higher ground told her mother: "I heard the voice of your daughter behind me the whole way."

 This is her story from NHK World.

The Fisherman

My first green wave was when I was 12 years old. I’d tagged along again with my older brother and his mates down to Rest Bay. He came in early and offered me a go on his 6’ Bilbo single-fin before his mates also came in. The sun was just going down, the water was freezing, but that didn’t matter. That first experience of catching a wave, standing up, leaning over and have the board turn vaguely in the direction you wanted to go, and actually staying ahead of the whitewater was a feeling I’ve been trying to recapture ever since.

It changes your view of the ocean, or the sea as we called it then. Even on the very many blown-out days of onshore slop, your eyes would skip across the sections looking for that fleeting bit of clean face or a glimmer of a lip you could mentally smack. It changes your view of everything, you start seeing waves everywhere.

Surf mags were full of images of perfect waves so you start traveling looking for what you could never get at home. Overseas where people just didn’t surf, if the local fishermen thought you were crazy for paddling out you’d just smugly chuckle to yourself thinking they just didn’t understand.

Most surfers know a bit about tsunamis. A building, unstoppable surge of water pushing far inland as opposed to your classic surfable big wave. Before a tsunami hits the tide starts dropping rapidly and possibly further than normal, then when the tsunami arrives it would be visible across the whole bay but with a height much less than you’d expect from something that could cause so much destruction. It was always the surge that would cause all the damage.

 I’d heard second-hand stories about a friend of a friend who was surfing in Sri Lanka when the tsunami hit in 2004. He had no choice but to catch it and ride it in, managing somehow to direct himself over to some beach-front lodgings and scramble up to the safety of the second floor balcony.

Then came this:

And then this shaky hand-held clip.

 I’m not sure how well known this clip is. It was taken by a local fisherman at Nodamura, Iwate and despite the dodgy-looking last few seconds, he and his family all survived and managed to get to one of the evacuation shelters. He lost his home along with his fishing boat but is amazingly lucky to be alive.

Big waves are life-threatening, no doubt about it. There are countless surf stories of big-wave heroes battling monster waves and surviving wipeouts from hell but with a few notable exceptions, these stories usually end up with the ocean “just letting go”. A lucky escape and a ritual good kicking. But what if the wipeout was just the start? What if the ocean just didn’t "let go"?

As of April 2: 11,800 confirmed dead and another 15,540 still missing… 

Second Harvest Japan

My first job after leaving school at 16 was an apprenticehsip with Sony. Part of it was a Radio and  TV repair course in Cardiff Skill Centre where we used to repair TVs for £1 and videos for £2. Cheap as chips but hey, we were learners and the trade-off was we might just blow your gear up beyond repair.


It was 1985 and I remember one woman who brought in a remote control car, not our regular gig but we said we'd give it a go. It got passed around everyone and no-one could do anything with it and ended up with our instructor, the illustrious Bob Russ who also couldn't fix it. 

Bob wasn't known for suffering fools gladly and knew a thing or two about customer service. When the woman came in to pick it up, he told her it was beyond economical repair as it needed an expensive chip that was only made in Japan. She told him her husband often went on business trips to Japan and asked for the part number of the chip so he could pick it up next time he was over there.


He looked at her, threw her busted toy car in the bin and said, "Well, if he goes to Japan on business he's probably got enough money to buy a bloody new one!" and walked off.


That was in 1985, the height of the bubble era in Japan and to us in Wales, all Japanese were mega-rich. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately after reading a discussion about the validity of donations to Japan. Despite the devastation, for many, and probably quite rightly, charity begins at home. Although Japan is nowhere near as rich as it was back in the 80s, the government will everntually be able to rebuild (again) at the staggering estimated cost of 25 trillion yen ($309bn; £189bn). The problem is it's going to take a long time for the frighteningly beauracratic government to reach the people where help is needed quickly. 

 I've been helping out where I can with an NPO called Second Harvest Japan who are building close relationships with other NPOs and NGOs up in the affected areas. Needs vary wildly between locations and acting on up to date information is vitally important. Some places need canned food, other places need water, other places blankets, other places dried milk for babies... other places just need everything!

Today I met Yoshida-san from East Wind Ministries in Sendai. He's the guy in the white jacket above outside the 2HJ Tokyo office, going through a pretty detailed list of stuff they needed. We loaded it onto his open-top truck within about 20 minutes of his arrival and off he went on the 6-hour+ trip back up there to drop it off tonight.


He said that needs change daily but in the rural communities around his area, since the government are focusing only on people in the official evacuation centres, relief supplies there are for the most part sufficient. He was however very concerned about the people who were living in the same rural communities, but who have not lost their houses. These people are still living in their homes but have no heating, are unable to buy food, and since they still have a standing house, cannot register with the evacuation centres. These "home refugees" get no official aid that's delivered so he and his team are basically going door-to-door dropping off supplies.

