gokoro comments

I remember some 50 years ago a poster showing a boy and girl in school uniform pictured from behind. The caption read ' when did you last talk with your children '.

'The evil men do lives after them, the good is often interned with their bones.'

W S.

These numbers are rounded off, the average time for a shallow quake from Japan is 13.6 minutes. In this case the P and S wave they are 10 8 minute apart. The P and S wave travel in a circular path though the core due to the increase in density with depth. The surface wave arrived 27.5 minutes after the P wave.

This earthquake was detected by the garden seismometer in England 11 minutes later, arriving via the North Pole and Siberia. Normally a shallow quake take 13 minutes but at a depth of 60 km, the rocks being denser it is faster. It’s a small world we live in.

To get things into perspective the human body contains enough Potassium 40 to give rise to some 4000 disintegrations per second. K40 is a beta emitter of energy of over a million volts compared to Tritium of under 20 kilo volts. The half-life of Tritium is about 13 years while that of K 40 is over a thousand million years. If you are at all worried about your exposure to radiation then it is best not to sleep with anybody.

This ship seems to be assumed the source of Japan’s corona virus. If the infected cases are plotted on a logarithmic scale it becomes a virtual straight line and can be extrapolated to case No 1. Interestingly this occurs round about December 23 when many Japanese were returning from China for the family New Year celebrations.

I  would be interesting to know the cost of car insurance versus age. That would tell a lot.

Clearly Ghosn didn’t follow the accepted procedure when caught fiddling the company finances. The usual way is a deep bow, profuse apologies, a few tears, retirement on a good pension and then a life of golf. Then all would have been forgotten.

This is not the first time that the Japanese Navy has sailed to some far flung place to perform similar duties. In the First World War a number of Japanese naval vessels were sent to the Mediterranean to act as escorts to troop ships. One was torpedoed by an Austro-Hungarian submarine and some 40 or so crew were killed. The damaged ship reach Gibraltar, repaired and went back into service. The Japanese sailors who died were laid to rest in a cemetery in Malta.

A lot of figures have been bandied about but just to put things into perspective, while the house in Ito is of course not the same as Fukushima or for that matter Tokyo, the radiation measurements are for a real situation.

 Measurements around the house indicated 0.1 to 0.11 inside, the small garden 0.12, ground at the rain pipe discharge 0.33 on the west side, 0.18 to 0.22 on the east side, 0.1 on the hard car parking area and the gravel path in front of the house 0.17 micro Sieverts. The values outside are about half at a height of 1 metre. These measurements are done in April for the last 3 years and show little change. The yearly value in the house would then be 0.88 milli sieverts. The Radon level inside is about 18 to 20 Bq which using WHO conversion yield about 1 milli sieverts a year. So the total yearly exposure is just under 2 milli seiverts per year.

The 2100 micro Sieverts is an average value for a year of which half of this is due to radon. The human body contains enough Potassium 40 to give about 5000 disintegrations per minute. If you are worried about your exposure level then it is best not to sleep with anybody.

This quake was detected 14 minutes later by a seismometer in the bottom of my garden at 4 am local time ( 3 am GMT). The garden in question is 10,000 km away in England. it's a small world.

Japan as a nation is worried that it’s 'Japaneseness' my be diluted by an influx of foreigners .Being British, I can boast that I am part Celtic, part Viking part Saxon part Roman part French and a few % Neanderthal. Though my wife reckons a bit more than a few % !

It's a small world. This earthquake was felt as far away the UK , at least the seismometer did..

Further to the story of Chiune Sugihara is the Chinese consul general in Berlin Ho Feng Shan. After 1938 many counties would not accept Jewish refugees but against orders he issued some 1200 visa to allow the refugees to leave Germany for China. Like Chiune Sugihara, Ho Feng Shan act of humanity was not recognized. Even though ‘the bell tolls for thee’ the world cannot hear it.

Perhaps time to remember the ambassador to Lithuania during WW2 Chiune Sugihara. He requested a number of times to Tokyo to be allowed to issue visas for Jewish people to leave the country for China and Japan. Against orders he issued some 3500 transit visas. Even while waiting on the train to depart he issued visas from the train window. The Japanese government should hang its head in shame.

Read not the words but the sentiment for that was how it was meant. An un-birthday is just as difficult to translate into Japanese as Mokusatsu is into English and with less disastrous results.

Now different the end of the pacific war could have been for the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but for an ironical word. Cultural differences are inherent in all languages and prime minister Suzuki’s casual use of the word ‘ mokusatsu ‘ set events on an unstoppable course to destruction. As Confucius said” if the written words can be misinterpreted, they will be.”

People forget that America was not the only country to pursue the development of an atomic bomb those 75 years ago. Britain when it stood alone against Germany, attempted it but decided to hand it on to America. Both Germany and Japan also pursued an atomic bomb project but without the success that America had. On April 1943 , Nishina tells Gen. Nobu-uji that the weigh would be enormous ( jindai ) and that’ as a bomb’ it is not considered suitable ( tekito narazaru ). Heisenberg in Germany, talked of the critical mass of U235 as having a radius 54 cm and weighing 10 tons. The dividing line between success and failure is perhaps not as obvious as it may appear.