Natural Catastrophes

I'm originally from New Jersey, a state in America where the only natural disaster that commonly dares approach the surly shores of the Garden State are mild hurricanes. The last major hurricane to hit the home of pork roll breakfast meat was in 1821 (or so Google informs me)!

The wonderful archipelago that I live on now, however, sits squat on the "ring of fire." Volcanic explosions, tsunamis, earthquakes...you name it and Japan has recently had one. Although well aware of this before I arrived in July 2009, I wasn't even ready for my first small quake which happened to hit the little town I dwell in precisely as I finished shaking the mayor's hand. I practically shat myself, but the white-haired, well groomed man who I'd just exchanged introductions with, didn't even pause. He carried himself like a boxing champ and sat down in his corner of the ring, continuing the conversation as if my eyes and mouth weren't locked open in terror. That moment was pinned to my brain as my first real experience of life in Japan because of two immediate thoughts: 1. How many of these happen here in one year? And 2. It's pretty simple to tell the accustomed from the uninitiated when it comes to natural disasters.

The mayor's stoic indifference to the tremors and my brush with panic are apt metaphors for the difference in Japanese and American news coverage of the recent catastrophes in Tohoku, Japan. While many people outside of Japan seem to believe that the local news coverage is attempting to make things seem better than they are, Red, White, and Blue news coverage has been doing its best to convince Americans that people are brainlessly screaming through the streets. It's very likely that the Japanese press was/is doing its best to prevent mass hysteria, but also true that the people mad with panic then and now are practically non-existent in number. In fact, in much of the news coverage I've seen on Japanese channels, people were rather too calm, putting themselves in further potential danger by filming the earthquake and tsunami damage to their homes and neighborhoods, live. I vividly recall live news coverage of the tsunami in Sendai City, in which a truck driver was standing astride his 8-wheeler on a bridge, watching the oncoming tsunami wave as if it were only the rain coming down.

The earthquake was huge, the tsunami was disastrous, the nuclear reactor explosions made it all a travesty. The Japanese people were rightly frightened, but now they are doing what they have a reputation for doing best. They are fighting together, and staying strong. Even in my realm of the Land of the Rising Sun, so far south that neither tremors or waves at all were felt or seen, citizens are sending bottled water, toilet paper, and other necessities to the regions worst affected. Just as Americans worked together to triumph over the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Japanese are working towards the same.

Keep Japan in your thoughts and prayers and donate to the Red Cross.