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Thanks for listening.
From San Francisco, I'm Danny Wood.
And it's one minute after 7 o'clock, you're listening to Radio Station WBAI New York.
The time, well actually, time being 7.01, it's time for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a cough.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
And getting started by the program is Off the Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Mike, Dot Rett, Rob T. Firefly, Voltaire, Kyle, Jim, and Philadelphia Bernie S.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
Well, it's been one hell of a week for the world, that's for sure.
Watching news developments coming from the other side of the planet
and seeing how quickly things can just spiral out of control.
Of course, referring to the, you know, I don't think I have to mention it to people listening in the press,
but people do listen to our show 10 years in the future and they might wonder just what is the significance.
Well, last Friday, Japan was hit by a, what was it, 8.9? Was it 9.0?
It's been upgraded to a 9.0.
It was a 9.0 earthquake which then caused a tsunami which was devastating
and all kinds of videos of that we've been seeing all over the place.
And then, as if that weren't enough, a nuclear disaster as one particular nuclear plant
has been hit by all kinds of explosions and fires and radioactive leaks
and nobody really knows what's going on.
In fact, the headline in today's New York Times,
at Japanese nuclear plant.
United States urges wider no-go area around nuclear plant.
Anger over Japan nuclear exodus.
There's all kinds of chaos and mayhem going on over there as we speak.
We don't know a whole lot about the situation that we can really help with.
But people are angry over the exodus?
Well, people are angry over the way it's being handled.
Basically, information just isn't out there as much as you might expect.
There are six reactors at the Fukushima plant.
And according to this BBC entry, this environmental correspondent said,
over the days of the crisis, attention has switched from reactor 1 to reactor 3 to 2,
back to 3, and now to 4.
And this is a surprise because reactors 4, 5, and 6 were shut down
at the time of Friday's earthquake, with some or all of their fuel rods extracted
and left in cooling ponds that each reactor building has under its roof.
And once a reactor is turned off, radioactivity and heat generation in the rods
die away quickly.
And the question is...
Not that quickly.
I'm sorry?
Not that quickly.
Well, apparently not.
The question is, why is it that the Tokyo Electric Power Company,
known as TEPCO, has warned the possibility of re-criticality is not zero?
I don't think I've ever said that word before.
If you're in any doubt as to what this means, it is that in the company's view,
it is possible that enough uranium is present in enough density to form a critical mass
in the cooling pond, meaning that a nuclear fission reaction could start in the building
outside the containment shield that surrounds the actual reactor.
If that happened, it would lead to the enhanced and sustained release
of radioactive materials, though not a nuclear explosion.
Basically, there's a lot of misinformation and rumors going around.
And also, there are a lot of people who are being contained,
who are being isolated from the population because they've been exposed to radiation.
And I've been watching some video of this.
Families separated through glass.
And people on the wrong side of the glass aren't being treated very well,
according to what we've heard.
So what we're going to try to do now, we have one of our listeners.
Actually, Stuart from Tokyo has posted an incredible story,
just his observations on how technology worked
and how technology did not work throughout this crisis.
And you can find that on our main webpage, www.2600.com.
What we're going to try to do now is reach Stuart live over there in Tokyo,
where it's, I believe, 8 in the morning over there, 8.07.
And I'm not sure if the circuits will work.
That's one thing we have to keep trying if they don't.
There's been a lot of activity, obviously, calling into Japan.
And we'll find out more about that.
But before I make the attempt,
anybody else have any observations or comments
or things they'd like to share on this situation?
Yeah, just there seems to be a lot of,
especially if you rely on the American mainstream news,
a lot of sort of conflicting information about what's actually going on out there.
It's kind of hard to separate the sensationalism from the solid facts.
There's one blog. It's at MITNSEIbelieve.com,
though I might be wrong on the suffix.
But it's run by some experts at MIT
who are blogging the actual scientific facts of the situation as it develops
rather than the sensationalism and catchy headlines.
Well, have you seen examples of the sensationalism?
Just basically from every different direction,
there seems to be something, a completely different story going on.
And they all seem to be sort of apocalyptic.
And I think at one point, if you were watching enough channels,
you were assured that we were both doomed and perfectly safe
and in the process of exploding and just fine and secure forever
all at the same time simultaneously.
Well, let me just, for the sake of people
that might be looking for some alternative views,
apart from WBAI, apart from listening on the Internet
and finding different sources on the Internet,
if you have cable television and you're, say, in the cable vision area,
there are three channels that I can think of
that would be better than the domestic garbage that we tend to get here.
