GJDailleult comments

Good thing I noticed this story, realized I forgot to post my "ironic" comment on my rabidly anti-monarchy English second cousin's Facebook page. Better go do that before I run out of time! As for me, I will probably watch at least some. It is, as said above, history being made, and it is pretty obvious that this wedding is being used to heavily promote the monarchy and influence (indoctrinate?)the younger generation. Don't see the point of it all myself, but clearly some people are keen on keeping the monarchy going and have their reasons.

Also, just my feeling, but they really seem to come across as decent and normal people. Not their fault if everybody else is nuts and going bonkers over their wedding.

On another site (BBC actually) it was said that the information was not encrypted, computer guys shocked that it wasn't.

“They are perpetuating the same habits that gave us our last crisis.”

No, it is the same crisis. Ron Paul sometimes says some interesting stuff, but at the end of the day he is just another guy who doesn't understand, or pretends he doesn't understand, what money is and where it comes from. Not just in the USA, same fools everywhere.

This stuff makes Harry Potter seem like reality. Thirty plus years of fake prosperity blew up as it was always going to. The debt was intentional and has nothing to do with politics.

Not bashing the USA here either. Every country is in the same race, just on different parts of the track. Japan still leading but USA and UK closing fast. Canada, Australia, China etc. hiding out in the pits right now.

Wrong! They did survive the quake. It was the tsunami that wiped out the electrical system causing the cooling system to fail that has caused this crisis.

disillusioned, you missed the meaning there. They survived a quake that at that location was much less than magnitude 9 in intensity. Claiming they survived a 9.0 quake is just TEPCO spin doctoring. But they did survive the quake and then the tsunami knocked out the power, as you said.

We didn't believe the BS the government was spewing out then, and we still don't now.

Let's say it again. Radiation can not be hidden. It can be monitored by anybody, has been from the start. It can be monitored from a distance, and by running the figures and wind patterns through a computer they can figure out the radiation situation at Fukushima. Any government who saw a danger to their citizens would have been able to raise the alarm. They didn't. The we didn't believe the government, and we don't believe TEPCO lines, the question is why were you listening to the people who created the problem in the first place?

Anyone who claims it was all apparent from 'all known experts and the like' that it was safe in Tokyo is full of it themselves.

As brittling said "We gotta respect everyone's decisions" is the kind of opinion that annoys me most. Stop telling me I am full of myself and that I have to respect everyone's decision. I am not and if I want to joke about "Flyjins" I will. I made my decision, and I am not full of myself for making it, I was completely oblivious to what was going on with other foreigners at that time. I have no problem with other foreigners making a different decision, but looking at the calendar it is now April 19 and I am not yet dead from radiation poisoning.

Clearly, the percentage of Japanese people who left Tokyo is a tiny fraction of the percentage of foreigners who left, and I would bet that of those who did the percentage who left because of radiation fears was lower too. A straw man.

And revip, no problems. I think I have made it pretty clear in my posts that I am confused about the situation, not angry. Also, something that is never pointed out, for many foreigners in Japan they experienced their first major earthquake on March 11th. Not just an earthquake, but a subduction zone earthquake, an extremely rare event. If the stress of going through that affected how they reacted the next few days, that is understandable.

But I also know that even though I am not angry, plenty of people are, and that is their right to be. "Flyjin" is a derogatory word I see many people claiming. OK well the street goes both ways. Smug, sanctimonious, "don't respect other peoples' personal decision", "think they can fit into Japanese culture" etc. etc. I have seen plenty of that too. Give it a rest.

The only socialism in America is the imaginary one that is trotted out to justify and distract from the insane neo-liberal, crony capitalism that is killing the country.

I am not a socialist myself, but I am also not an insane neo-liberal crony-capitalist.

Those darn scientists again, what do they know! Looks to me these US air traffic controllers need to form themselves a union. Oh right, good thing that was taken care of long ago.

Nothing makes me feel safer on a plane than knowing the air traffic controller following my flight might be asleep.

Let the person who predicted the tsunami cast the first stone!

Who are you suggesting they cast the stones at? There appear to be a lot of stones to be thrown, you are going to get somebody killed!

TEPCO has kept residents in Tokyo and other prefectures supplied with relatively cheap electricity from its nuclear reactors for 4 decades.

Not looking so cheap anymore.

OK, first off the reactors did not survive a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. They survived the intensity of the earthquake when it hit Fukushima, it is 9.0 only at the epicenter. I have read somewhere that the intensity was within what the reactors had been designed for, but I would have to double check that before saying it was fact. As for an unprecedented once in a 1,000 year event, that line seems to have come straight from TEPCO itself. But for the umpteenth time, a magnitude 9.0 quake is the once in 1000 year event, a tsunami capable of wiping out the electrical equipment as things were set up was not and is much more common.

