japandemic

38 y.o. Canadian English teacher aids and comforts 20 y.o. Japanese college student in her time of need.

Dateline: Kyoto.  2011, March 18.

Gonna party like it’s March 09!

As she was in WWII, Kyoto has been mercifully spared destruction, this time by the earthquake / tsunami 1-2 punch.  In fact, it is eerily normal here.  If it weren’t for news feeds on the computer and all the agitatingly earnest Facebook postings, you wouldn’t know anything was amiss.

Stores have goods, people go to bars, get seats on trains.  We complain about the brutal hayfever season, girls wear short skirts in weather warm or cold.

An older Japanese woman lectured me the other day that only foreigners are panicking (ed. note:  I was).   In the same breath told me that her husband just had to ship 3 boxes of supplies to their new daughter-in-law and her infant son in Niigata (Sea of Japan side).  This moderately dim bulb (the new mom—her elderly mom sharp as a ninja blade) had heard something about rolling blackouts (3 hours x 2ce a day) and late in the game decided to hunker down with supplies.  When she strolled into town she was  confused, then horrified, to see shelves stripped bare.  Phoned in gaijin-like panic for her father to send diapers, TP, cup o’ noodles, water, instant ramen, formula, milk, biscuits, beans, penlight & batts (all full scale flashlights and D batts gone from local stores, sent on to Tokoku they said).   I opined foreigners won’t eat that much cup o’ noodles, disaster or no.

Yet, the ship sails on.  Classes are getting taught, people work their jobs, the Nikkei is bouncing back, Buffett says buy!, the reactors are getting their juice and we shall soon see if the pumps have survived intact enough to work.

To the north there is godawful suffering, disease, mutilation and distress seen only in theaters of war.  Each in his or her own way is trying to do some bit to help.  Donate money of course.  Offer places to sleep, package and send boxes of supplies to strangers.  I hear of Tokyoites assembling boxes of supplies and putting them on the bus that now heads up to Sendai, saying just give the stuff to someone up there who needs it.

Or the Japanese IT engineer who loaded as big a box as would fit on his motorcycle, driving into Fukushima as far as he could gas-wise,  to give it to whomever seemed neediest.  Surfeit of choice, no doubt.

This intrepid American photographer hitchhiked up into the dead zone and documented his trip.  I just happened across his page on flickr and was impressed and humbled by the brass balls, grit, apparent Japanese language skills and heart of the guy.

I offer rehashed accounts of the reports I get off the BBC, Reuters, Al Jazeera, NHK English to my mom, who calls 3 times a day—or any time Fox News runs anything about events here—and she passes this info on to the extended family of concerned folks on both coasts and points between back in the USofA.

So foreigners, stop panicking* for God’s sake and get out there and do some good for your fellow adopted-countrymen!

*(Truth be told, none of the foreigners I know are leaving, thinking to leave, or hoarding.  Those bags bursting with Kirin Lager, Asahi Super Dry and can chu-hi?  That’s not hoarding, that’s just Thursday.)