Channel 103 is Euronews. Channel 104 is BBC World News.
And the cable vision has also opened up Channel 265,
which is a live television station from Japan.
It's in Japanese, but it's a godsend for people
who are concerned and speak Japanese to find out what's going on over there,
at least in the view of Japanese media.
Here in Manhattan-time, Warner Channel 133 is CNN International,
which is very different from CNN Domestic,
and you'll get a lot more international coverage
and live breaking news and things like that.
That's NHK, the Japanese broadcaster?
It's not NHK. No, it's not NHK.
In fact, I can't find anybody who carries NHK World,
which is the English language world network equivalent to BBC World News.
You can watch that online, too.
But the station that's on Channel 265 on cable vision
is Japanese, purely Japanese.
It's interesting to see.
You see all kinds of maps and diagrams and video footage,
but it is all in Japanese,
as it should be for people who are most concerned
with what's going on over there.
Okay, we're going to give a try calling overseas here.
Let's get a dial tone.
All right.
And it's going to hit those digits
and hopefully not transmit them over the air.
And we tried this before the show, and it actually worked,
so fingers crossed.
Let's see how long it takes.
And rings in Japan always sound like they're underwater for some reason.
And that one does not.
Oh, dear.
I wonder where this is going.
Are you calling a real Japanese phone number?
Yes.
We called it before, and it sounded like a real Japanese number.
But if this didn't work, it should be going to an error message or something.
Okay, here we go.
We're sorry.
Your call cannot be completed as dialed.
Please check the area code and number and dial again.
Okay, so she's accusing me of not dialing properly,
which is entirely possible because I didn't hear the tones.
It's possible that the sticky keypad here did not work.
So we're going to try it again.
We can maybe transmit the country code at least over the air.
Oh, yeah, okay.
The country code is 81.
We're dialing 011 and then 81,
and then the number, which I'm going to turn it down for
and hope that it actually goes through.
Did we hit a pound sign at the end of it last time?
Because I didn't do that this time.
All right.
Sometimes you should hit a pound sign when dialing overseas.
Sometimes not.
Let's try this.
There you go.
Hello, Stuart speaking.
Stuart, hi.
It's Emanuel off the hook.
Hi, how are you?
Good.
The real question is how are you holding up?
I'm okay.
It's a beautiful, sunny morning here in the Miura Peninsula just outside of Tokyo.
Well, we've been hearing all kinds of disturbing reports that Tokyo itself,
because of the direction that the wind was blowing earlier,
was in the path of the plume, the radioactive plume,
and a lot of people are walking around with masks or not walking around at all.
How would you compare the scene in Tokyo right now to the way it was, say, a week or two ago?
I haven't been up to Tokyo since the quake.
I've been working at home mainly because of the disruption to the train service,
and that's a follow-on because of a lack of power.
So there's the rolling blackout which affected train service.
But I have in front of me an online Geiger counter,
and we're now at 20 counts per minute, which is totally normal in the Tokyo area.
A few days ago I saw it spike up to about 40 on the counts per minute,
but, again, that's very normal.
There's areas around the world, populated areas, where 100 is the norm.
We can see fluctuations in the radiation level,
but in the Tokyo area they're well within the norm.
How far away are you from the actual plant?
We're a few hundred kilometers away.
It would take about maybe five hours to drive up there from Tokyo,
and I'm about an hour from Tokyo.
And the maximum evacuation area that I have heard said is something like 60 kilometers,
I believe is the highest.
The Japanese authorities are saying more like 10 or 20 kilometers.
Well, what they've imposed is a 20-kilometer kind of exclusion zone
where everybody's been evacuated,
and then from 20 to 30 kilometers it's a stay-indoors-as-much-as-possible zone.
We're getting various reports from around the world about this,
and they say that's the norm for this scale of accident right now.
It's bizarre because this is happening,
and, of course, there was a double natural calamity that occurred on Friday,
the major earthquake and the huge tsunami,
and it's almost like that's being put on the back page
because of all the fear about the radiation and nuclear accident.
But how are people, how is the media handling all of this?
You're right there.
The media seems to be very much focused on the nuclear situation right now.
There's constant press conferences going on on the Japanese TV regularly talking about that.
We're seeing quite a lot of video coming in.
As various towns have been reached and communication reestablished,
the home video that people took is gradually coming in.
