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Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake
- patio11 16y agoThere is a bit of overlap here with my comments on HN the last couple of days. I've had to explain it to 100+ friends, family, customers, clients, etc, so I figured I might as well polish it and put it somewhere public. At the risk of stating the obvious: I am not "HN's Japan Guy." There are many, many HNers in Japan. A few dozen of them make it out to the Tokyo meetups. There are many, many perspectives on this disaster -- this is just my wee little contribution from a place well removed from most of the worst scenes.
- daniel-cussen 16y agoYou're the only prolific HNer in Japan, though. You have also lived in the West, I believe, so that informs your perspective.
- bcl 16y agoThanks for posting this.
- adrianbye 16y agoexcellent post and exactly what i suspected. i think the news should steer back to the middle east and libya in particular right now; thats where things hang in the balance and can impact billions of lives.
- HSO 16y agoabsolutely. i have no doubt that the japanese people will continue to deal with this in the most admirable way. where attention could make a serious difference now is in libya and the wider region. speaking from germany, libya now gets allocated about a minute in the main news and you can see the political pressure for an intervention dropping while german politicians are now starting a stupid discussion about nuclear energy.
- cperciva 16y agoI am not "HN's Japan Guy." Perhaps not, but I'd say that you're probably the best writer out of HN's Japanese Guys. (No offense intended to other HNers from Japan -- I'd say that you're one of the best writers on HN from any location.)
- create_account 16y agoI don't know about best -- most frequent commentator definitely.
- po 16y agoI'll give him highest ranked writer. He is a very clear writer but no need to make it a pissing match. Our friends at other startups here pen some nice articles as well for example. Besides, he's fully absorbed one Japanese quality: he probably wont accept your praise without deferring it. :-)
- lisper 16y agoDo you happen to know whether Godaido Hall in Sendai survived the tsunami?
- patio11 16y agoI live several hundred miles from Miyagi prefecture. If this is a matter of life-or-death importance to you, find my contact info and I will find someone for you to speak to about it. If not, wait a few weeks and the prefectural tourism board will be able to help you out.
- lisper 16y agoNowhere near life-and-death. I just visited there about a year ago, was curious, and thought you might just know. I'll wait for the official word.
- nandemo 16y agoPatrick, that is a great write-up. I live in Tokyo. On Sunday, I was looking at the buildings on the way to the train station. There were no visible cracks, except on a few old buildings which might as well have had the cracks before. Almost all businesses were open, etc. Edit: as Patrick says, civil order continued. However, there were huge traffic jams and I witnessed a traffic argument turning violent. This is really rare in Japan.
- lubos 16y agoI just realized you are the guy who made bingocardcreator. Man, I know you forever since I used to be joelonsoftware regular before HN just like you :) anyway, thanks for write-up and good luck
- Klonoar 16y agoThank. Fucking. God. I am getting increasingly tired of explaining these points to everyone who asks me (currently in Tokyo). A well worded piece that I can just link to, very nice to see at the moment.
- pokjhnboi 16y agoNo thank Fucking engineers. God did the deed - engineers countered it. Given the few 1000s casualties against a Mag8.9 earthquake I think God lost this one
- pieter 16y agoPerhaps someone can tell about about the perception of nuclear reactors in Japan after the earthquake. Is there any knee-jerk reaction calling for the demolition of all existing reactors and stopping of all plans, or do most people have the same reaction Patrick has, seeing this as somewhat of a success? Is there any hysteria about the current problems with some of the reactors?
- patio11 16y agoInterest in the nuclear question is running very high. Japan historically has a complicated relationship with nuclear power, for all the obvious reasons. (Heck, I got freaked out when I saw the word "hibakusha" used in print today in a context not related to WWII.) I would characterize the tenor of reports I saw on NHK earlier as "visible concern" on the part of the anchor and "restrained professionalism" on the part of their expert guests I've said this before, though: Japan is a big country and it's diversity is often underappreciated. There is largely not a monolithic Japanese viewpoint on this. The same goes for just about everything. (See also: the United States.)