As for whether Shimizu should be arrested for criminal negligence, maybe his health problems and "ill-at-easeness" are due to him knowing he will be. Government is between a rock and a hard place here. Make this a criminal case and that would likely increase TEPCO's liabilities even more, and the government will be on the hook. But arrest him and make this all about the tsunami, and they can take off some of the heat about nuclear energy (not saying there should not be heat put on about nuclear, just that the electricity situation is obviously a big economic problem for the government, especially if plants were to get shut down over safety). One thing though, there was long, strange gap of close to two weeks when there was nothing said in the media about the role of the tsunami in the crisis. New York Times even did a whole story "TEPCO ignored risks" that never mentioned the word tsunami once, then a few days later had a very long and detailed article about the lack of tsunami preparation. Just a possibility, but maybe the media was asked to hold off while an investigation was conducted. We can only hope!

You were very brave to base your "major decision" on MIT and science news sites...

It seems to surprise some people still that there are people known as "scientists" who understand what radiation is and how it works. They know for example that exposure can not create a new animal by combining a gorilla and a whale! They also know that radiation can not be hidden and that what is going on in Fukushima can be monitored from anywhere, they are in fact doing it from Seattle and (I think) Austria. They also know that radiation weakens quickly as you move away from the source according to the laws of Newtonian physics, and they also know that there were 106 nuclear tests in the Pacific and 911 in Nevada. And of course the Tokyo situation has played out exactly as they said it would all along. Clearly I was an idiot for listening to them.

They may become neutralized resident.

That sums up exactly how I have been feeling the last 5 plus weeks, I have become neutralized!

As for the tax increases, for earthquake and tsunami victims, no problem. For bailing out and/or cleaning up after TEPCO, big problem. If the tax increases tips things so that some people decide to leave Japan for good it will be completely understandable.

Stop painting everyone with your silly and simplistic "hysteria" logic.

herefornow- actually I am not painting everyone with hysteria logic. I happen to think there were/are a number of good reasons to have left Japan, especially if you were/are a short-timer anyways. But if a person DID leave because of hysteria, then stop feeling a need to justify yourself and attacking people who didn't leave. Hey, the foreign media came here with a plan to milk this to the hilt and some people got swept up in all that and reacted exactly how the guys who know this stuff predicted they would. Humans being humans, just admit it and move on.

As for the expert opinion, I spent a lot of time on science sites like MIT and science news sites in the days after the quake, because I had no intention of making a major decision based on the information provided by the news media. And it was the same everywhere, Fukushima a very bad situation but no threat to Tokyo. The reason you didn't see those guys in the media is because that didn't fit the story they were peddling.

And no I don't think I am such a smart guy for all that, just somebody very skeptical of the corporate media. If this has happened 15 years ago, pre-internet, I probably would have been at the airport myself.

No one knew, not even the so called experts

That is a Flyjin myth. Every expert in the world knew that there was no danger of airborne radiation reaching Tokyo in hazardous amounts. Tokyo was at a distance that was safe after Chernobyl. Aha, but the Russians and the scientists lied!!! The radiation spread all over Europe and caused sickness and death! Hey maybe, but if true then fat lot of good it is doing you sitting in Osaka.

I will repeat, I have no problem with people doing what they did, I have a problem with people making stuff up to try and justify it.

See a few straw men arguments here. One, nobody is talking about people leaving Fukushima, they are talking about people leaving Tokyo. Two, Japanese people who left generally did so without making a mad dash to the airport and abandoning their jobs. It was school holidays anyways, and often they had family in western Japan to stay with. With the general post-quake situation as well as the Fukushima situation they made the call to leave. I know one woman who did so, and she now seems a bit embarrassed that she did, but I don't think she has any reason to be. Will agree on the hoarding point though, the level of toilet paper hoarding has been described as if trees had become extinct, it was and maybe still is at insane levels.

Also, to add to Mittsu's point, if you get on that internet thing (I believe Smorkian is the poster who has been telling people for weeks they should try using it) you will learn there is a whole field of academic study on risk assessment. Things played out exactly how the experts said they would. The instinctive way to deal with the risk of radiation is to run away, the instinctive way to deal with earthquake risk is to ignore it. Now, I had always assumed that other foreigners were like me, that they accepted the earthquake risk as a price of living here, but clearly most people just ignored it. The problem is that the radiation response is pretty harmless, maybe some individuals screwed-up their jobs and personal lives by jumping the gun, but it doesn't get anybody killed. But the response to earthquake risk is what gets people killed, because they and society are not prepared when they come. We live in time when buying a Geiger counter is considered prudent, but planning for earthquakes is fear-mongering. Moving from a non-earthquake area into an active earthquake zone is done casually, but an incident at a nuclear plant makes the place suddenly too dangerous? It's a head-shaker, and that has been my opinion from the start.