So even days later we're getting on-the-street video of the tsunami rolling in
and washing whole communities away.
I think many of us have seen a similar, if not the same, video.
It's simply shocking to see that.
What is your view of how the NHK and the rest of Japanese media have been handling the story?
I think NHK is almost in waiting for this kind of disaster.
The other TV channels also and media, they react very quickly.
We have earthquakes, as you know, on a regular basis.
Always the program will stop the live camera from wherever the earthquake has taken place.
Usually there's a camera in the newsroom,
so you see the cabinets shaking and people putting on hard hats from the local TV stations.
Then outside the TV stations they have the cameras on the street looking over,
which show signs wobbling,
or cameras in the ports that are expected to receive a tsunami.
In most cases, like 99% of the time, nothing happens at all.
It's just a very small quake.
If a tsunami happens, it's 10 centimeters.
Even at that time, there's an illustrated map projected over the screen of the regular TV program,
which may continue running,
which is showing the red areas where the danger is thought to be.
People ready in helicopters seem to go out immediately over affected areas,
because in many cases it's not clear what the actual extent of the quake damage is.
I'm sure the government are watching the same TV program as those who use helicopters go out and film it.
This time we saw, as you said, the extraordinary scenes of the tsunami coming in over the airport
and the farmland just washing away glass houses in a big brown dirty wave.
I think that's never been seen before.
I think this is the first time that the actual footage has been displayed on live TV.
When I was in the office, I was getting a lot of messages, seeing a lot of messages coming in.
It was unbelievable what people were describing, because they didn't know how to describe it.
Secondhand, we really didn't know what to make of it.
Then we could start to see the TV by ourselves and understand, wow, this is something very different.
Yes, it really is. You say you saw pictures of the tsunami happening live over TV?
Yes. People who were in their house and watching TV would have seen it live.
The channel would have immediately gone over to the helicopter view.
I was receiving, looking at Twitter at the time, and many messages coming in
with people just describing what they were seeing on the TV.
You wrote an amazing piece that's currently featured on our front page
about just the various ways that technology worked and did not work throughout this disaster.
I think in particular you focused on social networks and how they played a part
and how certain things that you might expect to work weren't really working all that well.
That's right. As I've written about it, I suddenly realized a day or so afterwards
how all of this came together. At the time, we were just desperate for information.
The immediate thought is to call your relatives or your family nearby,
but just shortly after the earthquake occurred, the cell phone service was totally unobtainable.
The calls weren't going through.
It occurred to me that I was getting mail to my phone and other services
which are based on the IP network, and that was fine.
I really don't know why the cell phone service goes down, whether it's overloading at the time
or they want to retain the quality of service so they just don't accept calls
when the network is heavily used.
But all of those IP services, the web and even Skype, were working fine.
Some people were receiving calls from their relatives overseas via Skype on their mobile phone,
but they couldn't call their neighboring town on landline or on the mobile network.
A lot of people have changed over their analog landline to kind of integrate it
with the fiber Internet service, but that is only available when the power is up
and there were immediate blackouts in some areas.
Those people who had a fiber connection were down at that point, even with their landline.
I heard that the old analog landlines, people who had those, they could get through.
Wow. This sounds familiar.
It's something that we've been saying for years,
that the landlines are really the only way to stay connected in crises like this.
Now, how did the cellular network hold up?
It was really bad.
Again, the connection we had, we had three bars, four bars, perfect connection,
but you couldn't put a call through.
As I was saying, we were able to contact social networks via the IP services like the browser
and the client on iPhone and other smartphones,
so we could get feedback about, for example, the earthquake report,
the actual epicenter, the magnitude at the epicenter,
and I was able to contact friends later in the day to find a place to stay
because the trains all stopped, and quite soon it was announced
that they wouldn't be starting until the following morning.
So all train services in and out of Tokyo were down,
and many people stayed in their offices.
Companies immediately put their own kind of disaster plan into effect
and allowed people to stay and did their best to provide with food and drinks
and other comforts.
The way that you got that situation resolved, though, is interesting.
You posted your situation on Facebook,
and within a few minutes you started receiving offers of places to stay?
That's right.
Actually, I have a very kind of complicated setup where Twitter echoes over to Facebook,
so I didn't really intend to post it over to Facebook at that time,
but it just got picked up by my Twitter feed,
and people said, oh, yeah, if you're nearby, then please come over.
It was people that I hadn't thought about that actually were living quite close by,
but I would never have thought about calling them up and saying,
oh, could I stay with you?
