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Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake (kalzumeus.com)
673 points by swombat on March 13, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 108 comments



There 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.


Patrick, 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.


You're the only prolific HNer in Japan, though. You have also lived in the West, I believe, so that informs your perspective.


I 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.)


I don't know about best -- most frequent commentator definitely.


I'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. :-)


excellent 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.


absolutely. 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.


Thanks for posting this.


I 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


Do you happen to know whether Godaido Hall in Sendai survived the tsunami?


I 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.


Nowhere 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.


English-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.)


I guess it goes without saying that this very thoughtfully composed post also implies is that it's not only the media infrastructure that is failed. But the answer is written into the post as well: be involved. Apparently everyone in Japan has a duty in times of crisis, and it's not something opted into.

I am genuinely jealous, after reading this post. In that I would love for _my_ country to have its shit together to this degree. That, also, goes without saying.


Japanese society is also ethnically homogenous (which increases trust and social capital - see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007....), hierarchical, and strongly favors social harmony over individual expression. I'm not convinced that a country like the U.S. could be as well prepared as Japan seems to be. I'm not saying we couldn't eventually overcome a similar scale disaster, but I think Japan is always going to have us beat in the immediate to short term aftermath.


"...strongly favors social harmony over individual expression."

I like how you put that. It describes my experience with Switzerland as well. I remember the pros and cons of being an American ex-pat there -- it could be quite rigid at times. As I get older, however, my frustration with this dichotomy appears to be growing. Individual expression can get off my lawn.


I live in a city of 2M people directly opposite the pacific from this. Our 50 person earthquake response team was disbanded last year after an investigation into police funding.

Of course since we are mostly on reclaimed land which will liquefy, all our drinking and firefighting water comes into the city across 2 ancient bridges and very few of the buildings have been earthquake retrofitted we aren't worried about the loss of 50 search and rescue people.


People 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.


Thanks 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.


"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.


I 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

May the mocking commence.


Interesting. The OED suggests that the word may have been borrowed into English three times, with the forms then converging, and settling on a Greek-transliteration type spelling. The three lines they trace are: 'typhon' from Greek, circa 1550s; 'touffon' or 'tufan' from Portuguese circa 1580s, via Urdu, possibly originally from Greek or Arabic; and 'tuffoon' or 'tuffan', from Chinese 'tai fung', circa 1700. It's possible the spelling is mainly from Greek, while the usage and modern meaning is mainly via a separate borrowing.


Typhon is a Greek titan, master of the winds. By some coincidence, the english derivative "Typhoon" sounds very much like the Japanese word "taifu", but it's obviously unrelated. The English (an other European languages) word definitely comes from Greek.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhon


I think it is more correct to say that all the typhoon words derive from Greek (or at least a common source). Europeans borrowed a cognate local word (tufan) to describe the cyclones of the Indian Ocean and 'correcred' the spelling to the Greek roots.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=typhoon&searc...


Well, you learn something new every day. (The Japanese word, borrowed from Chinese, sounds like "taifuu.")


I 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.


Unlikely. The first character in taifuu means "big", and the second means "wind". They came up with this on their own; and it's simply a coincidence that other languages have a word that sounds similar.


Actually, the first character in typhoon is 「台」, which means something like "stand" or "platform". It's also the first character in "Taiwan". I've read before that the word "typhoon" was of Arabic origin and came to Japan from Chinese, but the word spread to the West via Japan.


The original traditional Chinese character is 颱; the Japanese adopted the character 台 as a simplification of the original character (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai). Therefore, the "stand" or "platform" meanings of the 台 character are unrelated to that of 颱.


If you follow the link to 颱 from the wikipedia page to the wiktionary entry, you'll find that:

a) 台 is the simplified version of 颱 in modern Chinese

b) there is nothing in the entry that suggests it means "great" or "big", and that, in fact, the one character translates as "typhoon"

Also, if you check out the Japanese wikipedia page for 台風, you'll find that the Japanese spelled it 颱風 up until 1956. There's also a rational for the 台風 spelling suggesting that it may have meant that typhoons were great winds that came from the direction of Taiwan, which is why the 台 character was used (although none of the suggested etymologies are yet proven).


I only disputed that 颱 was related to the meanings of "stand" or "platform".

As for the meanings of "great" or "big", the OED and etymonline entries actually refer to a different character, 大, from the Cantonese pronunciation of 大風 (IPA: taːifʊŋ).