I don't see how the word "flyjin" is derogatory, though. Pretty funny, IMO.

My opinion too. I am not going to get into my personal feelings on the topic though, would just come back here in few hours to read that I am a know-it-all who thinks he is better than everybody else. Also that I claim to have had access to information that just wasn't available, and that I don't respect other people's personal decision. Actually I have no problem with people leaving Japan, I may apply for flyjin status myself before too long, as I have my own personal terror. But it is called "summer", not radiation.

What is really interesting to me are not the foreigner vs. foreigner battles, they were predictable when members of a group have such different reactions to a situation. What I find interesting is the Japanese reaction. The only Japanese people I know who are angry about the Flyjin situation are my wife (but she has spent too much time living outside the country and so has lost her mysterious "Japaneseness" - hah, I wish that is what it was, but is just her being her) and people whose lives were directly affected, ie. job, home-stay guest ordered to leave country, etc. Everybody else I talk to either just doesn't care, or are baffled and wondering what these people were doing here in the first place. Me too. Stuff happens in Japan, and it can happen at anytime. Check the scoreboard if you don't know what I am talking about. As was said to me, "They chose to live here, we were never given that choice". Seems clear to me that a lot of people's risk assessment equations were missing a variable or two.

This just show again that the JSA has only themselves to blame for the current situation. It was common knowledge that there was match fixing going on, and that these guys had demonstrated it statistically. The JSA either needed to put a stop to it, or to say it was no big deal, just an issue of the ranking system for lower ranked wrestlers, and didn't affect the overall integrity of the sport at the top level. They did neither, they denied it, and that is what blew up on them.

I know a woman whose brother lives in Kamaishi in Iwate. She said the first thing he told her was that the people who knew what to do and reacted correctly were alive, those who didn't were all dead. Why different people reacted differently is something the experts will likely be going over for a long time, especially after Indonesia and with the history of the area. My amateur guess is that 21st century scientific and historical knowledge is up against 1000's of years of human behavior regarding earthquakes and tsunamis, and that denial and fatalism run very deep.

One other thing, the traditional get-under-a table earthquake advice is 100% wrong for the kind of quake we had on March 11th. With a P-wave alarm system, and the slow build-up time of a subduction quake, most people could casually walk out of the building they are in and find a safe, open area to sit down and watch the climax from. Then if they are near the sea, move it. That seems to me to be knowledge that everyone should have, but if you talk about it you will be accused of "scare-mongering". The way to protect yourself from scary stuff is to not think about it apparently.

Don't have to time to check word for word, but I think this is pretty much exactly what the IAEA advised after the Indonesia quake. Which of course TEPCO ignored, for the simple reason that they are TEPCO.

If someone had actually predicted this, nobody would have believed them.

Klein2, I have no idea why you are on here spouting your myths. Are you a lawyer for TEPCO? This was not even the worst tsunami since the Meiji Restoration, and the event, and impact on Fukushima Daiichi, was predicted by multiple sources, with plenty of documented evidence of that. TEPCO was well aware of the risk they were taking, a risk that could not be justified by ANY risk assessment process. They also were not avoiding spending huge amounts of money, they were avoiding spending the trivial amount of money needed to get in line with IAEA guidelines issued after Indonesia. They did all that because TEPCO is nothing more than an asset stripping operation whose job is to send as much of the cash flow as possible to the shareholders, which they do by not spending required amounts on safety and maintenance.

Also, and I will go REALLY slow here, about this idiotic asteroid thing that comes up all the time. The March 11th earthquake was what is known as a SUBDUCTION ZONE EARTHQUAKE. These quakes are the strongest kind of earthquake, and they occur in a continuous cycle and are the easiest type of earthquake to understand. Not predictable in a human time frame, but inevitable geologically, and that is now understood scientifically. They are not one-off events, the process for the next one on that fault has already started. If you believe that the asteroid, after crashing into earth then gets up, flies back up to space, and whizzes around for a few billion years and then crashes into earth again, then you have a comparison.

Umm can someone tell me exactly when America had an actual surplus of money?

Well, never. If there is no government debt there is no money, no debt there are no billionaires. Where do you think money comes from? Americans used to understand that, now you just have a bunch of rich clowns shouting "oh my God we are in debt!!!" Well, exactly, of course you are. Should have thought of that 30 years ago before you started down this insane road.