But the friend that I did stay with, I got through to him via Skype chat,
so I could communicate real time on chat.
Then as I walked about 30 minutes to his place outside,
I wasn't quite sure which building it was,
so I called him on the Skype voice chat, and that worked fine.
But if you had tried conventional methods, just using your cell phone to call,
you wouldn't be able to get through at all?
That's right, yeah.
Very interesting.
That was Skype from the cell phone, but the actual cell network wasn't working.
Just to divert for a moment, the actual cell network, the type of system you use,
it's not anything like the system we use here?
Yeah, so there's various incompatible systems here.
We have the AU network, which is the CDMA network.
We have the Docomo network and the SoftBank network.
I forget which protocols they're running on,
but in general you can't use a standard GSM phone to make calls.
Nor can you use a CDMA phone, because when I was over there,
I had a CDMA and a GSM phone, and neither one worked.
Yeah, it's on a different frequency.
I see.
So other bits of technology that worked and didn't work, anything come to mind?
Yeah, so one of the things that was very useful was kind of real-time search.
I had a little bit been skeptical of the value of the real-time search,
which is sometime back Google paid a license fee to Twitter
just to take their whole stream of data,
and they put their own search engine around that.
And for the first time I used that to be able to look for a station name
or a train line and see the status at that time,
because people were complaining on their Twitter saying,
oh, the station's very crowded.
There's like a 500-meter line outside the station.
The website for the train company says it's up, but actually the doors are closed.
So by focusing in on a particular station and a particular train line,
I was able to know that a certain train station would be closed.
Or if you walked one stop down the line, that station at that moment was empty.
So it was very, very useful to plan my journey back home,
and in the end I traveled back on a near-empty train.
What was the service that you used for this? What service of Google?
It's called Google Realtime.
I think it's google.com slash realtime, or if you search on their site, you'll come up with it.
And you can search the real-time information that they have,
and then it will refresh the search.
Fascinating. So you'll see what people are saying as they say it.
And I guess going to the actual official websites wouldn't have got you any useful information at all
if you were even able to connect to them.
That's right. They just gave their expected service.
And what happened with the train, I passed through Shinagawa.
And so Shinagawa is a major terminus, and many people have to change there.
So the station became overloaded.
And so what they did, I think, was to just shut the gate on some lines.
And that allowed the trains from Shinagawa to leave empty
and start clearing down the line, picking up people,
so that when Shinagawa opened again, people would be able to go in the trains,
and there wouldn't be such a crush further down the line.
And by also shutting it, people were walking along the line to the next station,
just kind of walking home, and then finding that they could get on at the next station,
which gave like a 20- or 30-minute buffer so that the train station
could kind of reduce the density of the people there to be able to continue.
So I'm not sure how they planned for this, but about once a year,
we get a similar situation when there's a typhoon or some other trouble.
We're speaking with Stuart, one of our listeners and friends from Japan.
Stuart, now you're how far from Tokyo right now?
I'm about 55 kilometers, which is just over an hour on the train.
And I usually commute up there every day.
And would you have any trouble getting there today if you wanted to?
I think the train's on a reduced service today,
and one of the problems we've been having is that due to the power stations being taken offline,
Tokyo is very, very close to exceeding kind of the maximum power output
to consume all of the power output the electricity companies can generate.
So they've split the Tokyo and surrounding areas into zones
and having a rolling blackout for three hours at a time.
And when we were communicating earlier,
I think you mentioned that your rolling blackout was scheduled for 20 past the hour?
Yes, so it's quite funny because in my building and just my surrounding area,
we had the announcement over the loudspeaker system that there will be a blackout.
But my particular building hasn't been affected,
and a little bit around my building hasn't been affected.
And today I was thinking maybe there is some critical infrastructure in this local area,
and we're quite close to the Japanese self-defense force base,
so they probably don't want to take the base power down.
So I'm guessing that that's the reason why half of the town has been affected
and my half of the town hasn't been affected by that.
Stuart?
Yes.
Hi, Stuart. This is Bernie S.
Hi, Bernie.
Thanks for contacting us, by the way. It's great information you're providing.
I think you explained when we were corresponding via e-mail
that nationwide throughout Japan there's a mobile phone warning system in place
to warn people of tsunamis.
How did that work or not work this time?
Okay, so the warning system is fairly new.
So as of maybe two or three years ago in the normal Japanese feature phone,
it's been built in that the network will send a broadcast message
and a siren will go off, and it's the same sound no matter which phone you have.
