Earthquake and tsunami reaction in Singapore

We are glued to the television. We signed up for NHK, the Japanese public news network, only a few weeks ago, but we are so glad we have it. The earthquakes and tsunami in northern Japan have rocked the country, and we are getting the live feed. The images and stories are incredible - whole towns being washed away in minutes. We are very fortunate to have no family in the Tohoku region. We have some friends there that we have not heard from, but we are hoping for the best.

The news has also rocked Singapore, and it was on the cover of all the major newspapers today. Singapore is a multiethnic, multilingual country, so one can purchase a newspaper in at least four languages from the news stand - English, Chinese, Malay, Tamil. We bought the English one (the Straits Times), which carried about 8 pages of news about the quake and tsunami. I neglected to photograph the English version, but I took photos of four others (below).

Chinese language paper - estimates of the dead and missing in the bottom right corner.

Chinese language paper

Malay language paper - using the same cover image as the second cover above.

Tamil language paper

We are also glued to the internet, answering emails in Facebook and Gmail. I guess this is how we communicate now. I called my mother today (Singapore to Iowa) using a free tool in Gmail. The craziest story out of this terrible natural disaster comes from a friend who has family in the affected area. After waiting more than 24 hours for word about his wife's grandmother he sent this message about the global nature of technology: "We heard about XX’s grandma in the following way: an sms (text) from a cousin in Miyagi (location of the earthquake) to a cousin in Switzerland followed by an sms to XX’s brother-in-law in San Francisco which was followed by a Skype call to us!" 

Our thoughts continue to go out to everyone affected. Many people on TV are saying they are thankful just to be alive. But with houses and entire villages just washed away, I wonder how they will begin to rebuild.

A few points to note:

1) So far, I have noticed one major difference in reporting between non-Japanese networks (CNN, FOX, even BBC) and NHK (the Japanese network we've been watching most) when it comes to the explosion at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima. NHK has still not shown footage of the actual moment of the explosion, whereas the US networks are all showing the blast. Instead, NHK shows a before and after image, showing a clear difference in the second image. However, they have not shown the blast. This is a fascinating difference.

2) A few months ago I taught a unit about the vast amounts of money that have been funneled into construction projects over the past few decades. We read chapters from books by Gavan McCormack (The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence) and Alex Kerr (Dogs and Demons). The country built ports, roads, bridges and tunnels, all of which can be useful. However, great sums were also used for disaster prevention, including sea walls conceived and built to save lives from tsunamis. Many scholars have argued that much of this construction was less about disaster prevention than about lining the pockets of politicians, bureaucrats, and construction companies. 

Footage of waters rising and inundating whole villages shows how useless many of these construction projects have been in actually preventing water from flowing where it will. The energy in a tsunami cannot be held back so easily. In fact, in the weeks and months to come, we may learn that this construction in the name of disaster prevention may have provided a false sense of security for coastal residents, encouraging them to build in places that would normally be thought unwise. I am just speculating, of course, but people around the world live in similar situations. Once there is a real disaster people ask why anyone was allowed to live in these places in the first place (such as below dams, at the base of mountains with a chance of avalanche, and in an historic flood zone, like Boulder, CO).