This is why I think a donation to Second Harvest Japan, for those who have a bit to spare, is a worthwhile excercise. These guys can make sure exactly what's needed, gets exactly where it needs to go, very quickly.

To give you some background on Ishinomaki and Minamisanriku, read this poweful piece by Rob Gilhooly for The Japan Times.

uSv.net

A guy I work with showed me this site yesterday: microsievert.net 
Best to look at the animation on the live site then use the screenshot below for a basic translation.

A brilliantly simple way to represent all these numbers being thrown at us everywhere we look, even at the end of the weather forecast.

The top row starts with the worldwide normal average on the left, increasing up to RUN AWAY! on the right. The bottom two rows show the actual current readings at main cities in the various prefectures in East Japan including at the exclusion limit around the reactor. I live closer to Shinjuku than Chigasaki, but between those two.

I've checked the data against a few other sources and everything seems to tie up. No need to divide some obscure number by the number of hours in a year any more, or convert micros to millis, just check it's still only pitter-pattering between here and Fukushima... and run to the hills if it starts snowing. 

Currently drier than average though.

Zeros

Last Sunday, Tepco announced that radiation levels at the No. 2 reactor were around ten million times that of a normal reactor core. They later corrected the information, saying the actual level was only a hundred thousand times higher than normal!

The Japanese government immediately came out and slammed Tepco. Why? Because they thought erroneous announcements were unacceptable!

Hang on, isn't being a hundred thousand times over the limit also cause for a bollocking??

It’s like getting pulled over for speeding on a 100km/hr limit stretch of road, and the cops let you off with a warning for claiming you were going at the speed of light,  when you were only really going ten thousand times the speed of sound.

Actually, the additional bollocking was over and above the current standing bollocking that Tepco are under from almost everyone here at the moment, it just grated to see them only slammed for making incorrect announcements.

Tohoku: More Before

 I've been watching this home video quite a lot lately. I put it together after a surf-trip from Tokyo to Tohoku, Northern Japan in September 2004, four months before I moved up here. In fact, this trip played a big part in me making the move up here from Sydney.

Looking back, the choice of the first track, the cheery tone, the opening shot, all seem very inappropriate now, but it is what it is. After all, this was over 6 years ago when no-one had any idea what was coming. 

A lot of memories. Every surfer I met whether it was in Ibaraki, Fukushima, Iwate, Miyagi or Aomori was pleased to see me, there was no locals-only attitude, everyone was really mellow and just stoked. The waves weren't perfect, but man they were fun. It reminded me of why I got into surfing in the first place. Some more stills to follow at some point.

Smokes

A bit flippant perhaps, but I was wondering how many of those who have left Tokyo recently, remembered to stock up on duty-free smokes at the airport on their way out?

Just wondering...

Mild Heaven headstone in Kamakura.

Oxyhydrogen

Despite having learned a lot more than I ever wanted to about radiation levels in microSieverts and now radioactive Iodine (I-131) and Cesium-137 levels in Becquerels per litre or kilo, my favourite scientist is still this guy.

For some this will be a naive post, and the fact that I first saw the Hydrogen Technology Applications guys on this clip from Fox News doesn't help their credibility, but this promotional clip for their HHO gas is a bit less sensationalist.

The News on their website hasn't been updated since 2009 so does that mean they were wrong and the energy required to split the water molecules and create Oxyhydrogen really does exceed the energy recouped by burning it? Or did darker forces intervene?

Maybe I need more sleep but is it really naive to think this won't work? Is using water for fuel as elusive as perpetual motion?  

How many links could I fit into one short blog post?

What does blog stand for anyway?

Just some of the things I was thinking about on my way back from the supermarket carrying two 5-litre bottles of just-in-case drinking water.

Levels

“Interesting” times up here in Tokyo. Power cables have now been connected to all six reactors and Libya is been pushed up to lead-story status on BBC-World. even so though, the radiation levels are still a concern. I have friends who have left and friends who have stayed, but it seems pointless to divide them into two camps like this article tries to do, even if most of his article and particulalry his last paragraph is spot on. Depsite recent rants on the hype put out by the overseas-press, the local press can appear to go the other way and give the devil an easy ride. There’s always going to be a few hear-no-evil types who would stay and go down with the ship, but I hope staying doesn’t become a matter of pride.


For some people, I fully understand that leaving is a no-brainer. Having kids for one thing would certainly change your outlook and everyone has to do what they feel is best for their own and their family’s circumstances. Who was right or wrong to leave or stay is a pointless discussion.


I’ve now got a few websites bookmarked that give information on radiation levels close to where I live, as well as info on the water supply. I never ate much spinach anyway.