So a few months back suddenly the whole room just filled with this siren
of an earthquake coming in.
And at first nobody knew what it was. It was the first time that it happened.
And it's very strange when all around you the same sound is occurring.
It's like a weird stereo effect because there are people in different parts of the room.
So that at the time seemed like a very good idea.
And the way it works is that the various monitoring systems
can pick up the earthquakes very quickly.
But the actual ground waves are quite slow in comparison to the speed
that we can transmit over the phone network.
So it's possible to get a few seconds warning that an earthquake will occur.
But on the Friday earthquake there was no warning at all by the system.
And I don't know what happened, why that didn't happen.
But after the earthquake had occurred, variously throughout the night
there were warnings coming over the mobile phone,
but mostly for kind of low-intensity earthquakes.
So right now it doesn't seem to be working very well in that you don't know what to do
when you hear the sound, like whether it's going to be a big earthquake
or a small earthquake, and in most cases it's been a small one.
Do you think that had that worked,
people would have been able to seek high ground soon enough to avoid, what do you think?
Well, for the people in the areas where the tsunamis occur,
they have regular drills, like at least once a year the whole town runs up to the hill.
And they know, they're trained from an early age at school,
like even the kids at school know exactly what to do to get under the desk
and to put on some kind of a head covering that they have.
So those areas where the tsunami occurred,
they had warning via the local government loudspeaker system,
and they knew that an earthquake, a very strong earthquake had occurred,
so they ran immediately.
As soon as they feel a strong earthquake, they run immediately.
But this time the earthquake came within nine minutes,
so you have nine minutes to decide which way you're going to go.
And I was reading today that in some of the places there's a blue line that's painted on the road,
and you just run along the blue line, and that will take you up to the closest point.
So pretty much there was nothing more they can do.
Once they heard that siren go off and felt the ground shake, they were running.
Stuart, you said there was some kind of loudspeaker system in your neighborhood
that tells you when the power's going to go out.
What's that all about?
Okay, so all around Japan, every neighborhood, there is a loudspeaker.
And once a day, about 5 o'clock, a tune is played over the loudspeaker.
It's kind of to tell children it's time to go home, stop playing in the park,
and just go back to your parents at dinner time.
Throughout the entire country, really?
Throughout all of the major cities and villages,
anywhere that's a small gathering of houses.
Now, we get announcements, for example, flood warnings when there's a typhoon
and other various warnings over the speaker.
But the interesting thing is that I can hear it in the distance.
I can hear the announcement in the distance, and then I can hear the announcement locally,
and then I can hear the announcement in the distance again.
So after the announcement finishes, I can hear the off-the-hook tone of the telephone system.
So it seems like they're calling in to some local system to broadcast.
Very interesting. I assume the off-the-hook tone isn't the same as it is here in the States.
It just sounds like they forgot to hang up the phone, and then you hear it clicks off.
Interesting. Now, I think you also mentioned that SMS messages weren't actually going through,
and there's really no way to know if they went through or not.
Yeah, that's right. We kind of suspected that they weren't getting through
because some people were just not getting replies.
So I had a direct message over Twitter, which I got, which said,
did you get my SMS? And I said no, because I hadn't got it.
And that text message never came.
And do you suspect that was the case throughout the country?
I guess so. I think it's just the whole network would have been overloaded at that point.
And at the very end, at New Year's Eve, like about 15 minutes before the countdown to zero,
there's often a message from the telephone company saying,
please don't send a message exactly at midnight, because the whole network would be overloaded.
Stewart, in Japan, at least in the metropolitan areas,
do a lot of people still receive television over the air?
And what about radio? Those systems would seem to be less affected by infrastructure outages.
Yeah, that's right. Over-the-air television is quite, well, pretty much the norm.
Some people are going to cable for just their normal TV.
And there's a transfer over to the digital system planned later in this year.
So we're switching over this year. Radio, of course, is constant throughout.
And I tend not to listen to the Japanese radio outside of the car.
But in this area, in the Kanto area, where Tokyo and the surrounding metropolitan area is,
because of the U.S. base, there's an actual U.S. radio station operating on 810 AM,
which is the Far East Network, or I'm not sure what its name is these days.
But that is for the military personnel who may be out and about in the area.
And so there's disaster-related information on that service in England.
