Big society

I'm sure anyone following the situation here has their own source of news. Mine come from a lot from articles my coworkers share with me and information my wife brings home from work. If she's feeling patient enough, Kuri will sometimes translate the news for me off TV. I put up a new page which has some resources I think are accurate enough to share.

I pointed out in an earlier post how orderly the response to the earthquake seems to me. Two weeks later, the most amazing thing to me remains to be how people here are handling the situation. Most interesting is the fact that a lot of action is taking place completely independantly of government involvement. There's an article written by a fellow who I think described this well:

Japan’s schools and communities, its civil society, without exception played their own role to help with the disaster relief. Neither receiving nor needing executive orders, they seemed to have a natural cohesion, throwing themselves into the relief effort in an instinctively orderly fashion. Free public phones, free shelter materials, free food supply, the orderly and smooth flow of public transport. All of this was mostly unsolicited and occurred in a low-key fashion.

- Xiao Shu, Japan’s big society: a Chinese perspective on the earthquake

Original article in Chinese on iFeng.com

I do have a bit of uncertainty (not worry, just uncertainty) about the Japanese government. We all remember Wen Jiabao lightning fast dash to the Sichuan earthquake site. It's arguable whether this was propoganda or if his expertise in geomechanics made him an appropriate overseer. Regardless, it was something. If you were to ask me what role the Japanese government has in all this I honestly couldn't say. I'll admit, though, that as a foreigner this isn't something I could likely wrap my head around even if I had all the information. As a Canadian, there's an expectation I have that government action should be highly visible, even propogated. That might not apply in Japan. Regarding how well Japan's government is handling things, we'll just have wait and find out in hindsight.

Work is starting to pick up. I'm actually meeting with some success in my appointment booking. There are five or six people I'm going to meet with next week and I'm quite excited about this. The strangest thing is that I was known to deal quite harshly with telemarketers at my last job. While I'm not exactly selling anything, I am doing much of the same thing I hated before: cold calling. I don't like it much more now, but here I am doing it and I'm getting results. There's no conclusion I'm drawing here and you can take it any way you want. Just thought I'd point out the irony.