And back to normal?

Yesterday at work my boss pointed out that next week it's back to business as usual. He's correct in that at some point people have to at least start behaving as if things are normal. Today certainly seemed like that around Tokyo. People are still conserving electricity and it's still difficult to buy certain items but the mood around the city resembled that of any Saturday. Even television is sort of getting back to normal. I caught a few scenes from a travel documentary this morning.

I know this kind of behaviour is necessary and expected, but I hope that people don't start forgetting about the Tohoku region (the part that got hit by the tsunami). Not that anyone here can do much about the situation. It just seems a bit off carrying on as normal when there's a huge crisis not so far away.

Some feedback I've been getting from people seems to revolve around mixed messages from the media regarding potential nuclear disaster. Okay, I've got to say something about this...

Foreign news coverage of the Fukushima power plant does little good around here besides providing a punch line. Even my non-Japanese co-workers pass on it. Foreign reporters seem to have no idea what's going on a seem even less to care. As long as their story is freaky, it sells. Japanese media seems to be more on top of things and it doesn't throw in all the extra fluff to scare you into being impressed with them.

I know I'm missing something in the translation, but when I watch Japanese news I find it bland and unpersuasive. Seems more like a reciting of facts than a presentation. This is not a bad thing. When I was teaching essay writing in ESL, I found it very hard to get my students to make a point and stucture a convincing argument to support that point. Now, looking at foreign news and Japanese news, I'm beginning to see the advantages of a non-persuasive presentation style: it protects against hype.

Given all this, what Japanese news has to say isn't all that positive (although according to Kuriko, whose work lends her insight into this crisis, you should pay attention to what happens next week). It is, though, a far cry from the doomsday prophecies foreign news of pitching. So if you're afraid about radioactive steam floating all the way over the Pacific perhaps there is room for reconsideration.

Besides, the tsunami-hit areas are the ones that should be most worrisome.