Ten years ago I was going to bed early – I had plans to rive into the hills the next day to catch the last of the low lying snow. I was going to snow shoe – and a colleague was going to cross country ski. I got up early and drove my car out of the gate. I was closing the gate when the phone rang – I was called in that evening to do a night shift in the emergency room because of the earthquake in Japan.
Because I was worked a lot of the following evenings there was normally a couple of hours of little activity. There would be non-stop television from Japan on one of the big screens, and we would watch them to get a better idea of what was happening. While the world was concerned about a nuclear disaster it was clear to me that the real disaster in Japan was not being covered because it didn’t really affect “us”.
Around 20,000 people died from the tsunami. People couldn’t drive to safety, roads were damaged, they had to walk to emergency shelters. I remember one woman who had carried her mother on her back for three days to get to safety. She said she only had two biscuits with her to feed both of them.
Shortly before this one of my staff had finished her term and returned to Japan. Her workplace was in the town hit hardest by the tsunami. It was impossible to contact her. No use trying email, or facebook, or telephone. I spent my spare time in the first week trying to find out if she was still alive. Eventually she managed to post a message on a notice board that I found (a second hand china selling site of all places).
This was the situation for tens of thousands of people in Japan. They suffered terribly – while we concentrated on the nuclear accident that was just a small part of the main disaster. I gained a lot of respect for the people of Japan as I watched them cope with the disaster. And I was disappointed at how little of what was happening in Japan was reported in the West.