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Free Wifi in Shijo It is quite hard finding free-access wifi anywhere in Japan, let alone access that does not require you to sit and purchase a drink (most often at such exciting local eateries as McDonald’s or Starbucks)…

Which is why I figured I’d commit this tidbit of info to Google (and the occasional Kyoto-bound reader of this blog):

I just noticed some new banners have been put up along Shijo dori, announcing free wifi in the street. This is apparently courtesy of the neighbourhood’s shopkeeper association. Only small catch is that the wifi is password-protected1I have no doubt there is a suitably pointless bureaucratic reason for that.… and nobody seems to have realised that the primary target for such an offer (foreign tourists without 3G cell phones and limitless data plans) might have a hard time reading the katakana spelling of “password” on the banners. Ahem.

Anyway, the free wifi network info are:
Access point: shijo-0123456789
Password: 0123456789

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“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals”…

The most annoying part about trying to hold any Fukushima-related conversation over the past couple weeks: being made to feel like a tireless cheerleader for TEPCO, the Japanese government or nuclear energy in general. Merely refusing the whole panicky, guts-over-science, interpretation of events automatically left me in that corner over there, with the energy company shills, neo-con climate change deniers and simple-minded fools doomed to die a fiery nuclear death.

This is particularly enraging, if somewhat ironic, considering how much I loathe practically every aspects of public policy-making in Japan. In usual times, I am the culturally-insensitive boorish gaijin who snidely comments on the levels of inertia, corruption and inefficiency ingrained in Japan’s particular brand of bureaucratic para-democracy, getting much awkward silence and polite placating from annoyed Japanese counterparts (yes, I am the life of parties).

So, let me spell it out for the dialectically-challenged out there: Fuck TEPCO. Fuck its useless bunch of amakudari, working hand-in-hand with their equally self-serving ministry bureaucrat friends to keep their cushy retirement gigs at the expense of pretty much everything else. They are a perfect (though far from unique) embodiment of everything that is wrong with Japanese politics and bureaucracy. And most of it has absolutely nothing to do with the uncontrollable consequences of one of the strongest natural disaster to ever hit a modern country. If you want to blame TEPCO for something, why don’t you start by going back to 1995 and have a look at their practice of hiring Japanese lower-class burakumin to work in sub-standard conditions…

While I am at it: let me also publicly state my fervent dislike of nuclear radiations, tsunamis, cancer, war, famine and innocent children’s tears.

That being said…

How about first revisiting those heady days of post-tsunami events and the journalistic gold-rush for fear-mongering, grossly-inaccurate, paper-selling nuggets of gold. Remember? When “Western media had a better grasp of the situation than you people on the ground”1True quote from some well-meaning moron to whom I was trying to impress that Japan was not the devastated radioactive wasteland he envisioned.. The somewhat condescending idea that foreign media gave an inherently better coverage of the news, by virtue of their independence and superior journalistic skills…
Here is the deal about foreign media and what they publish(ed) about Fukushima: their facts all come from one place. The very same place Japanese media get their facts from, the same place everybody gets their facts from: official TEPCO press releases and Japanese government spokesmen. CNN does not have some embedded journalist traipsing around reactor #3 with a geiger counter or a mole inside the DPJ headquarters: they do like everybody else and work from [poorly translated, second-hand-acquired] official news releases. So much for the “poorly informed” local media, kept in the dark while their foreign homologues expose the naked shocking truth to the world. Their only differences resided in their tone and the quality of their analysis. And on both counts, the less said, the better.

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Rarely used words and neologisms abound in recent Japanese news…

More than the news-fabricated fly-jin “trend”, my favourite Japanese phrase these days is 疑心暗鬼:

An idiom whose components literally translate to “fear – darkness – demons”, beautifully rendered by the Green Goddess into: “Fear peoples the darkness with monsters”…

In everyday conversation, it can be used as a synonym for “paranoia”.

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I apologise for the avalanche of posts these days. I am sure you can understand why that is. I hope some are helping.

I just wrote this text to post elsewhere on the web, in response to someone due to visit Japan for some vacations in a few weeks and understandably worried about practical and ethical considerations… ‘thought it might help others too…

If you were planning to visit Japan in the near future (or if you even already arrived and were in the middle of your trip when the earthquake happened), you may naturally be inclined to cancel everything, either out of concern for your safety or out of respect for the victims of this tragedy. Should you stick to your plans and come nonetheless?

This is a difficult question…

The short answer is: yes, you should still come to Japan. Change as little as you can to your plans and have as much of a normal vacation as possible.

