Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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Outside of the immediate disaster zones, I think "everything went as planned and life went on without missing more than a few beats" is substantially accurate. The context for my post was originally I got literally in excess of a hundred people who thought I might be dead trying to reach me because of the reporting, despite me being several hundred miles away. I have been talking to news reporters the last few days (whose Rolodex of English-speaking Japanese people is apparently non-existent, so I'm the next best thing) and its like we're living on two different planets: "Can you comment on the food shortages you're experiencing in Fugu?" "Fugu is a poisonous fish. I live in Gifu. There is no food shortage here. I just got a pizza delivered despite there being an earthquake in the middle of the delivery." "I thought the quake was days ago?" "Not that earthquake, the Shizuoka earthquake, at 10:30 PM last night." "Shizuoka... is that by the nuclear power plants??" I nearly exploded. Halfway between Tokyo and Nagoya, cut off power to a lot of people, and would have been virtually unremarkable except that it happened this week.

This is a disaster localized to a small portion of a big country. That was certainly not a given: Tokyo could be burning right now, and the situation at the nuclear plant which literally had a tsunami hit it could be the situation at every nuclear and chemical plant in the country. (Or the plant could have suffered immediate, catastrophic failure, rather than immediate work-as-designed followed by a deterioration which gave us enough time to evacuate everyone.

Food distribution and trains got a hiccup in Tokyo -- they're now operating normally. (They're decidedly not normal in the towns destroyed in Miyagi, obviously. 500,000 people were displaced at least temporarily.)

People do not live in Apple stores. They stayed there one night while waiting for train service to be restored. If you're worried about displaced folks, look to the evacuation sites like e.g. schools in Miyagi, which is where folks who don't have a home to go back to are staying temporarily.

My impression is simply that people don't know Japanese geography, which isn't all together too surprising. There's no reason a person should know the geography of Japan any better than the geography of Uzbekistan if he or she doesn't have a specific tie to either country. They just hear "earthquake in Japan" and ask the people who live in Japan if they're doing alright.

My brother lives in Auckland. We had a lot of people asking if he was OK after the quake in Christchurch. They are ~700 miles away on different islands, so he wasn't affected at all by the quake there, but we patiently explained this. It seems silly to get so haughty when people are expressing genuine concern for your well-being.

It's actually understandable to be so haughty, at least after you've had roughly a hundred people do so. As someone who's here right now, I can tell you we've got enough on our minds that, while we certainly get that people are concerned with us, proper information in the hands of others would make life infinitely easier on our side.

There's no reason a person should know the geography of Japan any better than the geography of Uzbekistan if he or she doesn't have a specific tie to either country.

I'm going to agree here. I went to high school in Tokyo and I hadn't heard of Gifu until patio11 mentioned it. This is not really a problem due to the availability of these things called "maps", however.

This is not really a problem due to the availability of these things called "maps", however

Oh, how I wish this were the case. (The lady from the New York Times excepted, this has been a repeated issue when speaking with reporters. I have been falling back to my "If Japan were the United States..." explanation quite a lot.)

This is not really a problem due to the availability of these things called "maps", however.

And the availability of this thing called 'the periodic table' means everyone knows and understands basic chemistry.

The periodic table explains more complex relationships than: "how far apart things are" or "where they are in relation to one another." Basic concepts such as distance and relative orientation are things that (should) come as a basic understanding to even people with no formal education; therefore once one is introduced to maps, those concepts are (or should be) very easy to grasp. The relationships and orientation of elements on the periodic table are much more complex and cover much less 'intuitive' topics.

If you're reporting on Japan about a natural disaster that affects different parts of the country differently, it may be worth the 1-2 seconds to type in 'maps.google.com' in your browser.

I agree with that. The reporters thing seems to be a fresh take on it -- my impression from the beginning of the comment I replied to and the blog post from the other day was that it was just a lot of normal persons enquiring. Interfacing with reporters obviously is bound to be frustrating.

People have a 1/x scale with distance. When I lived in California my grandmother in the UK would call everytime there was a hurricane in Florida.

You can't really expect professional TV reporters to be any better informed than my 80year old grandmother.

That famous New Yorker cover http://bigthink.com/ideas/21121 comes to mind again.

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