Tsunamis, Typhoons and Earthquakes

I remember one night in 2002, my mother knocked on my door and woke me up: “Did you feel that earthquake?” I rolled over and peered over to my door and groaned, “It was just a truck going by, go back to bed!” That was my first earthquake, a magnitude 4.8, and I dismissed it as a articulated lorry.

Since coming to Japan, my experience of the Earth’s fight against humanity has increased thousandfold. We feel at least one earthquake every three months, at least one typhoon in the summer, and, much more rarely, tsunamis. In summer last year, after a string of earthquakes, I became worried about the anticipated 20XX Tokai earthquake. Luckily, nothing has really come of it yet as I’ve still not stocked any survival gear, not even a torch. I should get my act together.

Yesterday morning I woke up to a Facebook message asking if we were okay. There had been a magnitude 6.9 quake in Okinawa, Japan’s southern island province. Keiko’s colleague is in Okinawa at the moment, so I rolled over and told her to check on him. It was the biggest quake in Okinawa since 1909, and only 2 people were injured. In the capital, Naha, it was only M4, which is enough to rattle the pans and cupboards, but being an earthquake-prone country, the houses and building throughout Japan can handle much worse.

Across the other side of the world, Chile was struck by a M8.8, a mindblowingly strong quake, the 5th strongest on record. Luckily, my friend in Chile is fine, but just watching the news, as I’m sure you all have seen by now, I was struck by the violent pattern of the shaking, as caught on the CCTV cameras across the capital. Commonly earthquakes shake from side to side, but the dangerous ones jolt vertically. Again, a severely earthquake prone country, Chile has the infrastructure and building codes to withstand the kind of forces that would level British homes.

As I write, tsunami warnings have been issued across the Pacific coast of Japan and people are being evacuated. Most areas are going to be fine, but trains are stopping along coastal routes. The hardest thing to believe is that this all comes from an earthquake in Chile – 17,200 km, or 10,700 miles away. I have been wrestling with in my mind since I watched CNN’s coverage of the Hawai’i evacuations last night. Nothing much came of them, but in 1960, a M9.5 in Chile killed 138 people in Japan. The governments of the Pacific Rim, the so-called Ring of Fire, are right to react as they have.

My heart goes out to the people of Chile. If you are worried about anyone you know, or want to help, please look at Google’s Support Disaster Relief in Chile page. If you are a British citizen living or travelling abroad, please register with LOCATE, as provided by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In the event of a natural disaster, it will help embassies with locating and contacting you and your relatives: LOCATE.

Unnoticed Progress

I recently noticed that my Japanese has improved considerably since I arrived here 18 months ago. I can understand a majority of what I hear now and, even if I don’t completely understand it, I usually get the gist of it. I’m not sure what hit me first: the fact that I can chat with shop staff with few major problems, or the fact that I can get by pretty well here.

I’ve still got a long way to go, but it’s heartening to have cleared my most immediate goals (e.g. to understand the people I have to interact with daily, or be able to chat with Keiko’s family on a basic level). Now I have to concrete and reinforce my knowledge with further practice and study.

I’m still undecided as to how I’ll do that, but this year I decided to try to get something to show for my effort. As a New Year’s resolution, I promised myself that I would take N5 (most basic level) of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test as a crutch upon which to build my flakey confidence. I would certainly pass it, and I’d like to think I could do it without much trouble either. However, my teacher is pushing me to take the next level up. It’s a challenge, but it’s exactly what I need to get out of my current study rut (as the only good thing about the JLPT is that I forces you to study; practically it lacks the spoken and written elements of a more useful test of one’s proficiency).

Anyway, besides the personal implications, of finally recognising my progress, it has struck me how difficult it might be to pick up on the gradual progression of my students. I have a number of students who have made swift progress through the levels, but one of the dangers of the eikaiwa teaching environment (i.e. hour-long weekly lessons) is that you quickly begin to believe that your students aren’t going anywhere. I will certainly admit to feeling that way about housewives, who I suspect feel that simply being in an (semi-) English-speaking environment once a week is enough to push one’s abilities up without major work behind the scenes. This revelation makes me realise that maybe I am short-changing my students. Seeing them week in, week out, perhaps I have missed their improving language skills much like I missed my own. Professional food for thought.

Winter in Japan

I hope that every who reads my blog understands by now that Japanese summers are hot and oppressive. They sap your strength and range from uncomfortable to torturous. What you may not know is that winter here is testing too, in its own way.

In Britain we have the best combination of humidity and seasons: the summers are dry and the winters are damp. It’s great. In Japan, the summers are damp and the winters are dry. This is just plain bonkers.

Before I came to Japan, I had no idea how the humidity of a climate could be felt. Sure, I’d experienced the dry summers of the classic British holiday destinations, but Japan was something else altogether. Unlike the summer, when I pour with sweat from morning to night, winter is far more subtle in its effects.