I heard a report on BBC, actually, from someone who was living over there,
who said that it was rather hard for him to view Japanese media because—
and I might have this wrong, but basically it's part of Japanese culture to maintain a face
that things are as normal as possible and that any crisis is being dealt with
and that people should not panic.
Looking at some sample websites right now, I sort of see that being backed up.
I'm looking at CNN. Of course, this could also speak to our desire to have big headlines.
But the CNN headline has,
Spent Fuel Rods Exposed, Raising Concerns, MSNBC, Radiation Extremely High at Plant,
The New York Times, United States Calls Radiation Extremely High and Urges Deeper Caution in Japan.
And then I go over to NHK in Japan, and the headline is,
G7-G20 Talks to be Held on Quake-Hit Japan, No Health Risk 20 Kilometers Away from Plant,
New Power Lines Being Planned for Cooling System.
Do you get the sense that maybe it's being toned down a bit over there?
Well, it's difficult to say, really.
From what I know, the things that I've seen,
I feel that the outside media is a little bit hyperactive
and kind of making the story, looking for the story.
But as you say, the way that culturally people communicate,
things may not be said directly.
So when people, it's been said that the way to understand the communication,
Western communication, it is your responsibility to communicate to the other person
everything they need to know for them to understand what you're saying.
But in the Japanese situation, it's more that you give them enough information
and they are smart enough themselves to understand your clues as to what you're saying.
So there's a less directness in some of the ways that information will be communicated.
So when you have a news conference and it's translated into English,
and I think a lot of the, obviously the Western journalists are picking up the English translations,
they won't be getting the nuances of the Japanese way that it has been said.
So I'm always concerned about what is the real, obviously the real story,
and then looking at, trying to look at what foreign experts are saying about the situation.
But there seems to be a lot of misinformation, I think on both sides.
For example, from the pro-nuclear lobby, we'll be playing it down
and sending out information about there's no problem, this is within the design parameters.
And then the anti-nuclear lobby will be playing it up.
This is very dangerous, extremely dangerous.
So it's very difficult to know where the line is.
And that's taking up, again, a lot of time just reading through various news reports
and checking the science out.
Like when we hear that a gas, like it has been released,
radioactive steam has been released from the reactor,
then if you look at the science, you can find that that contains, for example,
radioactive isotopes of nitrogen, which have a half-life of seven seconds.
So within a few minutes, they'll be completely safe.
Now you wouldn't want to be standing next to that plume of gas when it comes out,
because it would be highly radioactive at that point.
But once it's in the air, then, within a few minutes, it's undetectable.
But as I was saying at the very start of the program,
like we're watching the Geiger counter,
and I think many people in Tokyo have learned a lot of physics in the last week.
I can imagine.
Yeah, it's very difficult to know when you see units about what does this mean,
this, for example, count per second.
What is the normal background radiation in your hometown?
Because in Tokyo, it's about 20 counts per minute.
In places in Europe, in England, where there's rocks that are like granite
and releasing radon and other nuclear active particles in the rocks, then it's 100.
So if Tokyo surges up to 100, well, we surged up a lot, and it's very detectable.
But then there are places in the world where they have that level of background radiation,
and people live there without worrying about it.
Stuart, at what point will you, if, how will you, what will you gauge,
use as a gauge to determine whether you will need to leave, and what would you do?
Well, that's the big dilemma right now.
I know many, many friends have actually left.
There's people who, as soon as the earthquake struck, took the ticket and flew out.
I'm established in this area.
I have my own family, my Japanese family in the area.
So I will be staying with them, and if they're evacuated, I will go with them.
But one of the kind of the, say, the canary in the mine will be the U.S. base.
If the U.S. base nearby evacuates, then that is a sign that it's time to think about it,
it's time to move, because they service nuclear-powered aircraft carrier there.
So they have on-site technicians there who are very familiar,
and they have all of the measuring equipment themselves,
so they're not relying on anybody else to give them information.
If they evacuate, then that's really time to go.
Now, the distance that you are from the epicenter of all this,
how are things by you so far as the people?
Do the people around you seem to be sort of still primarily in crisis mode
or trying to get back to normal, or how are things?
Well, it's very mixed.
I don't see anybody panic, even when you look at the centers where the people are staying
who have lost everything.
There's no panic there.
You see, on the tsunami videos, there is panic, obviously,
because that's an incident situation.
When I walk around, I see a little bit of tension.
For the first time ever, I've seen empty shelves in Japan.
I've never seen that.
But it's strange, really.
There is very little bread.
