December 01, 2016
Earthquakes and the JMA
The Japan Meteorological Agency classifies earthquakes in absolute (Richter scale) and relative terms. This provides the public with practical information, especially when the epicenter often isn't directly below the locations most affected (click image for full size).
So the 7.4 magnitude (later revised .1 upward) earthquake the Monday before last rated at worst a "5-" in actual effect ("seismic intensity") on land.
The earthquake struck at 5:59 AM (Japan time). That meant the 6:00 AM news (2:00 PM MST) was immediately interrupted by "earthquake coverage," which follows a pretty standard format.
No talking heads (at first), no reporters babbling into the camera with no idea what is going on. The screen switched to a live feed from Onohama harbor in Iwaki, Fukushima, closest to the epicenter. Pertinent information is relayed via on-screen text or audio.
At 6:02 came a tsunami warning, worst-case at three meters. Not disastrous, but enough to be concerned about.
The audio at this point turned, well, excitable. I imagine the poor guy had just gotten to work and hastily swallowed a liter of coffee. Pretty much: "Flee for your lives!" The red-highlighted text on the screen said the same thing. With explanation points.
Recalling that 16,000 people died from the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, this concern is understandable. (The 7.4 magnitude mainshock this time has since been categorized as an aftershock to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake.)
The fishermen certainly weren't taking any chances. As I said, the live feed was from Onohama harbor. It was fascinating to watch all the fishing boats rev up and head out to sea. In twenty minutes, the harbor was empty. Very impressive.
I do wonder about the "crying wolf" problem.
As it turned out, the deepest tsunami was five feet in one location and was more of a tidal surge. Most everywhere else along the coast, it was a foot to eighteen inches. One small boat capsized and nets drying on the docks got washed into the harbor.
But nobody is questioning the "better safe than sorry" policy, and certainly not in Tohoku.
Along with its early warning system, the JMA provides public data on earthquakes. Whenever NHK flashes a warning, I go to the JMA Earthquake Information site (Japanese/English). As you will see, earthquakes are a fact of life in Japan. (Click on a date in the left-hand column for details.)
As illustrated above, the colored round dots indicate the relative magnitude. Clicking on the map (such as here) lets you zoom in.
So the 7.4 magnitude (later revised .1 upward) earthquake the Monday before last rated at worst a "5-" in actual effect ("seismic intensity") on land.
The earthquake struck at 5:59 AM (Japan time). That meant the 6:00 AM news (2:00 PM MST) was immediately interrupted by "earthquake coverage," which follows a pretty standard format.
No talking heads (at first), no reporters babbling into the camera with no idea what is going on. The screen switched to a live feed from Onohama harbor in Iwaki, Fukushima, closest to the epicenter. Pertinent information is relayed via on-screen text or audio.
At 6:02 came a tsunami warning, worst-case at three meters. Not disastrous, but enough to be concerned about.
The audio at this point turned, well, excitable. I imagine the poor guy had just gotten to work and hastily swallowed a liter of coffee. Pretty much: "Flee for your lives!" The red-highlighted text on the screen said the same thing. With explanation points.
Recalling that 16,000 people died from the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, this concern is understandable. (The 7.4 magnitude mainshock this time has since been categorized as an aftershock to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake.)
The fishermen certainly weren't taking any chances. As I said, the live feed was from Onohama harbor. It was fascinating to watch all the fishing boats rev up and head out to sea. In twenty minutes, the harbor was empty. Very impressive.
I do wonder about the "crying wolf" problem.
As it turned out, the deepest tsunami was five feet in one location and was more of a tidal surge. Most everywhere else along the coast, it was a foot to eighteen inches. One small boat capsized and nets drying on the docks got washed into the harbor.
But nobody is questioning the "better safe than sorry" policy, and certainly not in Tohoku.
Along with its early warning system, the JMA provides public data on earthquakes. Whenever NHK flashes a warning, I go to the JMA Earthquake Information site (Japanese/English). As you will see, earthquakes are a fact of life in Japan. (Click on a date in the left-hand column for details.)
As illustrated above, the colored round dots indicate the relative magnitude. Clicking on the map (such as here) lets you zoom in.
Labels: earthquake, geography, geology, japan, nhk, science, technology, tohoku earthquake
July 14, 2016
Aogashima Island
Mining the ocean floor is one of those perennial futuristic things that is perennially ten years in the future.
But this time high concentrations of gold and silver ore were found in the vicinity of Aogashima Island. Gold in them there underwater hills may provide the kind of motivation to get a gold rush going. Reports the Japan Times:
If you think this sounds like the premise for a James Bond flick, well, check out Aogashima Island. It even looks like the lair of a James Bond villain! (Click to embiggen.)
Those blue spots aren't water. They appear to be roofs, Quonset huts and greenhouses, perhaps. Aogashima Island, 222 miles south of Tokyo, is the the southernmost inhabited island of the Izu archipelago.
But this time high concentrations of gold and silver ore were found in the vicinity of Aogashima Island. Gold in them there underwater hills may provide the kind of motivation to get a gold rush going. Reports the Japan Times:
A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo have discovered high-grade gold ore on a seabed off a remote island south of Tokyo. The ore, collected from a hydrothermal deposit at an underwater volcanic crater off Aogashima, contained as much as 275 grams of gold per ton, a figure that is higher than usual for such deposits on land or sea in Japan.
If you think this sounds like the premise for a James Bond flick, well, check out Aogashima Island. It even looks like the lair of a James Bond villain! (Click to embiggen.)
Those blue spots aren't water. They appear to be roofs, Quonset huts and greenhouses, perhaps. Aogashima Island, 222 miles south of Tokyo, is the the southernmost inhabited island of the Izu archipelago.
Labels: geology, japan, movies, science, science fiction, technology
April 28, 2016
Japan's San Andreas
The 7.3 magnitude mainshock that struck Kumamoto prefecture on 16 April (Japan time) was preceded by a 6.5 magnitude earthquake and followed by more than 1000 aftershocks. Less a devastating head-on collision than the wheels falling off a truck at 60 MPH and the axles dragging along a road filled with potholes.
Unlike the colossal magnitude 9 quake that devastated the Tohoku region of Northern Japan in 2011, the Kumamoto earthquake did not trigger a tsunami. Occurring in a largely rural part of Japan on the southern island of Kyushu, it has caused only 49 deaths to date. The most severe damage was from landslides.
The earthquake struck along a shallow inland slip fault, specifically the Futagawa-Hinagu fault link, at the western edge of the Japan Median Tectonic Line.
Like the San Andreas, the Japan Median Tectonic Line is clearly visible on topographical maps. It begins its journey off the western coast of Kyushu, heads east-northeast, hugs the northern coast of Shikoku, bisects the Kii Peninsula, doglegs around Mt. Fuji, and plunges back into the ocean fifty miles east of Tokyo.
To the north, the Philippine Sea Plate is colliding with the Pacific Plate and the Okhotsk Plate. Moving at a brisk 48-84 mm/year to the west-northwest, the Pacific Plate rams the southern edge of the Okhotsk Plate and the northern edge of the Philippine Sea Plate, crumpling the bedrock of central Japan into the Japan Alps.
The collision between the Philippine Sea Plate and the Pacific Plate forms the Ogasawara Islands, that start at the Izu Peninsula and include Iwo Jima at its southern end. The Izu Peninsula sits at the feet of Mt. Fuji and is home to Hakone National Park and its countless hot springs—a mere 50 miles south of Tokyo.
Sitting on top of the convergence of four massive tectonic plates, perhaps the most amazing thing about Tokyo is that it continues to exist at all.
Unlike the colossal magnitude 9 quake that devastated the Tohoku region of Northern Japan in 2011, the Kumamoto earthquake did not trigger a tsunami. Occurring in a largely rural part of Japan on the southern island of Kyushu, it has caused only 49 deaths to date. The most severe damage was from landslides.
 |
| Not the edge of a cliff, a landslide (courtesy Japan Times). |
The earthquake struck along a shallow inland slip fault, specifically the Futagawa-Hinagu fault link, at the western edge of the Japan Median Tectonic Line.
 |
| A slip fault vividly illustrated (courtesy Japan Times). |
Like the San Andreas, the Japan Median Tectonic Line is clearly visible on topographical maps. It begins its journey off the western coast of Kyushu, heads east-northeast, hugs the northern coast of Shikoku, bisects the Kii Peninsula, doglegs around Mt. Fuji, and plunges back into the ocean fifty miles east of Tokyo.