You can tell how dry it is with just a simple unscientific test. In spring and autumn, a pair of trousers take about two days to dry out; depending on the weather, in summer it takes one to two days; but in winter, inside with no heating or breeze, it takes about 12 hours. That’s great news for your laundry pile, but terrible news for your body.

This week I’ve had the sniffles. It’s cold out and that’s just what happens. However, whenever I blow my nose I find blood mixed in there: not a lot, but enough to be noticeable. This is something new to me; I’ve never even had a nosebleed. That’s not all: my lips are constantly dry, my forehead feels taut and my elbows are peeling. Unsurprisingly lipbalm and moisturiser sales boom at this time of year.

Worse still, the cheaper places to live in and around Tokyo completely lack winter-proofing. Due to the extreme summers, many places are uninsulated. While most people have air-conditioners to provide heating, they are environmental unsound, expensive to run and not particularly effective. The best option is a gas space heater which requires you to run a pipe from your gas tap in the kitchen (something I’m pretty paranoid about), or, if you live higher up the property ladder, underfloor heating. The cheapest option, and the classic image of winter life in Japan, is to sit under a kotatsu: essentially a heated table. Last year we used one and it worked a treat, but this year we’ve not and I’m regretting every minute of it!

So spare a thought for your shivering blogger, cowering under the covers each morning; and more importantly, consider the thousands of homeless around the country in a far worse situation than me. Whatever I feel, they’re getting tenfold.

Should Japan Give Permanent Residents Suffrage?

From today’s Japan Times, an update on an ongoing debate about giving Permanent Resident Status holders the right to vote in elections:

A former member of the Lower House from the Democratic Party of Japan, Ueda said he doesn’t understand why third-, fourth- or even fifth-generation foreign residents don’t just seek Japanese nationality. He was apparently referring to Korean residents.

Ueda said national security can be the focal point of a local election, citing this Sunday’s mayoral race in Nago, Okinawa Prefecture, where the long-delayed relocation of a U.S. military base is the crux of the campaign.

Residents of Korean descent comprise most of the permanent foreign residents in Japan. The government grants special permanent resident status to people from the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan who have lived in the country since the time of Japan’s colonial rule over those areas, and to their descendants.

Opinion is split among the foreign community, as best represented by an earlier post by Adamu over at Mutantfrog Travelogue:

In addition to expected support from zainichi Korean groups, we have some uncharacteristically half-baked support from Debito, the well-known human rights agitator: “Debito.org is in support, given how difficult it can be to get PR in Japan, not to mention how arbitrary the naturalization procedures are.” But just because it’s tough to get the status, that doesn’t mean one should get the right to vote and be elected. I am not accusing foreigners in Japan of being spies or degenerates, but a basic tenet of a country and the Japanese constitution is that it is to be governed by its citizens. That requirement helps assure those who will be involved in politics are committed citizens of the country. Permanent residents are already protected under the law and do not need to renew their visa to stay in the country. I think if they want more than that they should be ready to give up their original passport and become citizens.

He concludes:

There are more important issues in my opinion (allowing dual citizenship, establishing an immigration policy) that should be given more priority.

Putting aside giving suffrage to Special Permanent Residents, i.e. zainichi Koreans, what would it mean to give Permanent Residents the right to vote?

I’m not a Permanent Resident, at least not yet. I have to wait at least another 3 years, and probably longer, until I can even apply for it. However, assuming that I would still be living in Japan, I would probably also be the parent of a transnational child. As a parent, I would be concerned with providing my child and family with the best that they can get, and while Keiko could do that on my behalf, it doesn’t seem too unfair to ask that I might have a say too: as a resident of my local community, a tax payer, and a contributor to the pensions of the rapidly ageing society (a pension I would never receive myself). What I would like for my future-self is the ability to vote in city-wide elections, such as for the mayor so I too can attempt to improve my family’s lot in my local area.

We can put aside the issue of national elections, they might affect me, but those are the province of citizens given that they can affect constitutional and national security issues. While Ueda might have a point in saying that national security and local elections can intersect, I think this is unlikely even in Okinawa. It’s the power of the national government that will bring about change.

You might be asking why I don’t consider naturalising, i.e. becoming a Japanese citizen. As a British citizen with family in Britain, it’s important for me to be able to visit or move back to live in the UK should something terrible happen. If I became a Japanese citizen I would have to give up my British nationality (Japan does not allow dual-citizenship) and that would mean travelling on a visa (and if you’ve seen the current visa system in Britain, you’d realise that it would be a fate worse than death).

As for voting back home, I am only really concerned with the General Election, i.e. elections to change the national government who make foreign and nationwide domestic policy, the only areas of British policy that really affect me these days. I have no interest in voting in local elections back home. I don’t live there and I have no stake in what happens.

