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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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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