The Japanese and Chinese etymology of 颱風 is as convoluted as the English one that _delirium mentions above in a previous comment. It may have originated as a Western borrowing, be related to Taiwan as you have suggested, or be related to Cantonese 大風; it may have perhaps even been influenced by multiple sources.


Well, to be fair, I was only disputing the assertion that the first character in "taihuu" meant "big" (I'm assuming the author of the post assumed it was 「大」, a natural assumption to make). Giving a translation of the character at all was a side point. It's not like I said that "taihuu" meant "platform wind" or anything, only that the character in question meant something other than "big".

Further, you asserted that 「台」 was adopted into Japanese as a simplification of 「颱」, which I've shown to be false (it was adopted into Japanese as-is and wasn't simplified until 1956, and was also simplified in the same way in Chinese), yet people continue to upvote your incorrect assertion and downvote mine. Not that I hold that against you; you seem reasonable enough. But it does make me wonder what people's motivations would be.


Wrong character for the first. Going back to the Chinese (which is presumably where Japanese got it, given that it uses Chinese characters), the "tái" (颱 or 台, depending on whether you prefer traditional or simplified script) in "táifēng" is first-tone (ascending); the word that means "big" in Chinese is actually "dài" (大), fourth-tone (falling). Japanese also uses 大 for "big."


Besides that, I'm pretty sure the original Greek word was pronounced something like "to fawn." It's only once English speakers bastardized it that it started to resemble the Japanese word.


Actually, 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


You can see the etymology of tycoon at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_magnate#Etymology

The borrowing pre-dates the Hepburn romanization system which wasn't developed until the 1880's.


Interesting narrative of the different originations.

http://books.google.com/books?id=sMiRc-JFIfMC&pg=PA141&#...


Thank. 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.


No 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


Take it to Reddit, please.


I think the thanks was for Patrick's article


Thank. Fucking. God.

...that you pointed this out. Yes, yes it was.


Sorry - I thought you meant

"thousands of people were killed - but one person survived, therefore a miracle, therefore praise god"


This is not the place for your partisan religious/political bickering.


> "Japanese does not have a word for excessive preparation."

Neither does English, as you've just demonstrated!


Yeah, this is a fairly common 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

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.


As a linguist? I agree, I don't like it, and literally that post went through my head when I was re-reading prior to hitting publish. As a writer? It is zippy and communicative, more than "The nation of Japan has chosen, through its political process, to invest a large amount of its resource surplus into disaster preparedness even though some observers believe it has long-since passed the point of diminishing returns."


As Zed Shaw, you could've gotten away with "Japan is justly famous for martial arts, cool gadgets, and staggeringly comprehensive preparations for just about anything. If Batman were a country, that country would be Japan."


It's a nice line, btw is it literally true? It fits with Deming, quality and six-sigma.

I ask, because Christensen claims that Japan success a few decades ago was because all their successful firms (Toyota, Sony, etc etc) began with disruptive innovations, that needed to be improved, with sustaining innovations. Aiming at quality works really well for this.

He then says their recent hard times are because those disruptive innovations have now become good enough - but the Japanese firms are still improving on quality. He contrasts this with the US, where new disruptive firms are being created all the time (aided by employee mobility, VC/angel/YC non-debt funding, open markets, start-up infrastructure, largely unregulated competition, and strong IP for R&D).


I think the difference is that Japanese disruptive firms can engineer things like planes, ships, cars - US disruptive firms enable you to play games about birds on your cell phone.


Based on surface news, it can look that way; but honestly it sounds like you're trolling.

US was first with mass-produced cars (Ford); Japan with games (Nintendo). Both these past innovations were disruptive.

Today, the US is pioneering consumer DNA testing (eg. 23andme), portable computers (iPhone/iPad - industrial uses are appearing, it's not just games);

The suggested case is that Japan doesn't seem to be innovating disruptively (although Nintendo has been working great at some disruptive stuff: wii and a 3D handheld). Disruptive innovation is possible in cars etc, such as the smartcar, and hybrids. Note that the all-electric car, Tesla, is from the US - and it's not clear that it will succeed. That's a big part of the disruptive game.

If anything, I'm pro-Japan, but mostly I'm a fan of disruptive innovations, and I sincerely hope that Japan will find a way to become disruptive again. Maybe it's harder because they have an aging population now... yet this could be a plus, because they could lead the world in innovations to cope with that, that the rest of the world will adopt when they catch up.