People are buying up bread.
You'd think that there would be a big run on rice,
but I think maybe people are thinking that they lose power, they can't cook,
so bread is something to stock up.
But that's not going to be useful for more than a few days.
In Tokyo, power saving is going on.
Everybody is trying to cut down as much as they can on their heating, lighting,
shop signs are off.
I think for the first time ever, Shinjuku and Shibuya were dark.
They're normally lit up at night, all through the night, with neon signs.
That's like the Times Square of Tokyo, correct?
Exactly, yeah.
It was dark.
I saw pictures of that.
Even in my local neighborhood, I can see quite a lot of shops
have turned off their lights at night.
It's almost a sign of support and solidarity if your light is off.
If you've got a big brand name sign there on the horizon,
it just means that you're wasting electricity.
Now, I think that this is a bit of a testament to the Japanese culture.
We were just talking a lot about how people, expats or just people living over there
or the foreign media is complaining about how there's not
the sensationalist coverage about this issue.
But then you're seeing this kind of issue that if it happened elsewhere,
you could easily see a lot of people panicking or running in the streets.
Just a lot of disorder.
Meanwhile, here we're hearing about how people are very orderly handling it,
even with there being shortages in food and rolling blackouts
and entire towns being destroyed.
It's very interesting to see.
Yes, I think there's a lot of fundamental things in the Japanese culture which help this.
Neighborliness is still highly regarded.
There are neighborhood festivals throughout the year.
Community groups.
Even outside of this kind of disaster situation,
in the wintertime, people will walk around the areas at nighttime
with banging a piece of wood together.
It's just like an old-fashioned sound, like a click-click sound you can hear at nighttime.
That's to remind people in the very dry winter to be careful with fires.
Because in the olden days, with all the houses made of wood,
if you had a fire in the winter, the whole village could go up.
Those kind of traditions still go on about being aware of danger.
Of course, in the Tokyo area, we're still expecting our big earthquake.
1923 was the last one, which was a huge disaster in this area.
The Sendai one is in a completely different plate in the geological region.
Tokyo is in a very dangerous place geologically.
There are three active plates that come together at one point.
In most places in the world, there are only two plates interacting at a time.
Tensions build up and are released by the earthquakes.
The other night, some of you may have seen, there was quite a strong earthquake close to Tokyo.
That was more towards Mount Fuji, on that side of the tectonic plate.
Whenever there's a release of tension in one part, it can mean a buildup of tension in another plate.
That could pass on the danger to another place.
Tokyo, as many of us know, is probably the most prepared city in the world for earthquakes.
But to give a sense, the earthquake that happened last Friday
was thousands of times more powerful than the one that decimated Haiti.
It speaks to what could have happened had you guys not been as prepared.
It would have been even more of a catastrophe than what we've seen so far.
That's right.
Especially after the Kobe earthquake, even the regulatory codes for buildings were stepped up.
Many things were rechecked.
We saw that the expressway in Kobe fell over when there was a large quake there.
They went back and they found that there were defects in the concrete.
There was a big program of re-strengthening all of the same kind of joints with extra steel cladding.
As you say, being prepared, it's probably the most prepared.
But on an individual level, I certainly now feel I wasn't prepared enough
because having a certain amount of supplies at home,
there were shortages in the stores for people hoarding.
At the moment, people are saying that toilet paper is in short supply.
It's purely due to people securing their own supply while it's in the stores.
Japan has a really fraught relationship with nuclear power and nuclear relations,
especially after Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Why do you think the Japanese population was willing to accept nuclear power stations in the country?
I mean, they don't have as many as France per se,
but why were they willing to build them there after the culture was so fearful of nuclear weapons?
Hello?
Hello?
Yeah, can I...
Okay, sorry.
Are you able to hear Voltaire's question?
I'm sorry, no, I missed his question.
Okay, I guess that's the microphone that doesn't work.
You know what?
It might be just as well as a great question,
but for you to answer that I think would take quite a while.
Basically, it was why are Japanese embracing nuclear power after the history,
you know, in the past?
Might it be something that they would shy away from?
And if you could answer that in just about 30 seconds, that would be just great.
Okay, well, I think Japan is heavily reliant on oil,
so there's no natural oil reserves.
So we have hydroelectric power and gas brought in from Brunei and oil.
So nuclear gives Japan the independence.
But as you say, I think there's no stigma about using the peaceful nuclear technology,
but whether it's safe to build the power stations so close to active fault is really under discussion now.