To the north, the Philippine Sea Plate is colliding with the Pacific Plate and the Okhotsk Plate. Moving at a brisk 48-84 mm/year to the west-northwest, the Pacific Plate rams the southern edge of the Okhotsk Plate and the northern edge of the Philippine Sea Plate, crumpling the bedrock of central Japan into the Japan Alps.
The collision between the Philippine Sea Plate and the Pacific Plate forms the Ogasawara Islands, that start at the Izu Peninsula and include Iwo Jima at its southern end. The Izu Peninsula sits at the feet of Mt. Fuji and is home to Hakone National Park and its countless hot springs—a mere 50 miles south of Tokyo.
Sitting on top of the convergence of four massive tectonic plates, perhaps the most amazing thing about Tokyo is that it continues to exist at all.
Labels: earthquake, geography, geology, japan, science, tohoku earthquake
March 16, 2015
Walk on water
When I was growing up, the space race competed with underwater sea adventures for gorgeous photo spreads in National Geographic (which nobody read for the articles). Jacques Cousteau was as big a star as the astronauts and took prettier pictures.
As with Stanley Kubrick's space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey, everybody knew that we were going to be living in cities at the bottom of the ocean any day now (because, you know, population).
Alas, by the time we made it to the Moon, real space exploration had grown ho-hum (sans white-knuckle disasters like Apollo 13). Living in space turns out to be pretty inconvenient. And mostly good for making cool YouTube videos.
The same goes for living under water. Somewhere along the evolutionary path, we homo sapiens got rid of gills, and good riddance.
But as it turns out, millions of people are living at the bottom of the ocean. The trick, you see, is first to raise the bottom of the ocean to sea level. That makes it a lot easier.
Over the past century, almost one hundred square miles of Tokyo Bay have been "reclaimed." I lived for a year in a housing project on reclaimed land in Osaka Bay, also home to Kansai International Airport, built entirely on a man-made island.
In Japan, it's actually more economically, politically, and environmentally efficient to carve up a mountain and dump it into the ocean than to move in the opposite direction, or push all urban development everywhere down to the water's edge.
The Tohoku earthquake has taken land reclamation in a whole new level. It's been four years since. The rubble has been removed, leaving behind empty fields and vacant lots where towns once stood. The question is how to prevent the "next time."
On 11 March 2011, 250 miles of coastline shifted up to eight feet eastward and dropped over two feet. Most harbor seawalls failed. Entire fishing villages were washed away. Fukushima Daiichi was swamped, its backup generators destroyed.
It soon became obvious that building sea walls able to defend against any possible tsunami was a fool's errand. And if built, the high walls would turn the place into a prison (which remains a problem even with the sea walls that are being built).
As a result, two basic approaches are being taken: 1) relocating retail and residential communities further inland; 2) a combination of sea walls and raising the ground level (click to enlarge).
Following the earthquake, parts of many coastal towns ended up underwater at high tide (and people complain about their mortgages being "underwater"). A good part of what was Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, will rise forty feet.
This once quaint fishing village now looks like a science fiction movie set: a forest of massive conveyor belts moving 20,000 cubic meters of soil a day. If you're looking for "shovel-ready projects," the shovels don't get any bigger than this.
Elaine Kurtenbach describes the government-industry complex that has been churning along now for half a century:
Rikuzentakata won't be going to the mountain; the mountain is coming to Rikuzentakata. Literally.
The Book of Isaiah sums up the process very well:
As with Stanley Kubrick's space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey, everybody knew that we were going to be living in cities at the bottom of the ocean any day now (because, you know, population).
 |
| As useless as the ISS (and more dangerous) but at least cheaper. |
Alas, by the time we made it to the Moon, real space exploration had grown ho-hum (sans white-knuckle disasters like Apollo 13). Living in space turns out to be pretty inconvenient. And mostly good for making cool YouTube videos.
The same goes for living under water. Somewhere along the evolutionary path, we homo sapiens got rid of gills, and good riddance.
But as it turns out, millions of people are living at the bottom of the ocean. The trick, you see, is first to raise the bottom of the ocean to sea level. That makes it a lot easier.
Over the past century, almost one hundred square miles of Tokyo Bay have been "reclaimed." I lived for a year in a housing project on reclaimed land in Osaka Bay, also home to Kansai International Airport, built entirely on a man-made island.
In Japan, it's actually more economically, politically, and environmentally efficient to carve up a mountain and dump it into the ocean than to move in the opposite direction, or push all urban development everywhere down to the water's edge.
The Tohoku earthquake has taken land reclamation in a whole new level. It's been four years since. The rubble has been removed, leaving behind empty fields and vacant lots where towns once stood. The question is how to prevent the "next time."
On 11 March 2011, 250 miles of coastline shifted up to eight feet eastward and dropped over two feet. Most harbor seawalls failed. Entire fishing villages were washed away. Fukushima Daiichi was swamped, its backup generators destroyed.
It soon became obvious that building sea walls able to defend against any possible tsunami was a fool's errand. And if built, the high walls would turn the place into a prison (which remains a problem even with the sea walls that are being built).
As a result, two basic approaches are being taken: 1) relocating retail and residential communities further inland; 2) a combination of sea walls and raising the ground level (click to enlarge).
 |
| Moving inland and higher up (courtesy Japan Guide). |
Following the earthquake, parts of many coastal towns ended up underwater at high tide (and people complain about their mortgages being "underwater"). A good part of what was Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, will rise forty feet.
 |
| Another way to stand on higher ground (courtesy Japan Guide). |
This once quaint fishing village now looks like a science fiction movie set: a forest of massive conveyor belts moving 20,000 cubic meters of soil a day. If you're looking for "shovel-ready projects," the shovels don't get any bigger than this.
Elaine Kurtenbach describes the government-industry complex that has been churning along now for half a century:
Pouring concrete for public works is a staple strategy for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its backers in big business and construction, and local officials tend to go along with such plans.
Rikuzentakata won't be going to the mountain; the mountain is coming to Rikuzentakata. Literally.
 |
| Making the mountains low (courtesy Japan Guide). |
The Book of Isaiah sums up the process very well:
Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.
Labels: economics, environmentalism, geography, geology, japan, science, space, tech history, technology, tohoku earthquake
March 12, 2015
Now, Our Two Paths
Asahi Productions (Studio Shiroishi in Miyagi) has released an anime short about the rebuilding efforts in Miyagi Prefecture, hard-hit by the 11 March 2011 Tohoku earthquake. It's in Japanese but otherwise easy enough to understand.
(View the larger screen version here.)
Ima, Futari no Michi ("Now, Our Two Paths") begins a decade or so ago with Jun and Kunpei discussing their futures (Jun becoming a doctor, Kunpei a fisherman), and then gives us snapshots of their lives over the four year since March 2011.
The dates at the bottom right are the year (Heisei notation) followed by the numerical month or season (winter: 冬 spring: 春 summer: 夏 fall: 秋 New Year's: 元旦). Heisei 23 is 2011 (subtract 12 to get the Gregorian year).
The spring of 2011 finds Jun back in Miyagi, completing her residency at a clinic near her home town. Kunpei is a farmer. The buildings at the 2:20 mark are prefabricated housing units, still home to 77,000 (out of 230,000 total displaced persons).
A more in-depth description here. From a critical perspective, I'm impressed at how much story can be condensed into five minutes (it is very much a story of moments).
(View the larger screen version here.)
Ima, Futari no Michi ("Now, Our Two Paths") begins a decade or so ago with Jun and Kunpei discussing their futures (Jun becoming a doctor, Kunpei a fisherman), and then gives us snapshots of their lives over the four year since March 2011.
The dates at the bottom right are the year (Heisei notation) followed by the numerical month or season (winter: 冬 spring: 春 summer: 夏 fall: 秋 New Year's: 元旦). Heisei 23 is 2011 (subtract 12 to get the Gregorian year).