If I did want to get out, I’d be heading down to Sydney where we’re lucky enough to have a place to stay. I might lose some of you here but I’ve learned more about microSieverts per hour lately than I ever really wanted to. Anyway, a 10-hour flight to Sydney from here would rack up about 60 microSieverts at what seems to be a universally accepted 6 microSieverts/hour. No-one told me about this amount of exposure to radiation while flying till now though, I wonder if the flight attendants are clearly told about it? I’ve never met one who seemed too concerned.

According to this pdf in Japanese from the NIRS (National Institute of Radiological Sciences) at the bottom of the page  , the average annual exposure worldwide per year is 2,400 microSieverts/year. In Brazil and India, it gets up to 10,000/yr.

Currently the nearest measuring point to me for environmental radiation is in Kawasaki. For water monitoring it’s in Shinjuku but both are close enough.

In Kanagawa the current real-time monitoring reading (bottom #5 above) at 21:30 on March 22 is 0.149uSv/hr and has been rising from 0.1244 earlier today but still below average. I expect it’ll keep rising for a while. At this level I’d get the same radiation fix after 16 days here as I would on the flight to Sydney.

The Iodine I-131 in the Shinjuku water supply is currently reading 5.3 becquerels/kg when the limit is 300. This is the stuff with the half-life of 8 days. The Cesium-137 is nastier as it has a half-life of 30 years but it’s at 0.22 becquerels/kg today when the limit is 200.

Also got the above cross-reference for radiation readings and water readings in Shinjuku from MEXT here (The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology)

 With all these sites bookmarked, after getting up and checking that Libya is still the lead story on BBC, it looks like checking these sites will be the new routine for a while.

Journalist Wall Of Shame

Everyone should read the Journalist Wall of Shame  It was started by a blogger who lives in Yokohama, you can read the original post which started it all here.

It's a great and sadly much-needed site that names-and-shames the sub-human, shameless, lying-bastard, terrorist-with-a-day-job-hacks that give real investigative journalists a bad name.

When you have French TV (FR2) referring to the "Hiroshima Nuclear Plant" instead of the Fukushima Nuclear Plant, German newspapers (Weld) calling the helicopters crews who are dousing the plant with water, "kamikazes", Australian newspapers (Melbourne Age) running headlines like, "NUCLEUR PLANT EXPLODES.MORE THAN 1000 BELEIVED DEAD. 215,000 HOMELESS", in addition to the newstainment CNN puts out, this site needs to be read, especially by anyone overseas with family and friends over here.

Traffic on my blog has gone up about 20-fold since the earthquake, so I'd like to ask everyone to share this link with everyone they can. Maybe put it as a status update on facebook, link to it from your own blog, or send it by direct email it if you have to. Please.


There is also a page highlighting Some Good Journalism and space for Quake Quotations There are only the following two quotes up at the moment, hope we can find more. 


WHO: Hans Sautter, German photographer living in Japan for the past 37 years
WHEN: March 19, 2011
WHERE: In a message posted in response to the over-the-top press coverage of the quake and Fukushima Daiichi, particularly by the German media.

"If you want to write about your feelings, then write poetry, not news."



WHO: Sir John Beddington, UK's Chief Scientific Advisor
WHEN: March 18, 2011; 16:00 hrs
WHERE: Q&A Session during British Embassy briefing for BCCJ members

Q: Why is the French [embassy] giving different advice?
Sir John: Their advice is not based on science.

Italy

Funny how the rumour mill works. I had an innocent facebook message this morning from my nephew who'd heard I was leaving for Italy because of the problems in Japan, he said his Mum might have heard someone mention it.

I went to Italy once when I was 15 with the school on a ski trip, thought it was OK I suppose, but never really thought about going back. Couldn't think where the story had started. Maybe it had spread from an "Interesting" comment I made on a friend's status update recently. Her friend had passed on the following update from the Italian Embassy in Tokyo:
  "a scientific team arrived yesterday from Italy and they measured the radiation level in Narita, along the way from the airport to the city and in Tokyo. They not only confirmed the official Japanese data that stated no significant radiation level in Tokyo, but they also affirmed that the radiation level in Rome is higher than in Tokyo at the moment."

The same friend also told me I'd said I was going to Italy, so I had to go back and check my profile as I'd had quite a few last night before crashing. 

Then it hit me. A week ago on March 12, the first night after the earthquake, I stayed up to watch The Six Nations rugby. Italy, the relative new boys and no-chance underdogs had finally beaten the mighty French. An unbelievable victory and their first ever over France in the tournament. No-one gave them a chance in hell before the match but they pulled it off. It's what sport is all about. Wales beat Ireland 19-13 later the same night, but Italy's 22-21 victory over France was a real landmark. I got on facebook and wrote, "ITALY!!!!! Just what I needed!!!"

Better be more careful.

Anyway, staying with the Italian theme, and to give more of an idea of what these places were really like, here are two pictures. One of them is from Southern Italy and the other is from the coast of Iwate, very close to where the terrifying black river footage was shot in Miyako City.