I'm kind of reconsidering whether that side of the argument is wise
because tsunami damage has really shown that it's dangerous to be by the sea.
All right, we've been speaking with Stuart, our friend, listener over in Japan.
In these last moments, is there any kind of an action
that you could suggest people here in the United States can take to help with the situation?
Yes, so please give generously to the international relief organizations that you know and trust.
Be careful not to get scammed online.
There was a report of many scammed domains set up with legitimate-sounding names.
So if you know the organization well, like the Red Cross and other organizations like that.
I know that the Tokyo Hackerspace now are starting some projects.
So if you can look at their homepage and see, especially if you can get involved
and support them, that would be great.
All right, Stuart, our thoughts are with you.
And of course, we'll stay in touch and get more updates as they come in.
But I really hope things improve and work out over there and that this tragedy will be overcome.
Again, thanks so much for talking to us tonight.
No problem. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
And we have this update.
We wanted to talk about the Bradley Manning case, the whole State Department controversy
where the spokesman actually had to resign because of things he said.
We'll speak about that next week.
But we do want to tell people that on the 20th, which is Sunday, actually on the 19th and 20th,
there will be all kinds of demonstrations throughout the country,
maybe throughout the world, about Bradley Manning.
Go to www.bradleymanning.org for updates on things that are going on in your area.
And write to us at oth2600.com with your feedback, comments, things like that.
Again, thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.
I wake up every morning and I'm stepping on the floor.
I wake up every morning and I'm stepping out the door.
I got faith in the sky, faith in the one, faith in the people rocking underneath the sun.
Because every bit of land is a holy land and every drop of water is a holy water.
And every single child is a son or a daughter of the one earth mama and the one earth papa.
So don't tell a man that he can't come here because he got brown eyes and a wavy kind of hair.
Don't tell a woman that she can't go there because she prays a little different to a God up there.
You say you're a Christian because God made you. You say you're a Muslim because God made you.
You say you're a Hindu and the next man a Jew. Then we all kill each other because God told us to.
Hello, hello. Hello, hello. Bonjour, bonjour. Bonjour, bonjour. Hola, hola. Hola, hola. Konnichiwa, konnichiwa.
Hello, hello. Hello, hello. Bonjour, bonjour. Bonjour, bonjour. Hola, hola. Hola, hola. Konnichiwa, konnichiwa.
Follow me, follow me, follow me. Let me take you to the dance center. To come and rock this rhythm.
Follow me, follow me, follow me. Let me take you to the dance center. To come and ski and camp.
Follow me, follow me, follow me. Let me take you to the dance center. To come and rock this rhythm.
Follow me, follow me, follow me. Let me take you to the dance center. Enough, yes.
So we dance to the rhythm. Bounce to the rhythm. Shake to the rhythm and you roll to the rhythm.
Sweat to the rhythm. Get wet to the rhythm. Make love to the rhythm. Clean up to the rhythm.
When you're moving, you come alive. And when you're grooving, in rhythm we survive.
So don't panic, don't panic. No drum machines, this is all organic.
Just Sly and Robbie on the drums and the bass. Sticky on percussion and we mashing up the place.
Giving you a beat you can rock and roll to. Giving you a sound you can shake your soul to.
So hip hoppers, funk rockers, moose rockers, even woodstockers. Don't need a passport, just send a postcard.
Send me a message, let me know how you are. Whether you are walking or driving in your car.
Throw your hands high, tell me who you are. Say hello, hello. Hello, hello. Bonjour, bonjour. Bonjour, bonjour.
Hola, hola. Konichiwa, konichiwa. Hello, hello. Hello, hello. Bonjour, bonjour. Bonjour, bonjour. Hola, hola. Hola, hola. Konichiwa, konichiwa.
Babo from Nigeria to Botswana. Babo from Botswana to Ethiopia. Babo from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe. Babo from Zimbabwe to Mexicana.
Babo from Mexico to Brasiliana. Babo from Brazil to Americana. Babo from America to Japan. Babo from Japan to China.
Babo from Montana to Pakistan. Babo from Pakistan to Australia. Babo from Australia to Bangladesh.
Yeah, the Rastaman. Yes, they're going after the poor man from the army because he leaked the government secrets and ting.
Oh, do you know what? I have the wrong accent. I need the accent for St. Paddy's because tomorrow is St. Paddy's Day.
Which that means today is March the 16th, 2011 at WBAI New York 99.5 FM.