The spring of 2011 finds Jun back in Miyagi, completing her residency at a clinic near her home town. Kunpei is a farmer. The buildings at the 2:20 mark are prefabricated housing units, still home to 77,000 (out of 230,000 total displaced persons).
A more in-depth description here. From a critical perspective, I'm impressed at how much story can be condensed into five minutes (it is very much a story of moments).
Labels: anime, earthquake, geography, geology, japan, tohoku earthquake
August 30, 2012
Mandarins and meltdowns
In the second of the two articles referenced in my post about real estate tomfoolery in central Japan, Spike Japan mentions an absurd but ominous harbinger of much worse things to come.
The 2007 Chuetsu earthquake (magnitude 6.6) caused a minor accident at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, a (non-radioactive) fire in a transformer,
The meltdown four years later at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was less the product of such "Keystone Coppery" than it was the result of years of incompetence baked into the bureaucracy by the time the disaster struck.
Because Fukushima Daiichi was based on a General Electric design that has an almost exact twin in the U.S., NHK has done a series of documentaries comparing and contrasting the one with the other. The stark conclusion is that everything that Fukushima Daiichi should have done, the U.S. plant had already done.
To greatly oversimplify, following the earthquake, three failures led to the meltdown: the diesel generators, all located on the ground floor, were wiped out by the tsunami; the backup batteries couldn't be swapped out once they ran low; the passive cooling system didn't have manual overrides.
At Fukushima Daiichi's American counterpart, the generators were long ago placed at staggered elevations; battery backups are available from a "Nuclear Parts 'R' Us" repository ("Any time, anyway you want 'em delivered"); and the passive cooling system has big, hand-cranked valves.
"The first thing we're trained to do in the case of a total power failure," the plant supervisor explained to the NHK reporter, "is climb up there and open those valves."
I'm the last one to praise government a bureaucracy, but the NRC is doing its job. Looking beyond the agency itself, it can do its job because it belongs to a political system tasked with making constitutional principles work in the real world: separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism.
As George Will likes to point out, the overriding objective of constitutional government is not to "get things done." It is to not get things done, to create a constant friction that keeps the Leviathan from steamrolling over individuals and localities.
In many respects, Japan's prefectures are less autonomous now than they were during the Edo period. The mayor of Osaka formed a new political party advocating for "local control," but for now it's only advocacy. Tokyo's mandarins continue to micromanage public works everywhere, down to the placement of telephone poles.
This centralized control is further plagued by the widespread practice of amakudari, according to which retiring regulators "descend from heaven" to serve on the boards of the companies they once regulated. As Wikipedia explains,
Beyond the considerable influence U.S. state governors have on nuclear plant placement (zoning, licensing, and the like), NHK was surprised to find that in the U.S., the local fire department and first responders are trained to deal with nuclear accidents (Hazmat), and have immediate access to the plant.
This is the essence of good and proper governance: those with the most at stake and the most to lose are given the resources to do something about it, not just desperately bend an ear in a distant federal government, but put their own "boots on the ground."
If a bunch of batteries is what it'd take to keep a chunk of their prefecture from being turned into a wasteland, and they had the tools available to do something about it, no one doubts that the governor and mayors of Fukushima would have gotten them there by car, boat, bike, or rickshaw, come hell or high water.
The 2007 Chuetsu earthquake (magnitude 6.6) caused a minor accident at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, a (non-radioactive) fire in a transformer,
the reaction to which laid bare naked Keystone Coppery on the part of TEPCO: the chief operations manager happened to pass the transformer in his car, noticed the smoke, concluded that the fire wouldn't burn long, and left the task of quelling it to subordinates . . . [who] found that the fire hydrants near the transformer had been knocked out by the earthquake and yielded up no more than a trickle of water. Plant officials tried to notify the local fire brigade by phone, but they had no hotline and couldn't get through; five off-duty firemen were corralled and they finally doused the blaze, two hours after the earthquake.
The meltdown four years later at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was less the product of such "Keystone Coppery" than it was the result of years of incompetence baked into the bureaucracy by the time the disaster struck.
Because Fukushima Daiichi was based on a General Electric design that has an almost exact twin in the U.S., NHK has done a series of documentaries comparing and contrasting the one with the other. The stark conclusion is that everything that Fukushima Daiichi should have done, the U.S. plant had already done.
To greatly oversimplify, following the earthquake, three failures led to the meltdown: the diesel generators, all located on the ground floor, were wiped out by the tsunami; the backup batteries couldn't be swapped out once they ran low; the passive cooling system didn't have manual overrides.
At Fukushima Daiichi's American counterpart, the generators were long ago placed at staggered elevations; battery backups are available from a "Nuclear Parts 'R' Us" repository ("Any time, anyway you want 'em delivered"); and the passive cooling system has big, hand-cranked valves.
"The first thing we're trained to do in the case of a total power failure," the plant supervisor explained to the NHK reporter, "is climb up there and open those valves."
I'm the last one to praise government a bureaucracy, but the NRC is doing its job. Looking beyond the agency itself, it can do its job because it belongs to a political system tasked with making constitutional principles work in the real world: separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism.
As George Will likes to point out, the overriding objective of constitutional government is not to "get things done." It is to not get things done, to create a constant friction that keeps the Leviathan from steamrolling over individuals and localities.
In many respects, Japan's prefectures are less autonomous now than they were during the Edo period. The mayor of Osaka formed a new political party advocating for "local control," but for now it's only advocacy. Tokyo's mandarins continue to micromanage public works everywhere, down to the placement of telephone poles.
This centralized control is further plagued by the widespread practice of amakudari, according to which retiring regulators "descend from heaven" to serve on the boards of the companies they once regulated. As Wikipedia explains,
Over 50 years ending in 2010, 68 high-level government bureaucrats have taken jobs with electricity suppliers after retirement from their government positions. In 2011, 13 retired government bureaucrats were employed in senior positions in Japan's electric utilities.
Beyond the considerable influence U.S. state governors have on nuclear plant placement (zoning, licensing, and the like), NHK was surprised to find that in the U.S., the local fire department and first responders are trained to deal with nuclear accidents (Hazmat), and have immediate access to the plant.
This is the essence of good and proper governance: those with the most at stake and the most to lose are given the resources to do something about it, not just desperately bend an ear in a distant federal government, but put their own "boots on the ground."
If a bunch of batteries is what it'd take to keep a chunk of their prefecture from being turned into a wasteland, and they had the tools available to do something about it, no one doubts that the governor and mayors of Fukushima would have gotten them there by car, boat, bike, or rickshaw, come hell or high water.
Related posts
Fukushima fallout
Build it and they won't come
Labels: economics, geology, japan, politics, tohoku earthquake
November 07, 2011
Just stand there
One of the most destructive political impulses in the world today is the conviction that every identifiable problem must be addressed by having the government, at the highest levels, do "something" about it: invade it or regulate it or outlaw it or subsidize it or bail it out.
Bryan Caplan calls this the "Activist's fallacy":
As Northern Japan found out, you can spend billions of dollars building a "solution" to a known problem, only to see it completely fail. And in the process, exacerbate the original problem by creating a false sense of security.
NHK has been conducting interviews with survivors from these costal town (an abridged version was broadcast on PBS). One thing that becomes clear is that people who could see the coastline got away, while those behind the immense sea walls--that turned these villages into medieval walled fortresses--often had no idea what was going on.
TEPCO was certain the sea walls surrounding Fukushima Dai-ichi couldn't be breached. The situation might have turned out completely differently had they built the plant with the assumption that a tsunami would flood the plant. The solution in that case--more redundancy in the backup power systems--would have been far more effective.
A Nightly Business Report (October 04, 2011) story from the fishing village of Kesennuma represents the kind of thinking that's too often missing when the gears of government begin to grind. Instead of fighting nature, the new Kesennuma wants to forgo the massive sea walls.
As correspondent Lucy Craft points out, "Even huge tsunami waves couldn't topple most of the concrete-reinforced shops in downtown Kesennuma and floodwaters rose no higher than the second story."
As it has turned out since, some large structures failed because they paradoxically became boyant. In other words, the basement levels and first floors of coastal buildings should be designed to "fail" and flood, not remain watertight and trap air.