- huhtenberg 16y agoI read what you wrote in the linked post, and your view of the situation appears to be... erm... too bright if you will. Were there not repeated cooling system failure resulting cooling pumps running on batteries (that needed to be swapped every few hours)? This sounds to me less like "something working as designed" and more like scraping last fallback options. Releasing (lightly radioactive) steam to ease the pressure in a chamber they have no view or control over doesn't sound that much better either. Nor does the evacuation of 140,000 people "from the area around Fukushima". All in all, based on the quotes of Japanese authorities that sip into the Reuters' feed - they did not have a situation under full control at several points. They handled it as professional as it's possible, no doubts about it, but it could've unfolded differently.
- anonymous246 16y agohttps://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors/ https://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-w...
- shadowsun7 16y agoThank you, patio11. I saw this on Twitter and read half of it with my mouth hanging open. (Somewhat related: this great post by Makiko Itoh http://makikoitoh.com/journal/memorable-tweet-japan-earthquake http://makikoitoh.com/journal/memorable-tweet-japan-earthqua...) I can't help but think what a disaster of this scale would look like in almost any other country but Japan. Checklists at almost every level of response is unimaginable in most countries I know (though maybe Singapore ...). If this were a 3rd world nation things would have been very, very different.
- rmc 16y agoI can't help but think what a disaster of this scale would look like in almost any other country but Japan Probably might look like the 2010 Haitian earthquake or the 2004 Indian ocean earthquake/tsunami http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_ocean_earthquake http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_ocean_earthquake
- mantas 16y agoAgreed. After living in Japan for a while, european point of view on this earthquake makes me smile. Anyway, prayers and best wishes to Japan. On nuclear reactors: I bet Japan will restart them soon. Give them a month, max 3. For the fcks sake, they still hunt whales. IMHO Japan is one of those countries that still don't give a damn about loud-screamos. Although they'll upgrade their plants to prevent failure like this one. Kudos to them.
- ugh 16y agoWhat is the European view? I have been told time and time again in the German media that Japan is prepared for disasters like this as good as one can be prepared, that they know exactly what to do [0] and that everyone is coping with it without much fuss. I have also seen several maps of the affected regions, showing clearly that not all of Japan is affected. The blog article wasn’t that surprising to me and seemed very much congruent with media reports (at least in Germany). Still, several thousand people died in the third biggest economic power in the world, that’s obviously going to get a lot of coverage and moms are going to call because that’s how moms are. [0] Approximate quote from one report I saw: “There’s no student who doesn’t get to take a ride on the earthquake simulator, no kindergartner who doesn’t learn how high tsunami waves can become.”
- mantas 16y agoAt least in Lithuanian mass media coverage in one sentence is "Shit did hit the fan". And featured article in biggest news website this weekend is notice issued by National Nuclear Smth saying nuclear stuff shouldn't hit us. Probably. I haven't seen single article in local media saying how well Japanese survived the earthquake/tsunami. It's more about how shitty situation (usually with ever-rising dead/missing headcount) is and rat-race to find worse pictures of post-apocalyptic Japan.
- ugh 16y agoShit did actually hit the fan. Several thousand people are dead. It could have been much worse but it is bad.
- nborgo 16y ago"An earlier draft of this post said 'lucky.' I have since reworded because, honestly, screw luck. Luck had absolutely nothing to do with it. Decades of good engineering, planning, and following the bloody checklist are why this was a serious disaster and not a nation-ending catastrophe like it would have been in many, many other places." This is fantastic and worth repeating. Thank you.
- mechanical_fish 16y agoEnglish-language reporting on the matter has been so bad that my mother is worried for my safety. I can believe it. So, on the one hand, it often seems like HN spends way too much time absorbed with inside-baseball conversations on the design of social news. How do we keep social-media communities intelligent and informative? How do we prevent them from being constantly trolled, dominated by sugar-coated memetic fluff (e.g. "things on fire"), spammed by marketers, or deliberately hijacked by paid sockpuppets, fanatical propagandists, and well-funded PR campaigns? We go on and on about this stuff, routinely. But on the other hand, we worry about these things because they are important, and because we still haven't done enough. Especially in the USA, our failed media infrastructure is a very big problem. It creates an environment where everyone is either perpetually ignorant or perpetually afraid, or both, and it fuels random acts of sabotage and irrationality, and it serves as a constant drag on our civilization's energy. So when, as an engineer, I think about ways to advance my favorite design and engineering projects - smart civic design, renewable energy, robotic exploration of space, cheap and widespread applied genetics, popular appreciation of science, promotion of the creative arts - it always seems to come down to education and information. Here we have an example: Why, in a world where we can build a global information system like this one, must patio11, with obvious reluctance, spend so much time restating the obvious? (And, indeed, he must spend this time, because the alternative is that many of our friends, and relatives, and especially our parents run around like Chicken Little.)