I understand the point that Adamu made in the quote above. Why take suffrage for permanent residents when we should be calling for immigration reform? After all, it’s not like the Permanent Residents themselves are clamouring for this right. The problem is that PR suffrage is being offered now, and who knows when or even if the Diet will contemplate dual-nationality? I hope that Japan becomes immigrant-friends as the country increasingly relies on foreign labour, but I’m not holding my breath. If the DPJ push through voting rights for zainichi Koreans and other Special Permanent Residents: excellent. If they tag on some benefits for PRs, I’d use them. After that, if they still don’t contemplate immigration reform, then what have we lost?

Top 10 Posts of 2009

It’s the time of year when our minds turn to the passage of time: as the clock counts down to the end of the first decade of the second millennium, I have become increasingly mindful of all that happened this year. Here are the most popular posts of the year, as based on page-views:

10. Ghost in the Shell 2.0 (13th February 2009)

The remastering of Ghost in the Shell left me a with a bad taste in my mouth. With its drab colours, the removal of its iconic features and a particularly bad dose of CGI, it all came across as a waste of time and money. I hope 2009 is the last time we’ll see such terrible CG, but I doubt we’ll be so lucky!

9. Milo and Project Natal – The Future of Gaming? (5th June 2009)

Microsoft showed off its new toy at the the video game exhibition, E3. The project, known as Natal, allows users to interact naturally with the software by way of a camera, scanner and microphone. Peter Molyneux of Lionheart showed us a video of the future of character interaction as a woman chatted with a boy in a game. Where this is going and when we can see it is still unclear, but I really can’t wait to get my hands on this piece of kit.

8. How Did Ichihashi Evade Capture for 2 Years? (15th November 2009)

After his arrest in Osaka, I raised a number of questions as to Tatsuya Ichihashi’s life on the run. He has now  been charged with the murder of Lindsey Ann Hawker, and hopefully the trial will bring to light the issues I highlighted. In the meantime, the news continues to pour in.

7. Losing Your Phone in Japan (2nd October 2009)

After dropping my Nokia mobile phone somewhere between work and home, I signed up with Softbank for my iPhone and gave some tips for any others who want to follow in my footsteps. Yes, compared to back home it’s a bit pricey and they contract is pretty long, but I love my iPhone: it’s revolutionised the way I spend my time, although perhaps not for the better.

6. Okuribito (22nd February 2009)

Yojiro Takita’s Okuribito was the best film I saw in 2009 (it originally came out in 2008). The beautiful cinematography, tearjerking story and excellent acting really sold it for me. I haven’t seen any other film draw so many tears since Titanic was released.

5. Geotagging Your DSLR Photos Using an iPhone (24th September 2009)

After getting my iPhone, I spent a lot of time trying to work out how to geo-tag photographs. Why? I think it’s nice to know exactly where you took your photos for reference’s sake. Maybe you have taken a photo that might have been excellent in a different season or time of day, geo-tagging allows you to find that place. The only problem is that the iPhone’s GPS resolution (on the move) is rather weak at times – plus the connection cuts when your phone idles. Still, it’s not a terrible way to get it done.

4. iPhone App Review: Championship Manager Express 2010 (30th November 2009)

Championship Manager stole away huge portions of my life. I’ve gone cold turkey now and it’s working out, but its power never ceases to amaze me. The iPhone version is poorly organised and unrealistic, but is still like crack to anyone who loves management sims. This was my first iPhone app review, and I thoroughly enjoyed the process. Maybe I’ll do a few more in the future.

3. Bathing in Japan (14th May 2009)

Bathing is a way of life. How you conduct yourself in a bathhouse or hot spring will reflect on you: do it wrong and you’ll make a lot of enemies fast. As a public service, I discussed the various kinds of baths and the general protocol when enjoying them. Oh, but keep away if you’re inked up…

2. How I Got My Spouse Visa… (26th April 2009)

Unless you’ve lived abroad, you probably cannot imagine how time-consuming and laborious visa applications are. Worse still, one tiny mistake can send you right back to the start. After an hour long wait in the immigration office, I wrote up a guide to help others in my situation, along with supporting documentation. I hope that it makes it easier for anyone else in my shoes.

1. Google Earth vs the Burakumin (5th May 2009)

2008 and 2009 were tough years for Google in Japan. People were up in arms over their roaming streetview cameras, and the internet giant put all its energy into breaking the Yahoo-dependent market. However, Google Earth’s listing of old city maps which made it easy to determine the location of former undercaste enclaves was perhaps Google’s most controversial, if unheard of, incident. Google removed all references to the Burakumin, but I was left wondering whether it was a good thing to censor rather than promote such history.
Thank you to everyone who linked to me in the past year, and thank you to everyone who visited and read my blog. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you all.