Can you give examples of Japanese disruptive innovation in planes, ships, cars? (I see your account is 14 hours old, and your comment history is a mix of intelligent discussion and reddit-style quips - I urge you to favour the former on HN).

EDIT if you are interested in constructive argument here, I'll offer some of Christensen's thoughts on disruption: it is lower-cost and/or targets non-consumers of an established product (e.g. as wii expanded the userbase of "game-players"), but it's not good enough for high-end consumers (e.g. hard-core gamers); over time it improves and replaces the established product when it does become good enough (unless the innovation is "co-opted", as Kinect is trying to do with wii).


Just like how English "doesn't have a word" for 我慢 ("gaman")[0], except it does (several, in fact)[1].

0: http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/sympathy-for-jap...

1: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/%E6%88%91%E6...


What's wrong with "overkill"?


For starters, it doesn't have anything to do with preparation


"over-preparation"

I'll admit, it's hyphenated.


If 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 )


Perhaps 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?


Interest 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.)


I 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.


Worst possible case right now is a meltdown in the core (which is not explosive, just hot thermally and radioactively). A meltdown is not a problem because containment vessel is still intact and it's designed to handle a meltdown. It's just expensive and a bit dangerous to clean up radioactive sludge off the bottom of the containment vessel. (The building that blew off just protected the containment vessel from weather.) The article linked by anonymous246 explains in detail.



I guess the Japanese don't generate 30% of their electricity from nuclear power for fun or because it's a popular choice. It's by necessity -- Japan imports 99% of its oil and has only tiny coal reserves.


Wondering roughly what kind of cents per kilowatt hour they pay for electricity over there, I know nuclear is a lot more efficient energy generation but have no idea how this translates for the end consumer.


I'm a Tepco (Tokyo) customer. Looking at my most recent electric bill we're paying about 22 yen a kWh, or around 27 cents.

That'll probably go up with Fukushima out of commission.


Ah okay so it's not exactly the silver bullet for electricity costs, I saw that the uranium price had doubled in the past year or 2, might have something to do with it. For comparison here in Melbourne Australia we are at about 20cents per kwh, with a grid based mostly on coal fired power plants. That has jumped a great deal in recent years though, I was paying 17 a couple of years ago and just before that when I was living at home I think it was under 15.


Not really. Uranium price has very little, if any, effect on operational costs at a power plant.


Thank 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-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.


I 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/Indian_ocean_earthquake


Brilliant article. I have written to the UK Guardian and Independent encouraging them to syndicate it.


Articles 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.


I thought the tone was unnecessarily aggressive.


If 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.


This 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


Agreed. 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.


Re reactors: you're kidding yourself. The reacors that shut down regularly will be restarted, sure. But those where cooling failed will NOT run in a month or 3. Those where the core melted are gone beyond salvage.

And patio11 is talking bullshit as well: the situation at Fukushiuma may not be a Apocalyptic Nightmare Scenarios yet, but the systems did not work "exactly as designed", the situation it's not under control, and may still turn into a ANS if containment fails and the wind turns towards Tokyo (which is forecast to happen around Tuesday). Flooding the building with sea water is a desparate measure, not SOP.


I don't know about these particular reactors, but I've worked at nuclear power plants in the past and the final cooling backup plan was generally a variation of "fill the building with sea water".

The reactors I knew (I assume it's similar in Japan) each had a LOT of options for cooling them. Some options would allow regular operation (which requires very fine control of cooling), some options would harmlessly shut a reactor down (where "harmlessly" means without causing any damage to the reactor). The filling-with-sea-water option was "standard operating procedure" in the sense that it was in the manual as a standard procedure, but it's the kind of thing you only get to do once because after you've done it your reactor is permanently broken and won't be restarted.


Since AFAIK they were designed to withstand a 8.2 earthquake, they pretty much exceeded expectation. And we can reasonably count on the standards being upgraded significantly after this.

I like a lot the comparison of nuclear energy with airplane safety: when you look at the statistics, it's a lot safer. But when it fails, it makes the headlines.


The richter scale is pretty meaningless in that regard because it measures the total energy released by a quake, not the destructive power at a given point. To use it for a design spec, you'd have to specify the depth of the quake, the length and frequency of the shockwaves and, most importantly, the distance from the epicenter.