- gbhn 16y agoThanks for this post. The suppression of bullshit is a glaring hole in our media environment. It's at least moderately plausible that intelligent and informed posts like Patrick's here can now get very wide distribution thanks to the internet. But what we don't have is a good way to incent the more hairspray-reliant members of the media sphere to read things like this and become informed.
- Natsu 16y agoPeople seek the most exciting news. The most outrageous headlines get the clicks, even from people who should know they're exaggerations. If you want to fix the news, start there.
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- rbarooah 16y agoIf I could vote this up high enough to reach the pages of the NYT, then I would. It gives so much perspective on the kinds of things other governments and societies could actually be doing right.
- alexandros 16y agoI hate to be -that- Greek, but the word typhoon in English is arguably either Greek or Arabic in origin. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=typhoon http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=typhoon May the mocking commence.
- patio11 16y agoWell, you learn something new every day. (The Japanese word, borrowed from Chinese, sounds like "taifuu.")
- burke 16y agoI had to stop and think about that one for a while. Are there any cases that you know of where a Japanese word is anglicized before becoming an English word? It seems like english speakers have an easy enough time guessing at Japanese pronunciation that we normally keep the direct romanization. This is why "typhoon" seemed weird to me. It makes a lot more sense that both languages would have imported it from Greek.
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- chc 16y agoActually, there are several like that. The most salient one in this case would be "tycoon." A few more: - skosh - bokeh (a photography term referring to a certain kind of blur in English) - rickshaw
- Paulomus 16y agoYou can see the etymology of tycoon at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_magnate#Etymology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_magnate#Etymology The borrowing pre-dates the Hepburn romanization system which wasn't developed until the 1880's.
- jrockway 16y ago
- jkuria 16y agoGood to hear you are safe Patrick! And thanks for educating us on Japan's Geography etc
- olivercameron 16y agoThis is a great write-up, thanks Patrick. Very much agreed about the hyperbolic news coverage, my Mother called me at 3am to warn me that a giant tsunami was about to hit San Francisco (where I live). Human engineering really prevailed this time. Still, shockingly sad to see videos like this: http://ow.ly/4dvh0 http://ow.ly/4dvh0
- X-Istence 16y agoThank you Patrick for a very insightful and interesting piece explaining how Japan is engineered to react in situations such as these. The checklists are absolutely fantastic. I've been a part of writing various different disaster manuals that were to be used in the event of X and none of them had checklists, I am going to have to add that in.
- benohear 16y agoBrilliant article. I have written to the UK Guardian and Independent encouraging them to syndicate it.
- adelevie 16y agoArticles like this really demonstrate the value of HN as a community. Most people would never think a relatively obscure software blog would be a source of some of the most reliable information about an event that the entire world is watching. Because we read HN (probably more often than we should), we are more informed than a sizable portion of news consumers.
- guelo 16y agoI thought the tone was unnecessarily aggressive.
- mattdeboard 16y ago> "Japanese does not have a word for excessive preparation." Neither does English, as you've just demonstrated!
- pmjordan 16y ago"over-preparation" I'll admit, it's hyphenated.
- damncabbage 16y agoIf we go that way, Japanese has something like 具え過ぎる (preparing-too-much). (I'm going to stop nitpicking now. patio11's original phrase was humorous, which is all it probably needed to be. :D )
- Natsu 16y agoWhat's wrong with "overkill"?
- cma 16y agoFor starters, it doesn't have anything to do with preparation
- lambda 16y agoYeah, this is a fairly common snowclone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone) that is often false, or when true transmits very little information at all: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3001 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3001 Just because someone doesn't have a word for something doesn't mean they have a concept for it; they might express it in two words instead of one. Also, most of the time you hear the claim that a language doesn't have a word for something, the claim is wrong, and the language actually does have such a word, while the person in question is ignorant of the language they are talking about (I presume that patio11 is not ignorant of Japanese, but may just be making a sloppy generalization). It's used as a way of demonstrating that some entire culture thinks or acts in some particular way, which is usually a poor approximation of reality. While there are distinct cultures that have distinct practices, cultures are generally not so homogenous as to not even have a way to express a particular concept that goes against cultural norms.
