Posted on 03/18/2011 4:42:11 PM PDT by Chi-townChief
Unlike victims of earthquakes in Haiti, Indonesia or China, those suffering in Japan expect their government to work and can’t understand why a country as affluent as theirs can’t keep gasoline, the lifeblood of a modern economy, flowing and why towns across the northeast have been plunged into frigid darkness for five days.
“I never expected anything like this in modern Japan. It is like fiction,” said Yutaka Iwasawa, a 25-year-old forklift operator. With the first floor of his house under water, he and his family huddle on the second floor. They go to bed as soon as the sun goes down because it is too cold and damp to do anything else.
The military, which has mobilized 100,000 troops for relief work, delivers water in stricken areas, hunts for bodies and has flown risky missions to dump water on a nuclear power plant belching radioactive smoke. In Ishinomaki, soldiers operate from a baseball stadium on dry land.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Japan’s greatest strength is their people. Such discipline, no looting, and being able to keep stoically calm in such horrendous life and death circumstances. I wish America would take in refugees and relocate those wishing to leave who have lost everything...we could use people like that.
I know that they can put into a box what I can never get back in after I've taken it out. LOL!
300 Christmas tree lights in a match box! Give me a break!
The Chinese are definitely adept at copying.
The Japanese do some innovating, and in a world economy, are smart enough to have American design centers for a lot of products. Most all the Japanese (and Korean) cars are styled at facilities in California.
That’s the problem - their procedure-oriented “sheeple” approach to life is great for keeping public order but not so good for out of the box problem solving.
I dare say he's been infected with the American entitlement attitude. He's clueless of reality. The scale of the disaster is unimaginable.
Japan's handling of the nuclear reactors has been a fiasco at best.
I'm sure you'd have done so much better. /s
“Obviously - however, they shouls have realize the incremental, try and salvage what we can, approach was not the way to go with the old nuclear power plant.”
We can’t all be Bruce Willis, with editors to fix the decisions we should have made the other way. I suspect that most of this mess up was just a lot of incremental decisions made under extreme stress that didn’t work the way they hoped. Or maybe there was no way out once the tsunami took out the generators. Or maybe they just should have started encasing it in cement at the git go. But where would they have gotten the cement, given that the whole NE of the country was shut down and there was no power.
Maybe they should have known. Knowing what we know now, they should have thought if there’s a earthquake, we might get a tsunami also and that might wipe out the generators and . . . . Or we could eliminate all power plants—lots of people die in regular power plants.
But there’s no way to eliminate all risk ever, no matter how much you think it out in advance. I don’t know what the answer is. Maybe western civilization really is reaching it’s limits. We need x amount of energy and you can’t generate that much with politically acceptable risks.
Japan's regimented culture minimizes problems like looting. But, it also appears to stifle individual initiative. ("The nail that stands up gets hammered down".)
In the US, by now, some PO'd hardhat guys would have hiked out of the flooded area, commandeered some backhoes, bulldozers and Gradalls -- and started digging ditches to drain those saltwater lakes where there were towns before the tsunami.
Or, just as likely, hardhats from around the nation would have arrived with earthmoving equipment and trailers full of diesel fuel and set to work -- completely without any government instructions or support.
(At least, that's how would have worked here 50 years ago...)
Americans take pride in individuality and imitative.
The Japanese see these as weaknesses.
'Americans take pride in individuality and initiative'
The people here who like to compare the Japanese situation to Katrina to point out the “superior Japanese culture” forget that outside of New Orleans, the response to Katrina in the Gulf region was very good in truly catastrophic circumstances.
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