This is another good example of drawing the line--between a storm surge and a tsunami--when it comes to confronting nature. And we really need to start drawing those lines. Rather than acting, Congress needs to learn when to sit on its hands. Don't do anything, just stand there!
Don't (re)build cities below sea level. Don't build suburbs in flood plains. Don't reinsure people who build seaside houses in the path of hurricanes. Quit lining every waterway with levees. We don't live in freaking Holland! (Oh, and don't give home and student loans to people who can't possibly ever repay them.)
Whether a bank or a flood wall or that latest Keynsian extravaganza, if it's "too big to fail," then the faster it fails the better. We'll pick up the pieces (the smaller they are, the easier to pick up), learn from our mistakes, learn to live with what we can't actually change or realistically prevent, and move on.
Bryan Caplan calls this the "Activist's fallacy":
1. Something must be done
2. This is something
3. Therefore, this must be done.
As Northern Japan found out, you can spend billions of dollars building a "solution" to a known problem, only to see it completely fail. And in the process, exacerbate the original problem by creating a false sense of security.
NHK has been conducting interviews with survivors from these costal town (an abridged version was broadcast on PBS). One thing that becomes clear is that people who could see the coastline got away, while those behind the immense sea walls--that turned these villages into medieval walled fortresses--often had no idea what was going on.
TEPCO was certain the sea walls surrounding Fukushima Dai-ichi couldn't be breached. The situation might have turned out completely differently had they built the plant with the assumption that a tsunami would flood the plant. The solution in that case--more redundancy in the backup power systems--would have been far more effective.
A Nightly Business Report (October 04, 2011) story from the fishing village of Kesennuma represents the kind of thinking that's too often missing when the gears of government begin to grind. Instead of fighting nature, the new Kesennuma wants to forgo the massive sea walls.
Especially because we want to draw more tourists, building a wall to block off the sea is out of the question. Tsunami are a natural phenomenon. There's one major tsunami every few centuries. So you insure yourself and figure out how to make it safe to live and work around them.
As correspondent Lucy Craft points out, "Even huge tsunami waves couldn't topple most of the concrete-reinforced shops in downtown Kesennuma and floodwaters rose no higher than the second story."
As it has turned out since, some large structures failed because they paradoxically became boyant. In other words, the basement levels and first floors of coastal buildings should be designed to "fail" and flood, not remain watertight and trap air.
This is another good example of drawing the line--between a storm surge and a tsunami--when it comes to confronting nature. And we really need to start drawing those lines. Rather than acting, Congress needs to learn when to sit on its hands. Don't do anything, just stand there!
Don't (re)build cities below sea level. Don't build suburbs in flood plains. Don't reinsure people who build seaside houses in the path of hurricanes. Quit lining every waterway with levees. We don't live in freaking Holland! (Oh, and don't give home and student loans to people who can't possibly ever repay them.)
Whether a bank or a flood wall or that latest Keynsian extravaganza, if it's "too big to fail," then the faster it fails the better. We'll pick up the pieces (the smaller they are, the easier to pick up), learn from our mistakes, learn to live with what we can't actually change or realistically prevent, and move on.
Related posts
Apocalypse not now
The Sendai earthquake
Labels: earthquake, environmentalism, geology, politics, science, tohoku earthquake
October 06, 2011
Before and After
Before and After (not a translation) on ABC (Asahi Broadcasting) is like This Old House, except they do one house an episode. That means they race through the interesting stuff--the foundations and framing and plumbing--and spend more time on the boring stuff like interior decor.
Enough attention is paid to the nuts and bolts to make it clear that while ferroconcrete structures in Japan are the most solidly built in the world, and residential building codes have improved since the Great Hanshin earthquake, they still aren't as strict as building codes in the U.S.
One week on This Old House, while tearing down an old floor, Tom Silva pointed out all the once-standard construction methods that were no longer code. That same week on Before and After, there was an army of carpenters busily repeating pretty much every single one of them.
One of the big challenges on This Old House is retrofitting old structures for modern plumbing, heating and AC. The biggest plumbing challenge on Before and After is allowing the o-furo water heater to be turned on from inside the bathroom, instead of leaning out the window.
As I noted previously, south of Hokkaido, Japanese houses aren't likely to have central HVAC, high pressure hot water, or insulation. In my apartment in Port Town, the hot water in the bathroom and kitchen sinks ran off the heater attached to the o-furo, but only one faucet could be on at a time.
Another thing that becomes clear is that, as Alex Kerr laments, Japanese are pretty unsentimental about ordinary old stuff. The debut episode involved restoring a century old house. In the U.S., historical preservationists would have been crawling all over it. Break out the jackhammers!
To be sure, the idea of buying a house as an investment is a foreign one in Japan. The only worthwhile investment is in the property it sits on. You build a house in Japan knowing that the next earthquake may knock it down, and the next tsunami may wash it away. But there are exceptions.
The laundromat I used in Osaka was off a street crowded with old, two-story residences. Over the span of six months, I watched one get torn down to the ground--leaving a gap in the street like a missing tooth--and then rebuilt exactly the same, but using a frame of steel I-beams.
That's one house that isn't going anywhere, come hell or high water.
Enough attention is paid to the nuts and bolts to make it clear that while ferroconcrete structures in Japan are the most solidly built in the world, and residential building codes have improved since the Great Hanshin earthquake, they still aren't as strict as building codes in the U.S.
One week on This Old House, while tearing down an old floor, Tom Silva pointed out all the once-standard construction methods that were no longer code. That same week on Before and After, there was an army of carpenters busily repeating pretty much every single one of them.
One of the big challenges on This Old House is retrofitting old structures for modern plumbing, heating and AC. The biggest plumbing challenge on Before and After is allowing the o-furo water heater to be turned on from inside the bathroom, instead of leaning out the window.
As I noted previously, south of Hokkaido, Japanese houses aren't likely to have central HVAC, high pressure hot water, or insulation. In my apartment in Port Town, the hot water in the bathroom and kitchen sinks ran off the heater attached to the o-furo, but only one faucet could be on at a time.
Another thing that becomes clear is that, as Alex Kerr laments, Japanese are pretty unsentimental about ordinary old stuff. The debut episode involved restoring a century old house. In the U.S., historical preservationists would have been crawling all over it. Break out the jackhammers!
To be sure, the idea of buying a house as an investment is a foreign one in Japan. The only worthwhile investment is in the property it sits on. You build a house in Japan knowing that the next earthquake may knock it down, and the next tsunami may wash it away. But there are exceptions.
The laundromat I used in Osaka was off a street crowded with old, two-story residences. Over the span of six months, I watched one get torn down to the ground--leaving a gap in the street like a missing tooth--and then rebuilt exactly the same, but using a frame of steel I-beams.
That's one house that isn't going anywhere, come hell or high water.
Related posts
Unfurnished
Dogs, demons, and construction companies
Labels: culture, geology, japan, japanese tv, japanese tv reviews, technology, television reviews
April 14, 2011
Not an apocalyptic thriller
This video, shot by a crew of Video News Network reporters, reminds me of the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker. The "stalker" is a mule who guides people into the "Zone," an wasteland devastated by a meteorite strike. Their destination is "The Room."
At the center of this zone is the Fukushima power plant. It's just as unearthly and weird as the movie. Despite the squawking radiation meters, they are never in much danger. The Geiger counters finally peak at 112 μSv/hour within a mile of the plant.
They didn't hang around, so shouldn't have gotten much more radiation than a single dental X-ray (5 μSv), about what you'd get every hour flying cross-country in a commercial jet. The average annual radiation dose for Americans is around 3600 μSv.
Radiation is one of those things that you don't think about until forced to by circumstances. But like the universe itself, we were born in radiation and will spend our lives absorbing and radiating it. It's not a question of whether or not, but of how much.
In Stalker, The Room is said to be a place where wishes are granted. The wishes in this case are obvious, but only time and a lot of hard, dangerous work can make them come true.
At the center of this zone is the Fukushima power plant. It's just as unearthly and weird as the movie. Despite the squawking radiation meters, they are never in much danger. The Geiger counters finally peak at 112 μSv/hour within a mile of the plant.
They didn't hang around, so shouldn't have gotten much more radiation than a single dental X-ray (5 μSv), about what you'd get every hour flying cross-country in a commercial jet. The average annual radiation dose for Americans is around 3600 μSv.