As for the longer answer:

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Yesterday afternoon (JST), Professor John Beddington, Chief Scientific Officer for the UK government, officially stated that Tokyo was entirely safe from the threat of radiation, even in a worst-case scenario.

The UK embassy in Tokyo confirmed that there was no threat outside of the immediate vicinity of Fukushima.

A statement released this morning by the US embassy in tokyo agrees with the above and confirms it sees no threat beyond the 20km exclusion zone.

The French embassy in Tokyo will get back to you as soon as they stop running for their lives.

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A tangential update to my previous, and much more relevant, post on the current shape of things in Japan…

As any sane person would point out, now certainly isn’t the time to have a wide-scale debate about civil nuclear policies. Decade-long policies should not be decided in the middle of a day-to-day disaster…

Unfortunately, that is not how some people see it: the debate is already happening. I have no particular animosity against the die-hard anti-nuclear types1see: Germany and other countries with similarly contentious domestic policies on nuclear energy and strong anti-nuclear groups. who have seized on the occasion for their own political purpose: I know they sincerely mean well2Keeping in mind that meaning well and being sincere has never meant you can’t be an irrational loon, far from it.. But I do certainly find it distasteful when any side uses the emotion generated by such a tragedy to advance points of questionable relevance. It’s also a bit insulting when reports of anti-nuclear demonstrations trump reports on actual earthquake/tsunami-related fatalities on the front page of German newspapers (yes, I am looking in your direction, Spiegel).

Now, since we are having that debate. Allow me to raise one single point, based on very easily verifiable facts:

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After the short and factual update of last weekend, time for some more random notes and observations about the current post-seismic events unfolding in Japan.

Beware: it is slightly rantish. But one can only take so much uninformed stupidity by foreign media and unproductive, if well-meaning at times, panicky news and concern spread through social networks… Brace yourself for some pissed-off soothing anger. All brought to you from the safe comfort of my Kyoto abode: hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers away from the nearest active fault line, sea front or failing nuclear reactor.

So… First and foremost: if you are a Japan-residing foreigner who does not live in the directly-hit Tohoku area or within walking distance of Fukushima nuclear reactors (both unlikely if you are reading this): chill. the. fuck. out.

This was one of the biggest earthquake in history, but it did not occur in Tokyo (thank the gods). Shindo 5 quakes as the one that was felt in Tokyo are not a once-in-a-century event, they happen all over Japan at least once a decade. And this is why destruction was minimal in Tokyo. If you live in Kanto and are unsure of what real destruction means: take a look out your window, now have a look at NHK feeds from the Sendai area. Notice a difference? Perhaps the lack of 50m-long fishing boat couched in the middle of the street, or the fact that every single building around you is still standing. My point is not to say it wasn’t a bad one in Tokyo, just that it wasn’t the one. And people living where it happened had it much, much worse. So please can we avoid the tearful airport arrivals of foreigners freshly repatriated from their minato-ku apartment, bawling on international news as if they had just survived World War 3.

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To anybody with friends or family in Kyoto and worried about them:

The quake was very minor in Kyoto (some 800km away from the epicentre). It was felt as a 2-3 (out of 7) on the Shindo scale: things got shaken a little bit, but no real damage. Tsunami warning was low for the region (and of course non-existent for land-locked Kyoto).
Everybody you know in the Kansai area is most likely fine.

Tokyo was still rather far from the epicenter (nearly 400km) and was shaken more seriously (upper 5 on the Shindo scale), but there wasn’t any major damage. If you have friends over there and haven’t heard back from them, it is most likely due to cellphones, electricity and transport being down for many hours (nuclear reactors are automatically stopped when major earthquakes occur). but they should be fine too.

Of course, the region north of Japan (Tohoku, particularly Miyagi-ken and the city of Sendai) have been hit most violently: the earthquake occurred about 200km off the coast of Miyagi-ken and registered a 7 in that area (the highest on the Shindo scale: about the same as Kobe during the Great Hanshin earthquake of 95). The ensuing tsunami (over 10m) and many large-scale fires have led to massive destruction in that region. But I am sure you have seen all this on the news already.

If you cannot reach people in that area or haven’t heard from them in a while: do not panic. Infrastructures are badly damaged, large parts of the phone and electricity grid are still down or saturated… And a lot of people may have had to leave their house in a rush without grabbing their cellphones. This doesn’t mean they aren’t OK.

Thanks for worrying and let’s hope the final toll isn’t too heavy.