The tragedy in Japan is heartbreaking but panicked reporting helps no one, says Patrick McKenzie.
I run a small software business in central Japan and have lived in the country for many years. Some of the English-language reporting on the Japanese disaster has been so bad that my mother is worried for my safety. In the interests of clearing the air I thought I would write a bit of what I know.
A quick primer on Japanese geography
Japan is an archipelago made up of many islands, of which there are four main ones: Honshu, Shikoku, Hokkaido, and Kyushu. The one that almost everybody outside of the country will think of when they think "Japan" is Honshu: in addition to housing Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto, and virtually every other city that foreigners have heard of, it has most of Japan's population and economic base. Honshu is the big island that looks like a banana on your globe, and was directly affected by the earthquake and tsunami, to an extent, anyway. See, the thing that people don't realise is that Honshu is massive. It is larger than Britain. (A country that does not typically refer to itself as a "tiny island nation".)
The public perception of Japan, at home and abroad, is disproportionately influenced by Tokyo's outsized contribution to Japanese political, economic and social life. It also gets more news coverage than warranted because one could poll every journalist in North America and not find one single soul who could put Miyagi or Gifu on a map. So let's get this out of the way: Tokyo, like virtually the whole island of Honshu, got a bit shaken and no major damage was done. They have reported one fatality caused by the earthquake. By comparison, on any given Friday, Tokyo will typically have more deaths caused by traffic accidents.
Miyagi is the prefecture hardest hit by the tsunami, and Japanese TV is reporting that they expect fatalities in the prefecture to exceed 10,000. Miyagi is 320 kilometres from Tokyo. That's about the distance between New York and Washington DC.
Japanese disaster preparedness
Japan is exceptionally well-prepared to deal with natural disasters: it has spent more on the problem than any other nation, largely as a result of frequently experiencing them. (Have you ever wondered why you use Japanese for "tsunamis" and "typhoons"?) All levels of the government, from the self defence forces to technical translators working at prefectural technology incubators in places you've never heard of, spend quite a bit of time writing and drilling on what to do in the event of a disaster.
For your reference, as about the lowest person on the organising chart for Ogaki City (it's in Gifu, which is fairly close to Nagoya, which is 320 kilometres from Tokyo, which is 320 kilometres from Miyagi, which was severely affected by the earthquake), my duties in the event of a disaster were:
Ascertain my personal safety. Report to the next person on the phone tree for my office, which we drilled once a year. Await mobalisation in case response efforts required English or Spanish translation.
Ogaki has about 150,000 people. The city's disaster preparedness plan lists exactly how many come from English-speaking countries. It is less than two dozen. Why have a maintained list of English translators at the ready? Because Japanese does not have a word for excessive preparation.
When Nagoya started shaking during the earthquake, here's what happened in my office:
T-0 seconds: Oh dear, we're shaking.
T+5 seconds: Where was that earthquake?
T+15 seconds: The government reports that we just had a magnitude 8.8 earthquake off the coast of East Japan. Which clients of ours are implicated?
T+30 seconds: Two or three engineers in the office start saying "I'm the senior engineer responsible for X, Y, and Z universities."
T+45 seconds: "I am unable to reach X University's emergency contact on the phone. Retrying." (Phones were inundated virtually instantly.)
T+60 seconds: "I am unable to reach X University's emergency contact on the phone. I am declaring an emergency for X University. I am now going to follow the X University Emergency Checklist."
T+90 seconds: "I have activated emergency systems for X University remotely. Confirm activation of emergency systems."
T+95 seconds: (second most senior engineer) "I confirm activation of emergency systems for X University."
T+120 seconds: (manager of group) "Confirming emergency system activations, sound off: X University." "Systems activated." "Confirmed systems activated." "Y University." "Systems activated." "Confirmed systems activated."
While this is happening, it's somebody else's job to confirm the safety of the colleagues of these engineers, at least a few of whom are out of the office at client sites. Their checklist helpfully notes that confirmation of the safety of engineers should be done by visual inspection first, because they'll be really busy for the next few minutes.
Scenes like this started playing out up and down Japan within, literally, seconds of the quake.
Everything pretty much worked
Let's talk about trains. One of them was washed away by the tsunami All of the rest - including ones travelling more than 240 km/h - made immediate emergency stops and no one died. There were no derailments. There were no collisions. There was no loss of control. The story of Japanese railways during the earthquake and tsunami is the story of an unceasing drumbeat of everything going right.
This was largely the story up and down Honshu.
On the train line between Ogaki and Nagoya, one passes dozens of factories many of which have large amounts of extraordinarily dangerous chemicals maintained, at all times, in conditions which would resemble fuel-air bombs if they had a trigger attached to them. None of them blew up.
The overwhelming response of Japanese engineering to the challenge posed by an earthquake larger than any in the last century was to function exactly as designed. Millions of people are alive right now because the system worked and the system worked and the system worked.
That this happened was, I say with no hint of exaggeration, one of the triumphs of human civilisation. Every engineer in this country should be walking a little taller this week. We can't say that too loudly, because it would be inappropriate with so many still missing, but it doesn't make it any less true.
Let's talk nukes
There is a lot of panicked reporting about the problems with Tokyo Electric's nuclear power generation plants in Fukushima. Although few people would admit this out loud, I think it would be fair to include these in the count of systems thatfunctioned exactly as designed.
The instant response - scramming the reactors - happened exactly as planned and, instantly, removed the apocalyptic nightmare scenarios from the table.
There were some failures of important systems, mostly related to cooling the reactor cores to prevent a meltdown. To be clear, a meltdown is not necessarily an apocalyptic nightmare scenario.
Failure of the systems is contemplated in their design, which is why there are so many redundant ones. You won't even hear about most of the failures because a) they weren't nuclear related (a keyword that scares the heck out of some people) and b) redundant systems caught them.
The tremendous public unease over nuclear power shouldn't be allowed to overpower the conclusion: nuclear energy, in all the years leading to the crisis and continuing during it, is absurdly safe.
What you can do
Far and away the worst thing that happened in the earthquake was that a lot of people drowned. This is terrible, and we'll learn ways to better avoid it in the future, but considering the magnitude of the disaster we got off relatively lightly.
Japan's economy just got a serious monkey wrench thrown into it, but it will be back up to speed fairly quickly. (By comparison, it was probably hurt more by either the Lehman shock or the decision to invent a safety crisis to help out the US auto industry.)
If you're feeling compassionate and want to do something for the sake of doing something, find a charity. Give it money. Tell them you were motivated to by Japan's predicament. You'll be happy, Japan will recover quickly, and the charity will appreciate your kindness.
On behalf of myself and the other folks in our community, thank you for your kindness and support.
A version of this article originally appeared at www.kalzumeus.com. then on the National Times website.
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