Radiation is one of those things that you don't think about until forced to by circumstances. But like the universe itself, we were born in radiation and will spend our lives absorbing and radiating it. It's not a question of whether or not, but of how much.
In Stalker, The Room is said to be a place where wishes are granted. The wishes in this case are obvious, but only time and a lot of hard, dangerous work can make them come true.
Related posts
Fukushima fallout
Sendai earthquake
Apocalypse not now
Labels: earthquake, geology, japan, movies, science, tohoku earthquake
April 04, 2011
Fukushima fallout
Japan's most immediate infrastructure challenge (thinking in stark economic terms) is power generation. A friend in Japan relates that when asked what they need the most, the people in the Tohoku region (around Sendai) say, "Send electricity."
The Fukushima's forty-year-old reactors were scheduled for retirement, so once things stabilize, Tokyo Electric will probably install gas turbine generators. The one meme the talking heads have all agreed upon at this point is that the "nuclear renaissance" has been stopped in its tracks.
Personally, I'm a nuclear agnostic. In the U.S., natural gas is the best solution in the near and medium term (heck, we could export it to Japan), though coal will continue to dominate (most of Utah's power comes from coal) because it's so cheap and plentiful.
But a country like Japan has no real alternatives to nuclear if it wants anything approaching energy independence.
Even if solar and wind could the surmount the storage, transmission, and baseload power problems, Japan's geography and weather make them less than viable. Japan would be ideal for geothermal--if the huge gap between theory and application could be bridged and scaled up.
The current state of the art nuclear designs eliminates most of the problems revealed at Fukushima. If we abandoned every initially risky technology instead of improving it, most comforts of modern life would not exist, starting with the automobile.
We happily live with enormous risks when we really want something. Forty years ago, cars were death traps. In the U.S., traffic fatalities per million miles have dropped by more than half in that time. But cars still are death traps, the direct cause of 1.2 million deaths around the globe every year.
Chernobyl included, the mining and burning of fossil fuels causes more direct and indirect deaths than nuclear by several orders of magnitude. The psychological problem is that, like airplanes, the risk is concentrated, and the ability of the individual to control his own fate greatly diminished.
I know the feeling. I'm not afraid of flying, but I wouldn't live in the River Bottoms. When my mom was growing up, the River Bottoms north of Provo was rural farmland, so-called because when it flooded in the spring, the land was often covered by the Provo River.
The completion of Deer Creek Reservoir in 1941 put an end to the flooding, and now the River Bottoms is home to upscale McMansions and office parks.
The odds of Deer Creek Dam failing in my lifetime is about zero (though dams elsewhere have failed with horrendous results). But given the choice, I'd rather not have to think about it. That's the human animal for you: existential dread has become our postmodern fear of the dark.
As I said, I'm not emotionally vested in this fight, other than disapproving in general of political/industrial "solutions" at either end of the green spectrum that only survive through massive government subsidies. A government subsidy won't change the laws of physics or economics.
So the following prediction is made in the abstract: environmentalists who seize this opportunity vilify nuclear do so at their own peril. They will be admitting that the whole carbon emissions business is not that important, not apocalyptic, and the least frightening of their fears.
Nuclear paranoia will drag down all the overpriced and heavily subsidized "green" solutions with it. When Germany steps back from nuclear, count on it sneaking Eastern European coal and Russian gas through the back door. Ah, I love the smell of green hypocrisy in the morning.
A case in point is a proposed nuclear power plant near Green River, Utah. Emery County is already home to five coal-fired plants. It's where most of the electrical power in the state comes from. How badly to environmentalists want to replace them? Not that badly.
For me, at the northern end of Utah County, Green River (also known as "the middle of nowhere") is well out of my existential dread zone. So I sincerely don't care. But then I also don't lose one wink of sleep worrying about atmospheric carbon dioxide or "climate change" either.
You know people are serious about solving a problem when the solution switches from pie-in-the-sky hypotheticals (if Uncle Sam would only give them a big enough chunk of money or twist enough arms) to what's actually sitting on the table in front of them.
This is another example of how much environmentalists and religious dispensationalists have in common. However firm their belief in the cataclysmic end of the world, very few (thankfully) act on those beliefs, other than to fervently proclaim them. Because by faith are we saved.
The Fukushima's forty-year-old reactors were scheduled for retirement, so once things stabilize, Tokyo Electric will probably install gas turbine generators. The one meme the talking heads have all agreed upon at this point is that the "nuclear renaissance" has been stopped in its tracks.
Personally, I'm a nuclear agnostic. In the U.S., natural gas is the best solution in the near and medium term (heck, we could export it to Japan), though coal will continue to dominate (most of Utah's power comes from coal) because it's so cheap and plentiful.
But a country like Japan has no real alternatives to nuclear if it wants anything approaching energy independence.
Even if solar and wind could the surmount the storage, transmission, and baseload power problems, Japan's geography and weather make them less than viable. Japan would be ideal for geothermal--if the huge gap between theory and application could be bridged and scaled up.
The current state of the art nuclear designs eliminates most of the problems revealed at Fukushima. If we abandoned every initially risky technology instead of improving it, most comforts of modern life would not exist, starting with the automobile.
We happily live with enormous risks when we really want something. Forty years ago, cars were death traps. In the U.S., traffic fatalities per million miles have dropped by more than half in that time. But cars still are death traps, the direct cause of 1.2 million deaths around the globe every year.
Chernobyl included, the mining and burning of fossil fuels causes more direct and indirect deaths than nuclear by several orders of magnitude. The psychological problem is that, like airplanes, the risk is concentrated, and the ability of the individual to control his own fate greatly diminished.
I know the feeling. I'm not afraid of flying, but I wouldn't live in the River Bottoms. When my mom was growing up, the River Bottoms north of Provo was rural farmland, so-called because when it flooded in the spring, the land was often covered by the Provo River.
The completion of Deer Creek Reservoir in 1941 put an end to the flooding, and now the River Bottoms is home to upscale McMansions and office parks.
The odds of Deer Creek Dam failing in my lifetime is about zero (though dams elsewhere have failed with horrendous results). But given the choice, I'd rather not have to think about it. That's the human animal for you: existential dread has become our postmodern fear of the dark.
As I said, I'm not emotionally vested in this fight, other than disapproving in general of political/industrial "solutions" at either end of the green spectrum that only survive through massive government subsidies. A government subsidy won't change the laws of physics or economics.
So the following prediction is made in the abstract: environmentalists who seize this opportunity vilify nuclear do so at their own peril. They will be admitting that the whole carbon emissions business is not that important, not apocalyptic, and the least frightening of their fears.
Nuclear paranoia will drag down all the overpriced and heavily subsidized "green" solutions with it. When Germany steps back from nuclear, count on it sneaking Eastern European coal and Russian gas through the back door. Ah, I love the smell of green hypocrisy in the morning.
A case in point is a proposed nuclear power plant near Green River, Utah. Emery County is already home to five coal-fired plants. It's where most of the electrical power in the state comes from. How badly to environmentalists want to replace them? Not that badly.
For me, at the northern end of Utah County, Green River (also known as "the middle of nowhere") is well out of my existential dread zone. So I sincerely don't care. But then I also don't lose one wink of sleep worrying about atmospheric carbon dioxide or "climate change" either.
You know people are serious about solving a problem when the solution switches from pie-in-the-sky hypotheticals (if Uncle Sam would only give them a big enough chunk of money or twist enough arms) to what's actually sitting on the table in front of them.
This is another example of how much environmentalists and religious dispensationalists have in common. However firm their belief in the cataclysmic end of the world, very few (thankfully) act on those beliefs, other than to fervently proclaim them. Because by faith are we saved.
Related posts
Sendai earthquake
Apocalypse not now
Not an apocalyptic thriller
Labels: earthquake, environmentalism, geology, japan, politics, science, tohoku earthquake
March 25, 2011
The p-wave network
Japan is blanked by p-wave detectors. During an earthquake, the primary (pressure) waves propagate faster than the destructive secondary (shearing) s-waves. Depending on the distance from the fault, the lead time can be up to a minute. This early warning system stops Shinkansen trains and scrams nuclear reactors.
