March 18, 2011

St. Paddy didn't bring luck to Tokyo yesterday. He didn't even show up at all. The nuclear reactor situation in Fukushima is getting more and more out of hand as desperate efforts to cool the rods continue. The last news I read was this morning on nikkei.com. And the aftershocks continue with the quakes occuring in various locations, some frighteningly near at various levels of intensity from 3-6+ on the Japanese scale of 1-7 (the quake on Friday was 7).

I signed up for alerts from the Setagaya-ku earthquake information site and their emails tell me the time and intensity of each quake, just seconds after they happen. Ditto on TV. It is comforting to hear the "ding" of mail in the inbox when they occur to remind me that I am not alone.

Back to the nuclear crisis in Fukushima: Rolling blackouts have been in effect since Monday to reduce the amount of electricity consumed in order not to make the rods cranky (I am sure I am technically incorrect about that, but the bottom line is that the amount of electricity being consumed is overloading the system). Up to now, our district has had few scheduled blackouts and our neighbourhood has had none. The situation last night became more severe and there was the threat of a sudden mass blackout. Even then, we were left out, so I don't think there was one after all.

Train lines agreed to cut or suspend their services from 17:00 yesterday, which may have helped. Needless to say, this left thousands of people stuck for several hours at stations from rush hour into the night as they waited for a train to get home. Not a hardship I guess when you know why (that is a separate, troubling issue that I won't get into).

And amidst all this troublesome news, stores are miraculously springing back. Today I dropped into a supermarket to survey the scene and saw that their shelves were about half full. In another store, they were about 20% full.  Whatever the results, they are really working hard to obtain goods for us. I thanked several of them for their hard work. Seeing this rebound in such a short time, even though it might just be temporary, is somehow encouraging.

But it is still no comfort for the survivors in Miyagi and surrounding areas who have little or nothing to eat. Relief efforts are ready to go, but they can't get there because of transportation difficulties and lack of gas to get there. People there are freezing too as they have no oil for heating and in so many places there is no electricity. The places that can offer help are doing so in the ways they can - for example, some ski resorts in some areas have donated their rental skiwear for people. A hot spring hotel opened its doors for people to get warm, have something to eat, and take a rest. Supermarkets opened their doors to people to come and take what they needed, at little or no cost.

Healthcare and medicines are not available because of the above - no transport, no heat, no supplies near enough to the places that need them. Just today, relief workers were able to get enough of the debris cleared away to open some roads. Hope exists in this flicker of a path.

Being my first report, the above is very scattered and parts of it erroneous at best, I am sure. Please feel free to add corrections in the comment window below. Thanks for reading. More to come later, as we like to say!

My little red lantern