I thought going to Kyushu to visit Atsushi would be a break from the news cycle. It was not. Saturday and Sunday, especially, were big days, so for anyone who hasn’t gotten the rundown:

There aren’t many serious earthquakes in northern Kyushu, but there was one when I was there (go figure). We felt it at level 4 in Atsushi’s city–quite a lot of shaking, but nothing disturbed. The quake was centered just off Fukuoka, a city of about 2 million, where it registered a weak 6. There was an island with about 700 inhabitants, I think, that had bad damage. The houses were built into a hillside, so they slid on top of each other. The greater part of the population has had to be evacuated. There were also a few Fukuoka downtown buildings that had windows that broke and dropped out onto the street. A few water mains burst–things like that. Of course several hundred people were injured, though there was only one death. All things considered, the damage was minimal. There are still, however, lots of evacuees who can’t return to their houses.

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20 March was exactly ten years after the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system. Last year, NHK (I think it was NHK) ran a documentary that dramatized the network of rescue workers, civil engineers, police investigators, and chemical analysts that springs into action when something like this happens. This year being the tenth, the coverage largely consisted of short interviews with the wives of a few of the commuters who died. (There were 12 deaths out of thousands injured.) In most Japanese Buddhist sects, the tenth year after a death isn’t considered significant. Most have special rites on the seventh anniversary, and the focus on Sunday was on Western-style laying of wreaths. There was also a statement of apology from Aum Shinrikyo, which has renamed itself Aleph and changed leadership since conducting the attacks.

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Talks during Condoleezza Rice’s visit were focused mostly on the ban on US beef imports, the tiresome back-and-forth over which is going to turn all our brains to mush even if we never eat a morsel of the stuff again. The ban may be lifted…it may not be lifted…our two great nations cherish their close allegience but that’s not contingent on it’s being lifted…we’re considering lifting it…you said that before but you still haven’t lifted it. Et c., et c. Condoleezza Rice and Jun’ichiro Koizumi have the exact same hair, which made them look comically symmetrical in their poses together for the press. That’s about the most interesting thing that seems to have come out of her being here. It was certainly more interesting than the beef and rice jokes.

If you want to find out what Rice said about non-cow issues, you’ll have to see the reports of her visit to Seoul after she left Tokyo. (She and President Roh agreed that the DPRK should return to the suspended six-party talks, for instance. Of course, South Korea has also imposed a ban on US beef imports, so it was a topic there, too.)

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Three crewmembers of a Japanese tugboat were released by their pirate captors yesterday. (Okay, that didn’t happen on Saturday or Sunday, but it’s a story I’ve been following.) The Asahi article has pretty much all the details that were being reported yesterday. Well, it leaves out the fact that the chief-engineer guy is gorgeous, but I assume that was a question of column-inch restrictions.

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There’s also been more about Japan Post reform and shifts in the SDF structure, but I’ve been busy since arriving back and haven’t really had a chance to look closely at what’s going on.

Added at 22:20:

Joel at Far Outliers posted about the anniversary of the subway attacks here, with fascinating information about the angles the media used when covering them at the time and, further, about whether Aum Shinrikyo’s nature and motives were adequately understood.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005 at 20:37 and is filed under Japan Post, misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.