All of the reactors at Fukushima scrammed during the Sendai earthquake. It was the latent heat that caused all the problems when the backup generators powering the cooling system were wiped out by the tsunami. A nuclear reactor is basically a big stove, and it stays hot for a long time after the power is turned off.
Japan's earthquake detector network functions like Watches/Warnings alerts from the National Weather Service. When the triggering threshold is reached, a graphic pops up on your television screen, identifying the location of the quake. A few minutes later, a graphic or text scroll lists the magnitude and the affected areas.
There's a cell phone app for that too. And Yahoo Japan (and other sites, I'm sure) pops up a banner with similar information. The television graphic is accompanied by this sound. The first couple of days after the Sendai earthquake, it happened so often I started to feel like one of Pavlov's dogs.
All of the reactors at Fukushima scrammed during the Sendai earthquake. It was the latent heat that caused all the problems when the backup generators powering the cooling system were wiped out by the tsunami. A nuclear reactor is basically a big stove, and it stays hot for a long time after the power is turned off.
Japan's earthquake detector network functions like Watches/Warnings alerts from the National Weather Service. When the triggering threshold is reached, a graphic pops up on your television screen, identifying the location of the quake. A few minutes later, a graphic or text scroll lists the magnitude and the affected areas.
There's a cell phone app for that too. And Yahoo Japan (and other sites, I'm sure) pops up a banner with similar information. The television graphic is accompanied by this sound. The first couple of days after the Sendai earthquake, it happened so often I started to feel like one of Pavlov's dogs.
Related posts
Sendai earthquake (1)
Sendai earthquake (2)
Sendai earthquake (3)
Labels: earthquake, geology, japan, science, shinkansen, tohoku earthquake
March 18, 2011
Sendai earthquake (3)
With the aftershocks receding and Fukushima stuck in a FUBAR remake of Groundhog Day, NHK ran out of new news and has been running time-filling weather graphics and soothing background music all day (all night in Japan), with semi-regular programming scheduled to resume at three this afternoon with Good Morning Japan (6:00 AM in Japan).
So, let's discuss the semi-artistic angle.
The typical anime natural disaster serves to realign the social order in more "interesting"—libertarian—ways, such as creating a society where everybody's armed like in the Wild West. It's rarely framed in the more Christian "end-times" sense, and people adapt to the new order while seeking out new business opportunities, like battling evil robots and exorcising demons.
It's eerie but purely coincidental that I'm translating a fantasy series right now that begins with the destruction of Shinjuku by the "Devil Quake."
Japan went through a huge social upheaval in the mid-19th century, and a physical and existential cataclysm in the mid-20th century, so it's nothing new. As in those times, these events may lead to a welcome political realignment, providing an incentive, for example, to couple Japan's structural debt problem and reconstruction efforts with overdue austerity measures.
And perhaps the stark realities of actual suffering will put a deserved end to a recent, rather loathsome, flirtation with the angsty, sociopathic anti-hero. As Hiroki Azuma writes in the New York Times,
I wouldn't be surprised to see a slew of dramas in coming years about the heroic nuclear plant worker struggling against all odds. The relatively minor 2008 Iwate-Miyagi earthquake has already produced a feel-good film about a bunch of brave puppies, valiant JSDF rescuers, and resourceful kids.
I think the most compelling future developments--the biggest opportunity for out-of-the-box thinking--will be tsunami hardening, how Japan prepares for the next "big one." The Patlabor series, for example, is premised on the building of a massive sea wall to protect Tokyo from rising oceans. This "can-do" fiction may yet turn into fact.
So, let's discuss the semi-artistic angle.
The typical anime natural disaster serves to realign the social order in more "interesting"—libertarian—ways, such as creating a society where everybody's armed like in the Wild West. It's rarely framed in the more Christian "end-times" sense, and people adapt to the new order while seeking out new business opportunities, like battling evil robots and exorcising demons.
It's eerie but purely coincidental that I'm translating a fantasy series right now that begins with the destruction of Shinjuku by the "Devil Quake."
Japan went through a huge social upheaval in the mid-19th century, and a physical and existential cataclysm in the mid-20th century, so it's nothing new. As in those times, these events may lead to a welcome political realignment, providing an incentive, for example, to couple Japan's structural debt problem and reconstruction efforts with overdue austerity measures.
And perhaps the stark realities of actual suffering will put a deserved end to a recent, rather loathsome, flirtation with the angsty, sociopathic anti-hero. As Hiroki Azuma writes in the New York Times,
While many will revert [after the crisis passes] to their indecisive selves, the experience of discovering our own public-minded, patriotic selves that had been paralyzed within a pernicious cynicism is not likely to fade away.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a slew of dramas in coming years about the heroic nuclear plant worker struggling against all odds. The relatively minor 2008 Iwate-Miyagi earthquake has already produced a feel-good film about a bunch of brave puppies, valiant JSDF rescuers, and resourceful kids.
I think the most compelling future developments--the biggest opportunity for out-of-the-box thinking--will be tsunami hardening, how Japan prepares for the next "big one." The Patlabor series, for example, is premised on the building of a massive sea wall to protect Tokyo from rising oceans. This "can-do" fiction may yet turn into fact.
Related posts
Sendai earthquake (1)
Sendai earthquake (2)
The world ends (and I feel fine)
Labels: anime, earthquake, geology, good morning japan, japan, politics, robots, tohoku earthquake
March 16, 2011
Sendai earthquake (2)
I've been watching NHK's live, wall-to-wall coverage since the earthquake. The images are truly overwhelming, with magnitude five and six aftershocks occurring across central Japan almost every hour. It's like a large china cabinet being slowly being dragged across a rutted road.
Human beings are ultimately powerless before the forces of nature, but human ingenuity can help to mitigate their effects and recover from them. Keeping your wits about you in the meantime certainly helps.
NHK's coverage is calm, cool and collected. The reporters, you know, report. In one of those "what the foreign press are saying" segments, they broadcast a lead-in clip from ABC News with Diane Sawyer. It sounded in comparison like a movie trailer for a Michael Bay blockbuster.
NPR's Morning Edition (my clock radio alarm) has managed to keep things fairly sober and balanced. My only complaint is the way they time shift makes references to "today" (meaning: yesterday in Japan) very confusing, when I'd watched what was happening "today" last night.
Amidst all the destruction, one amazing realization that comes from watching "Showa nostalgia" movies like Always: Sunset on Third Street is how quickly Japan recovered, not from the obliteration of one mid-sized city, but of every major population center in the country (except Kyoto).
The Marshall Plan in this case may be the $800 billion in U.S. Treasury securities that Japan currently holds. Despite running up huge structural deficits, they've wisely kept some money in the bank.
Nassim Taleb correctly argues that the best strategy for survival is to create systems robust enough to withstand the inevitability of the best predictions and forecasts, the most exacting theories and models, and the smartest experts being proved completely wrong.
Human beings are ultimately powerless before the forces of nature, but human ingenuity can help to mitigate their effects and recover from them. Keeping your wits about you in the meantime certainly helps.
NHK's coverage is calm, cool and collected. The reporters, you know, report. In one of those "what the foreign press are saying" segments, they broadcast a lead-in clip from ABC News with Diane Sawyer. It sounded in comparison like a movie trailer for a Michael Bay blockbuster.
NPR's Morning Edition (my clock radio alarm) has managed to keep things fairly sober and balanced. My only complaint is the way they time shift makes references to "today" (meaning: yesterday in Japan) very confusing, when I'd watched what was happening "today" last night.
Amidst all the destruction, one amazing realization that comes from watching "Showa nostalgia" movies like Always: Sunset on Third Street is how quickly Japan recovered, not from the obliteration of one mid-sized city, but of every major population center in the country (except Kyoto).
The Marshall Plan in this case may be the $800 billion in U.S. Treasury securities that Japan currently holds. Despite running up huge structural deficits, they've wisely kept some money in the bank.
Nassim Taleb correctly argues that the best strategy for survival is to create systems robust enough to withstand the inevitability of the best predictions and forecasts, the most exacting theories and models, and the smartest experts being proved completely wrong.
Related posts
Sendai earthquake (1)
Sendai earthquake (3)
Labels: earthquake, geology, japan, science, television, tohoku earthquake
March 14, 2011
Sendai earthquake (1)
The magnitude of 9.0 (revised) made it the biggest known earthquake to hit Japan in its recorded history.