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- lwat 16y agoAnyone with a mirror please?
- patio11 16y agoI'm getting hammered pretty hard (Jimmy Wales decided to retweet it), and discovered a bug in my Apache configs, but have fixed it. It should hopefully hold up. The larger bug is, of course, using Apache when if this had been on Nginx I would be snug in my bed right now instead of getting paged. shakes fist
- lwat 16y agoThank you!
- gnosis 16y agoHere's a mirror: http://www.kalzumeus.com.nyud.net/2011/03/13/some-perspective-on-the-japan-earthquake/ http://www.kalzumeus.com.nyud.net/2011/03/13/some-perspectiv...
- hunterp 16y agoNukes are only "safe" when built to spec like the functioning,socialist government of Japan is capable of. And then very "intelligent" blog articles try to rationalize a cancer causing, radiation inducing thing. Nuke plants that are old, not kept up to date, etc are very very dangerous. As economies ebb and flow, the demand for energy always is present, but the resources to keep a plant up to spec are not. Sustainable resources like hydro, wind, solar, geothermal and tidal are far less worrysome, on a different level of dangerous, and do not require disaster contingency plans after contingency plans. Keep It Simple Stupid, nukes are not simple and they are not stupid, let us usher in an era of idiot proof nuke free earth that allows for energy independence from the empire of the nuclear grid. To the solarnet! To the hydronet! To the geonet! To the windnet! To the tidalnet!
- mistermann 16y agoI have to assume you are joking?
- hunterp 16y agoNot joking at all. The reason sustainables are not super popular is that they have high initial investment costs, and represent decentralized power. Unless you have a united force supporting them like the spanish government (Spain is one of the most sustainable countries) or the recent 10 billion dollar investment for offshore wind by South Korea, you are not really going to win the economic battle necessary to get us going sustainable. Sustainables are a form of decentralized power, so there are a lot of reasons why centralized power does not want it to exist.
- hunterp 16y agoSince this thread started, Japan has now 3 failed reactors, and 1 approaching meltdown. I take that back. No government, private industry, etc, no matter how organized is equipped to handle nuclear energy at the scale they currently operate at. There are nuclear projects that operate on 1/100th the scale. And this represents a decentralization of power. I'm still not interested in nuclear power. There are so many lucrative, healthy, green, sustainable alternatives.
- c00p3r 16y agoThat's why I hage narcissists. They use any opportunity to showof and promote themselves.
- charlief 16y agoThank you for this and it was highly informative, but the article's tone seems a bit apathetic to me. It is still tough for me to stomach even a little engineering pride in the immediate wake of a tragedy of this magnitude. I know the policies and procedures in place worked as they should for the earthquake's immediate damage, but what about the specific preparedness for the tsunami, which will be the largest cause of causalities. It is an enormously challenging problem, but surely more could have been done. Also: Would be better to say Great Britain and Honshu are about the same size instead that Honshu is larger (Britain is slightly larger). Leiman Shock: slight spelling error in Lehman Brothers?
- Helianthus16 16y agoMore can always be done. Confining your reaction to the emotional is uninformative and exactly the sort of panic that our media creates and is creating about this event. If you can't slip smoothly from being sad about the death and destruction to analyzing the disaster response dispassionately, that's your problem.
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- charlief 16y agoI think a comprehensive discussion includes the large moral impact: causalities from tsunami. I believe the article was pretty apathetic to this matter, and the high-number of causalities may conflict with the premise that everything went as planned. You said more can always be done, but I would like to know what. I think it is pretty self-righteous to prioritize our media-distortion matters over this question. Perhaps I had poor choice of words, but I believe this does not entirely invalidate my point.
- Helianthus16 16y agoThis post as a whole is not a comprehensive discussion of the quake. It is explicitly about the media distortion of the event. If your point is valid it remains off-topic. Additionally, your language indicates you're still not grasping the problem we are examining. There is no "premise that everything went as planned." That is absolutely not his point at all. His point is that there is a hugely complex system that performed admirably, that emergency relief systems are a war against the unexpected. I think it's pretty self-righteous to prioritize the decision-making that the Japanese will take care of on their over examining and controlling our own reactions, reactions based on a poor understanding of the emergency response and hysterical reporting.