I'd be very interested to learn what those specs actually said. If it really was a Richter scale value, it would logically have to be at point blank, which this quake wasn't. If so, the energy that hit the reactors may well have been considerably less than what they were designed for,


Worse case scenario is core meltdown, which poses no risk to humans. The reactor melts into a concrete pit made specifically for that purpose.

Flooding the building with sea water is not something they came up with on the spur of the moment during this crisis. All of their options are well planned.

More info: https://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-w...


Desperate, but not unforeseen. I guarantee you that there is something on file at Japan's nuclear regulatory agency describing exactly what they're doing now and the circumstances under which to do it.

Nuclear engineering is imagining the worst case, every reload, and coming up with a plan for what to do to contain radioactive material if it happens.


Just to clarify - I meant reactors that are OK. Failed ones won't be restarted for sure.


There is quite a difference in the way the situation of the nuclear reactors are describe in patio's article and the way the media here presents it.

patio basically says everything is under control, nothing to worry about, no harmful radiation levels - not more than eating a banana or taking a long distance flight.

The media is talking about meltdown, nuclear catastrophe and there have been at least two explosions by now. US forces moved away from the shores due to radiation, Russia is worried about the wind carrying radioactive caesium and iod all the way over to them. As far as I can tell from news coverage, radiation levels did exceed 500 mikro-sievert, at times were as high as 1500.

It is just hard to understand what all this really means in terms of risk and how bad the situation really is. Meltdown and explosions at a nuclear plant just generally does not sound very safe and "standard procedure" to me.

Anyone can shed some light on what is going on there, from a technical and engineering and maybe even physicist point of view?


100 micro-sieverts is approximately equal to the radioactive exposure you'd get from one trip between Japan and Chicago.


What 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.”


At 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.


Shit did actually hit the fan. Several thousand people are dead. It could have been much worse but it is bad.


For a comparison of how bad it could have been, you just have to look 6 years back at Indonesia. The quake had pretty exactly the same strength, so I'd assume the tsunami was roughly as powerful.

The result: more than 10 times the death toll in an (I think) much less densely populated area. The effort and money Japan is able and willing to spend on earthquake/tsunami preparation has most certainly had a big effect. Even if devastation in the worst-hit areas is complete, a lot of people probably escaped because of the infrastructure and drills.


Arrrg! Why is nobody understanding me? My intention was never to even hint at any deficiencies in Japanese preparedness. But, well, shit did hit the fan! I don’t know what else I should call the death of several thousand people. Those deaths were probably unavoidable and certainly no humans are to blame for them.

Between 100,000 and 300,000 people (the numbers are still very much unclear) were killed during the or in the aftermath of the much weaker earthquake in Haiti and if you look at other earthquakes you see similarly high death tolls – that tells me very clearly that Japan was extremely well prepared and I never for one second doubted that.


I think I understood you quite well, I was just agreeing with you :)


> It could have been much worse but it is bad.

Guess the glass can be half-empty or half-full. FWIW, I'm also sitting in Germany and I'm mighty impressed by the Japanese response. It's bad but it could have been much worse.


I did not in any way say that the Japanese response was inadequate or even merely ok and I have seen nobody in the media making a statement to that effect (nuclear incident excluded – but that’s mostly about the lack of information and contradictory information).

Saying that the situation in the affected areas in Japan (which, even relative to Japan’s size, is quite a large area) is most certainly bad is in itself not at all a criticism of the Japanese response and I’m a bit baffled at how you could get that impression. There are certain things no diligent and excellent preparation can currently prevent (as evidenced by the horrible death toll).


Hmpf, I suppose this is a misunderstanding. I was just "playing" with your last sentence. I did not get that impression and certainly didn't (intend to) put words in your mouth.


Thank 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.


Thank 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?


More 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.


I 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.


This 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.


[deleted]


>I agree absolutely, but did this hugely complex system really perform admirably in the case of the tsunami?

Yes. I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but once again, your terminology indicates you're not grasping the problem. There is no perfect system, there will always be flaws.

In what sense is the system worthy of no admiration? Because that is what you are asking for: you're saying that a viewpoint that regards the loss of tens of thousands instead of hundreds of thousands as praiseworthy as somehow "apathetic" when really it's just realistic: things could have been much worse.


Good to hear you are safe Patrick! And thanks for educating us on Japan's Geography etc


Anyone with a mirror please?


I'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


Thank you!



Nukes 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!


I have to assume you are joking?


Not 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.


Since 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.




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