tsunami

[jape]

I hope any of you near the coast have gone for dinner somewhere high ... news coming in from Japan is terrible and I don't know how far the tsunami will go but lets hope you are all OK.

[humanbeing]

GMT+8 about 9pm Honkong will rasise ~0.5m

[td_ref]

Watched 'lost in translation' last night, oh dear, 8.9 magnitude on Friday.

[euphonius]

My friends in Tokyo, far from the epicenter, are shattered. Constant aftershocks. One friend will set out on foot to fetch his wife from another part of town. Another friend is in a plane on the runway at Narita, Tokyo's big international airport. She felt the shock from inside the plane, and the flight was postponed. If systems permit they will fly at 6 a.m., after a night in the plane, as it is not possible to return to the terminal.

This disaster really will test Japan.

Godspeed to Japan and all who live there.

[barnone]

What a disaster in Japan. Didn't even know about the quake until I read jape's thread early this morning here in Florida.

[moilami]

Watched it from Youtube some time ago. Good footage in there. Nature is big and powerful. People are like ants when compared.

All the best for Japenese.

[jape]

We have this modern phenomenon called 'rolling news' on some channels. Inane commentary, stupid questions from 'journalists', repetitive, badly focused clips taken from 'you tube'. The lowest common denominator of reporting. Yet although they were on air within a short while, many hours later the same clips, questions and comments.
I did some channel surfing and it is mostly the same on all of Australian TV with small variations in the 'experts', yup, repeating the same stupid questions and answers.

And they tie up phone-lines and badly needed communications facilities with this garbage.

Our Foreign office officials could not get in touch with our own Embassy there, except after a few hours and then with patchy mobile phones. What? No radio or satellite comms?

I still haven't seen any good reporting, just the sensationalism. Nothing, despite worldwide communications, from anywhere else on the planet that is affected. Rolling news, rolling crap.
We had day after day of this junk with the bush-fires and the floods and cyclone. Emotionalism, milking every moment for sensation. Very little real news, just hour after hour of conjecture and ridiculous commentary. It is not the hardware that is lacking, it is the journalists and station producers with brains we lack.

I watched it on both French and then Chinese (CCTV4) for a while. Both showed short, concise round-ups of events and images. Facts and just a little commentary. Shame they were not subtitled but I could still see and understand with my limited French language skills and no Chinese, what was going on better than on the local stations! Australia is simply copying the very worst of USA in business, news, fashion and TV - and going down the plug-hole fast!

[moilami]

Your posting made me curious to listen from Finnish Yleisradio (equivalent to BBC but Finnish version) news and I was very surprised to find level headed and calm discussion with maybe 10 different experts commenting this and that. It was almost heavenly experience when compared to Internet mass hysteria way of reporting.

[Lao Jia Hou]

Truly a tragedy - so incredibly heart-wrenching. I can't watch much of it.

Chinese news reporting is "different" from the West in one aspect - the sensationalism is blood & guts, in the raw. The more gory, it seems, the better. It reminds me of when I was in the waiting room at the Driving License bureau in Beijing - it has a large screen TV showing horrible accidents, including the aftermath. One was a close up of a guy that was decapitated. Another is of pedestrians being squashed by huge truck tires.

[jape]

There's nothing quite so shocking as holding a mate in your arms as he dies. And nothing so quickly dehumanising as watching another mate turned into bits and pieces. Whether in road trauma or other nasty places we have all over this world. But I like all the 'gory truth' style road safety ads, might just wake up a few idiots. I wish they showed them in the Vehicle Licensing offices here. Unfortunately all the 'entertainment' movies of bombs and wars and heroes have so much removed people from reality that it has little effect, peer pressure to drink is more powerful.

No-one who has been through blood and gore likes to talk about it or think about it but strange things fix in your mind forever, like how yellow some bone is.

And when it comes to natural disasters, all is so strange these days, we watch it on TV, repeated over and over until it becomes unreal - and some locals I overheard just complained how they missed some TV show while the first reports rolled in. I asked them if they realised that people were dying, trapped and crushed and drowning in those images they had been laughing ta, marvelling at, of boats hitting bridges and cars catching fire in water. They moved away from me and looked at me as if I were the strange one. I am used to that.

Glad to see your words 'heart wrenching'. Few have hearts any more, fewer respond with them, and even fewer truly mourn and empathise. i am not sentimental but I am glad after a lifetime I can still feel.