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Originally Posted by kindlekitten
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
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There is a cultural desire to group closely. When you see a Japanese tour group, people are walking with their shoulders touching each other. When a contractor builds a housing developement, there is just barely room to walk, turned sideways, between the houses. Japanese cities are crowded because they want to be crowded. There is plenty of undeveloped space. Yes, most of it is mountain, but that never stops the developers. They just terraform. They cut down the mountain and build their housing projects. It's true that the natural flat land has all been turned to agriculture, primarily rice, but there are new towns going up all the time. There is one right near me! They cut down some mountains and began putting in houses and apartment buildings. Now they are putting up a CostCo!
Tokyo is big, but in actuallity it's just a bit larger than London. If you look at a
Japan map, you realize that it's just one of many large Japanese cities. So is Osaka, or Kyoto. By comparison, New York City (Manhattan and the Bronx) would fit inside my neighborhood, with room to spare. It takes about 12 hours to drive from Kyoto to Tokyo via the expressways.
The epicenter of the quake was off of Sendai, north of Tokyo, but Tokyo felt the shocks enough to shut of the airports and train services for the day. However, it was the tsunami afterwards that really did the damage, though all of that was basically coastal, and north of Tokyo.
Stitchawl