Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

There is a bit of overlap here with my comments on HN the last couple of days. I've had to explain it to 100+ friends, family, customers, clients, etc, so I figured I might as well polish it and put it somewhere public.

At the risk of stating the obvious: I am not "HN's Japan Guy." There are many, many HNers in Japan. A few dozen of them make it out to the Tokyo meetups. There are many, many perspectives on this disaster -- this is just my wee little contribution from a place well removed from most of the worst scenes.

View on HN

Patrick, that is a great write-up.

I live in Tokyo. On Sunday, I was looking at the buildings on the way to the train station. There were no visible cracks, except on a few old buildings which might as well have had the cracks before. Almost all businesses were open, etc.

Edit: as Patrick says, civil order continued. However, there were huge traffic jams and I witnessed a traffic argument turning violent. This is really rare in Japan.

You're the only prolific HNer in Japan, though. You have also lived in the West, I believe, so that informs your perspective.

I am not "HN's Japan Guy."

Perhaps not, but I'd say that you're probably the best writer out of HN's Japanese Guys.

(No offense intended to other HNers from Japan -- I'd say that you're one of the best writers on HN from any location.)

I don't know about best -- most frequent commentator definitely.

I'll give him highest ranked writer. He is a very clear writer but no need to make it a pissing match. Our friends at other startups here pen some nice articles as well for example. Besides, he's fully absorbed one Japanese quality: he probably wont accept your praise without deferring it. :-)

excellent post and exactly what i suspected.

i think the news should steer back to the middle east and libya in particular right now; thats where things hang in the balance and can impact billions of lives.

absolutely. i have no doubt that the japanese people will continue to deal with this in the most admirable way. where attention could make a serious difference now is in libya and the wider region. speaking from germany, libya now gets allocated about a minute in the main news and you can see the political pressure for an intervention dropping while german politicians are now starting a stupid discussion about nuclear energy.

Thanks for posting this.

I just realized you are the guy who made bingocardcreator. Man, I know you forever since I used to be joelonsoftware regular before HN just like you :) anyway, thanks for write-up and good luck

Do you happen to know whether Godaido Hall in Sendai survived the tsunami?

I live several hundred miles from Miyagi prefecture.

If this is a matter of life-or-death importance to you, find my contact info and I will find someone for you to speak to about it. If not, wait a few weeks and the prefectural tourism board will be able to help you out.

Nowhere near life-and-death. I just visited there about a year ago, was curious, and thought you might just know. I'll wait for the official word.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com