Quote:
Originally Posted by Stitchawl
A Japan rant...
Japan is NOT small. It likes to call itself small. It likes to present a 'small' image to the world, for some reason, but Japan is NOT small. Great Britain is less than half the size, but we never think of it as 'small,' nor does it try to project that image.
With all the news about the current disaster, a lot of misinformation has developed. I can see it in the e-mails I get from friends around the world. While the devastation here has been severe, only a small part of Japan has been 'physically' affected. The emotional devastation is world-wide, spread with the tsunami that reached so many different shores.
If one were to lift Japan up and place it over a map of the US eastern seaboard, placing the top of Hokkaido on top of the state of Maine, Japan would reach down to South Carolina. East to west, it would go from the coast all the way inland to the mountain range that extends from the Adirondacks through the Appalachians.
The area 'physically' affected by this current disaster equates to a strip of land along the coast, perhaps going inland for a few miles, from Massachusettes, RI, and a bit of Connecticut. The rest of Japan has NOT been physically affected, although we have certainly all been emotionally crushed. Services are mostly back to normal in Tokyo, and even all the schools are open today. Obviously this is NOT the case 100 miles north of Tokyo. It will be quite some time before that area is functioning normally once again. Of course, the lose of lives, the destruction of property, and the emotional distress can not be, nor should not be, discounted. This has been devastating for Japan.
Stitchawl
|
thanks for giving us that geographic perspective, because you are very correct! quite often we hear things along the lines of; "the tiny island country of Japan..." we also base pretty much everything off of the images we get of Tokyo and think of how tiny and crowded it all is. the images of the Tsunami gave proof to that inaccuracy, as we saw what was obviously miles and miles of farmland drowned