The earthquake on Friday was preceded earlier in the week by dozens of five to seven magnitude deep-sea earthquakes in the same area, off the coast of Sendai. None of the tsunami forecasts at the time exceeded eighteen inches, and none of them reached even that height.
In this case, though, the boy cried wolf and the wolf came.
Read more »
The earthquake on Friday was preceded earlier in the week by dozens of five to seven magnitude deep-sea earthquakes in the same area, off the coast of Sendai. None of the tsunami forecasts at the time exceeded eighteen inches, and none of them reached even that height.
In this case, though, the boy cried wolf and the wolf came.
Read more »
Labels: earthquake, geology, google maps, japan, science, tohoku earthquake
February 18, 2010
The world ends (and I feel fine)
This year's NHK historical docudrama is about Ryouma Sakamoto, Japan's most brilliant and charismatic 19th century revolutionary (in the traditional sense of being open to new ideas and then seeking pragmatic ways of implementing them).As the program vividly illustrates, the arrival of Commodore Perry's "Black Ships" was no less shocking to both the populace and the powers-that-be than an invasion from outer space.
Two centuries earlier, Japan could boast of having one of the most advanced societies in the world. But in 1853, Perry's steam-powered warships confronted the Japanese with technology beyond anything they could imagine.
A mere fifteen years later, after ruling uncontested for 250 years, the Tokugawa regime was crushed and swept from power in a civil war that lasted a matter of months.
Add to that regular earthquakes, volcanoes, and typhoons, the occasional suicidal end-time cult, two atomic bombs and losing a world war, and it's no surprise that the apocalypse has become part of the national consciousness.
Japanese F&SF writers love apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic plots. And perhaps perversely, Japanese love being entertained by them. They come in all shades and varieties. To name a few of the sub-genres off the top of my head:
- Japan sinks into the Pacific (Japan Sinks).
- Japan (or parts thereof) is destroyed by rampaging monsters. Or robots. Or aliens. The Gozilla series covered all of these at some point.
- A secret conspiracy destroys Japan (or parts thereof) to keep an even bigger conspiracy secret (Vexille). Attempts to explain said conspiracy usually result in much tangled logic and head scratching in the denouement (Evangelion).
- More specifically, Tokyo gets destroyed. Repeatedly (Akira).
- Instead of destroying Tokyo, aliens park the whole city in a different dimension (RahXephon).
- The oceans rise, threatening to inundate most of metropolitan Japan (Patlabor). Toss in a mutant sea monster (Patlabor: W-13).
- Earthquakes, with both natural and supernatural causes and effects, wreak havoc (Demon City Shinjuku).
- The planet is rendered unlivable by external astronomical events, like the Moon exploding (Cowboy Bebop).
The apocalyptic event is often an excuse to wreck the current social order (Burst Angel). Japan is such an orderly society that if you want to inject a Mad Max element—or postulate that everybody's as well-armed as Americans—you need an upheaval first to make it believable.
The cheesy but fun (and even poignant at times) anime version of Witchblade combines a Tokyo-wrecking conspiracy with supernatural earthquakes, rising seas, and law & order so gone to hell that superhero gunfights (among barely-dressed babes) can break out at any moment.
The best defeat of extraterrestrial invaders occurs in Magic User's Club, wherein the heroine turns the alien spaceship into a giant flowering cherry tree.
My favorite post-apocalyptic series is the Yokohama Shopping Log (not available in English). A combination of natural disasters and rising oceans has destroyed most of the "post" in postmodern Japan. But all things considered, life didn't turn out half bad.
Think of Little House on the Prairie with modern plumbing and an android as the protagonist. Seriously, reading this manga is better than an antidepressant. Maybe the world ought to end on a more regular basis.
Related posts
The Big Bad
Apocalypse not now
Demon City libertarianism
Oh yeah, we're baaad
Labels: anime, anime lists, apocalyptic fiction, demon city, environmentalism, geology, japan, movies, pop culture, robots, sakamoto, superhero, ww2
February 15, 2010
Apocalypse not now
The world is always ending and never will.
That is, until the sun goes nova, a black hole swallows up the Earth, or a nearby star collapses in a gamma ray event that turns us all into irradiated food. Since we can't prevent any of those things from happening, there's no point worrying about them (asteroids we can actually do something about).
But we love imagining that "it's all over (almost)," largely because Sunday School is boring. Plus that "love your neighbor" stuff isn't as much fun as hoping the son of a bitch fries when the big one hits. Thus every screaming headline is treated as evidence that the big, bad Damoclean Sword is about to go into free-fall.
Yet as Stephen Pinker and Jared Diamond have pointed out, during the 20th century, even including WWII, a member of the human species had a lower chance of suffering a violent death than at any time else during recorded history. We mistake news of bad things with the incidence of bad things happening.
What we're mostly witnessing presently is the inevitable shifting of the momentum of history from one part of the globe to another. Having previously identified and invested ourselves with the ascension of the West, this decline arouses much angst. But in the long view, it's another day at the office.
The "West" is aging so fast (along with China, Japan, and most of the developed world) that any call to arms in order to usher in Armageddon would first send us scurrying for our walkers.
Doomsayers used to warn us that when the nuclear apocalypse came (assuming, improbably, that all those long-dormant missiles would obediently fire when the button was pressed), only the cockroaches would survive. Human beings are more resilient than cockroaches and thrive in far more extreme environments.
It's unfortunate that Chinese history during the Three Kingdoms period and Japanese history during the Warring States period isn't a regular part of the high school curriculum. It would impress upon students how resilient the human animal is under extreme duress.
During the Three Kingdoms period, attrition rates in many areas exceeded 50 percent of the entire population. That'd be like the population of the U.S. dropping from 300 million to 150 million in a single generation. Now China is our principal loan officer.
True, it took a few centuries, but it wasn't the end of the world. It wasn't even the end of Chinese civilization. The history books simply marked the beginning of a new dynasty.
These same historical periods saw great social change and advances in technology and culture (ditto the aftermath of the Black Death). Give the human race a challenge and after a bit of Darwinist pruning it'll rise to it. This end-of-days stuff makes for entertaining movies. But in real life it's a cop-out.
It's hard to match the presumptuousness of a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears teenagers selling the secret sauce to save our souls. Except that they're dim bulbs compared to to the blinding arrogance of the secular evangelists who claim they are going to save the whole bloody planet.
The new religion of catastrophic environmentalism has also embraced the apocalypse, along with the fundamentalist's fear of change. But just as much worse changes have happened to human civilization in the past, much worst changes have happened to the planet itself than we're capable of inflicting.
And will happen in the future, regardless of anything we do or don't do. Planetary catastrophic change—earthquakes, volcanoes, ice ages, oceans rising and falling—is what the planet does normally. (The mean temperature of the North Slope of Alaska was once thirty degrees warmer than it is today.)
We've turned into roosters convinced the sun rises on our command. We're quite capable of fouling our own nests, but only in the sense that a horsefly fouls the windshield of a tractor-trailer cruising down the interstate. It's not like the tractor-trailer cares. A swish of the windshield wipers and its gone.
Let's keep in mind who's really in charge. There are more bacteria on earth—in mass and number—than all other living things combined. For that matter, there are more bacteria in the human gut than cells in the human body. The bacteria keep us around because we're convenient.
Our ultimate fate is to become compost. It is more comforting to believe that we're standing at the fulcrum of history, that like Archimedes we can move the Earth if given enough leverage (or "political activism"), rather than accommodating ourselves to whatever direction the Earth wishes to move in.
Except not that mundane, sausage-making politics. Or anything that requires any actual risk to life and limb. Just idealistically protest stuff and vilify those of different (political) faiths (the ones counting on you being "left behind"; it's apparently a very mutually-annihilating sentiment).
Merely declare your "awareness" of the situation and you are saved! (Wait, I forget, is that evangelicals or environmentalists?)
Making every conflict, every frustrated objective, every twist and turn in the course of geological and human events, into a Manichean contest of wills buys into the same fanciful thinking as the conspiracy gnostics who insist they're the only ones who really know what's going on (and then can't shut up about it).