Could everybody stop using this bogus 1,000 year event line, which I suspect originated with TEPCO. A magnitude 9 earthquake in Japan is maybe a 1.000 year event, destructive tsunamis are not, they can be generated by quakes much lower that a 9 and have been over and over. Also, with 21st century scientific knowledge, there is no way any risk assessment analysis could say you don't 100% prepare, design, and engineer for quakes and tsunamis, regardless if they may not actually happen in your lifetime. The only reason that isn't done is that too many people think the way they can protect themselves from scary stuff is by not thinking about it.

I see here the same thing I see on many sites, people are really attached to the old thinking that earthquakes are random and unpredictable. No offense but it is that attitude that gets people killed. This isn't 100 years ago when earthquakes were explained as having something to do with mountains and volcanos, and everyone was surprised when they happened. Seismology is really a very new science but they already have incredible knowledge and understanding of how things work. Now can they give you a time and date so you can plan your holiday around the quake, sorry for the inconvenience but they can't. But they know that subduction zone earthquakes are cyclical and predictable on a geological time frame, and they have charted them back 1000's of years using tsunami evidence. Inter- plate and shallow fault quake risk areas are identified and mapped out, and that is the important part, not prediction ability. Your doctor can't tell you when you are going to die either but you still listen to him. Intra- plate quakes much tougher to figure out but they are not the problem here anyway. The point is that in the 21st century we now have the knowledge and technology to prepare for what we now know are inevitable or likely events instead of standing around saying "bloody hell where did this come from ". You engineer and design for it like the village in Iwate where nobody died and you drill it into heads what to do in every situation. Hopefully Tokyo will be ready but Tohoku and of course TEPCO sure weren't. Time to start using what we know.

Don't think there is any great suppression of news about a Tokyo quake going on, it is simply a "dog bites man" story. Common knowledge. Think that also explains why I don't pick up much anger or complaining about the foreign exodus among Japanese people I know. More like just confusion about what were such risk averse people doing here in the first place, I am confused on that one too, I can only rationalize living here by the fact that hometown is in the same or worse boat.

Four weeks on, and I still haven't figured out how people can see 28,000 lives wiped out in an afternoon and then decide they need to worry about radiation. The casualty figures from Chernobyl are a drop in the bucket compared to the earthquake and tsunami deaths just since the Indonesia quake. I don't have time to check figures right now, but from memory I would say that holds true even for the maximum, anti-nuclear estimates.

You are at a far, far greater risk of being on the beach and then not knowing what to do or where to go, than from any radiation. But some weird psychological stuff going on, the same people obsessed with radiation refuse to think about earthquakes. Denial is pretty powerful.

The edge of their risk tolerance I mean, not their sanity!

Nobody is saying there are not foreign reporters in Japan doing excellent work, there have even been some excellent exposes the last few days of TEPCO's handling of the tsunami risk (ie. real news). The complaint is with how the major foreign news outlets have approached and framed the Japan situation. Also, this idea of the "passive" Japanese media, true as it may be, seems increasingly to be used to justify the reactions of many foreigners the last two and a half weeks. Myself, I find it bizarre that people who willingly (or more likely unknowingly) accept the risks of living in this country (as opposed to Japanese people who have them imposed on them), can see almost 30,000 people killed in a single afternoon and then are pushed over the edge when they hear the word "radiation", but hey that is just me!

If we are going to compare co-workers, I have one who lives in constant terror of his telephone ringing. He knows it will be a sobbing family member begging him to save himself from imminent death from radiation poisoning. Wonder where they get their news from???

As for the preparedness angle being heavily covered, of course it hasn't been, because it doesn't match with the nuclear disaster theme dreamed up back in New York and London. You would not be having an insane world debate over nuclear safety if people understood that the problem really was that some morons took an insane gamble that there would be no tsunamis before the plant was de-commissioned. They simply did not cover the factual story because it was not the story they wanted to cover. If they then managed to get a few details right that were not in the Japanese media, whoopee for them.

Sorry, but anybody who pulls out the meteor line, the hindsight line, or the why didn't the experts do anything line, has zero understanding of the situation.

What happened on March 11th was a natural, cyclical event. TEPCO was warned repeatedly by those experts that there was a high risk that it would happen again soon. The senile old codgers decided "hey this plant has only a few years left, so let's save the money and not do anything" when any kind of risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis would have screamed let's do this YESTERDAY!!!. The result is they have destroyed the reactors, destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of people, and maybe in the long-run destroyed the Japanese economy and financial system. How anybody can defend that level of stupidity is beyond me.