It's a trap that teenagers easily fall into, what with all their "goth" posturings and dour convictions that nobody (let alone their parents or teachers) has ever suffered as much as them in the whole history of the world.
But teenagers grow out of it. Adult, middle-class Americans indulging in non-fiction apocalyptic fantasies are like twelve-year-olds gathered around the campfire telling ghost stories and scaring themselves for the giggly thrill of it, knowing that in the morning they'll be driving home to the suburbs.
That is, until the sun goes nova, a black hole swallows up the Earth, or a nearby star collapses in a gamma ray event that turns us all into irradiated food. Since we can't prevent any of those things from happening, there's no point worrying about them (asteroids we can actually do something about).
But we love imagining that "it's all over (almost)," largely because Sunday School is boring. Plus that "love your neighbor" stuff isn't as much fun as hoping the son of a bitch fries when the big one hits. Thus every screaming headline is treated as evidence that the big, bad Damoclean Sword is about to go into free-fall.
Yet as Stephen Pinker and Jared Diamond have pointed out, during the 20th century, even including WWII, a member of the human species had a lower chance of suffering a violent death than at any time else during recorded history. We mistake news of bad things with the incidence of bad things happening.
What we're mostly witnessing presently is the inevitable shifting of the momentum of history from one part of the globe to another. Having previously identified and invested ourselves with the ascension of the West, this decline arouses much angst. But in the long view, it's another day at the office.
The "West" is aging so fast (along with China, Japan, and most of the developed world) that any call to arms in order to usher in Armageddon would first send us scurrying for our walkers.
Doomsayers used to warn us that when the nuclear apocalypse came (assuming, improbably, that all those long-dormant missiles would obediently fire when the button was pressed), only the cockroaches would survive. Human beings are more resilient than cockroaches and thrive in far more extreme environments.
It's unfortunate that Chinese history during the Three Kingdoms period and Japanese history during the Warring States period isn't a regular part of the high school curriculum. It would impress upon students how resilient the human animal is under extreme duress.
During the Three Kingdoms period, attrition rates in many areas exceeded 50 percent of the entire population. That'd be like the population of the U.S. dropping from 300 million to 150 million in a single generation. Now China is our principal loan officer.
True, it took a few centuries, but it wasn't the end of the world. It wasn't even the end of Chinese civilization. The history books simply marked the beginning of a new dynasty.
These same historical periods saw great social change and advances in technology and culture (ditto the aftermath of the Black Death). Give the human race a challenge and after a bit of Darwinist pruning it'll rise to it. This end-of-days stuff makes for entertaining movies. But in real life it's a cop-out.
It's hard to match the presumptuousness of a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears teenagers selling the secret sauce to save our souls. Except that they're dim bulbs compared to to the blinding arrogance of the secular evangelists who claim they are going to save the whole bloody planet.
The new religion of catastrophic environmentalism has also embraced the apocalypse, along with the fundamentalist's fear of change. But just as much worse changes have happened to human civilization in the past, much worst changes have happened to the planet itself than we're capable of inflicting.
And will happen in the future, regardless of anything we do or don't do. Planetary catastrophic change—earthquakes, volcanoes, ice ages, oceans rising and falling—is what the planet does normally. (The mean temperature of the North Slope of Alaska was once thirty degrees warmer than it is today.)
We've turned into roosters convinced the sun rises on our command. We're quite capable of fouling our own nests, but only in the sense that a horsefly fouls the windshield of a tractor-trailer cruising down the interstate. It's not like the tractor-trailer cares. A swish of the windshield wipers and its gone.
Let's keep in mind who's really in charge. There are more bacteria on earth—in mass and number—than all other living things combined. For that matter, there are more bacteria in the human gut than cells in the human body. The bacteria keep us around because we're convenient.
Our ultimate fate is to become compost. It is more comforting to believe that we're standing at the fulcrum of history, that like Archimedes we can move the Earth if given enough leverage (or "political activism"), rather than accommodating ourselves to whatever direction the Earth wishes to move in.
Except not that mundane, sausage-making politics. Or anything that requires any actual risk to life and limb. Just idealistically protest stuff and vilify those of different (political) faiths (the ones counting on you being "left behind"; it's apparently a very mutually-annihilating sentiment).
Merely declare your "awareness" of the situation and you are saved! (Wait, I forget, is that evangelicals or environmentalists?)
An interesting fact about white people is that they firmly believe that all of the world's problems can be solved through "awareness." Meaning the process of making other people aware of problems, and then magically someone else like the government will fix it. This belief allows them to feel that sweet self-satisfaction without actually having to solve anything or face any difficult challenges.
Making every conflict, every frustrated objective, every twist and turn in the course of geological and human events, into a Manichean contest of wills buys into the same fanciful thinking as the conspiracy gnostics who insist they're the only ones who really know what's going on (and then can't shut up about it).
It's a trap that teenagers easily fall into, what with all their "goth" posturings and dour convictions that nobody (let alone their parents or teachers) has ever suffered as much as them in the whole history of the world.
But teenagers grow out of it. Adult, middle-class Americans indulging in non-fiction apocalyptic fantasies are like twelve-year-olds gathered around the campfire telling ghost stories and scaring themselves for the giggly thrill of it, knowing that in the morning they'll be driving home to the suburbs.
Related posts
The Second Coming went
Oh yeah, we're baaad
The world ends (and I feel fine)
Fukushima fallout
Labels: apocalyptic fiction, deep thoughts, environmentalism, geology, history
May 18, 2008
Earthquakes and mandates
The governing political principle in The Twelve Kingdoms is that of the Mandate of Heaven. It shares some similarities with the Divine Right of Kings that rationalized hegemonic power in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. But unlike the European kings, the Mandate of Heaven was not assumed to continue in perpetuity, but revealed itself in dynastic cycles. A successful coup d'etat was taken as evidence that the Mandate had been loss.
Claiming decadency from the Sun God Amaterasu, the Japanese emperor combined both the Divine Right and the Mandate of Heaven. In practice, by the end of the first millennium, political power had been completely separated from throne. It thus became politically convenient for a new shogun to seek a Mandate by seeking the blessing of the emperor, much in the same way the European kings sought the blessing of Rome.
In The Twelve Kingdoms, institutional corruption and natural and supernatural disasters are directly tied to the dynastic cycle. In medieval China, evidence for the withdrawal of the Mandate could only be offered post hoc ergo propter hoc. Modern technology could change that. This week on NPR, Morning Edition introduced the political implications of the Mandate of Heaven into its coverage of the earthquake in China:
One thing is certain: the earthquake has tragically revealed the consequences of very real corruption in the Chinese construction industry. Inspections recently uncovered similar corrupt practices in Japan, thankfully before an earthquake struck, and the architect and contractors went to jail. In an ever-opening China, politicians will no doubt lay claim to a "new" dynastic cycle, laying these sins at the feet of prior corrupt regimes.
Claiming decadency from the Sun God Amaterasu, the Japanese emperor combined both the Divine Right and the Mandate of Heaven. In practice, by the end of the first millennium, political power had been completely separated from throne. It thus became politically convenient for a new shogun to seek a Mandate by seeking the blessing of the emperor, much in the same way the European kings sought the blessing of Rome.
In The Twelve Kingdoms, institutional corruption and natural and supernatural disasters are directly tied to the dynastic cycle. In medieval China, evidence for the withdrawal of the Mandate could only be offered post hoc ergo propter hoc. Modern technology could change that. This week on NPR, Morning Edition introduced the political implications of the Mandate of Heaven into its coverage of the earthquake in China:
In Chinese political culture, an earthquake, a famine, or a great flood can be seen as the end of the Mandate of Heaven. Heaven bestows power on leaders. But when Heaven sees that those leaders aren't handling the power well, it can take [that power] away. This is sometimes signaled by a great natural disaster.
One thing is certain: the earthquake has tragically revealed the consequences of very real corruption in the Chinese construction industry. Inspections recently uncovered similar corrupt practices in Japan, thankfully before an earthquake struck, and the architect and contractors went to jail. In an ever-opening China, politicians will no doubt lay claim to a "new" dynastic cycle, laying these sins at the feet of prior corrupt regimes.
Labels: 12 kingdoms, china, geology, history, politics