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It’s almost been a year since all hell broke loose and the end of times came to the residents of Northern Japan. Last March 11, when the Fukushima Nuclear Plant started to cook off acquaintances and friends started to leave in a panic. It honestly never even occurred to me to leave. (Read: Leaving Japan is Betrayal?)
Maybe I would have considered leaving if I knew what I know now about how close the plant came to melting down. How, according to reports just being released, Japanese Prime Minister Kan actually had to order TEPCO to stay and try and keep the plant under control. If TEPCO had its way and abandoned the plant Tokyo would have been evacuated. That’s Tokyo’s 30 million people, the population of Canada, all fleeing south.
He credited Mr. Kan with making the right decision in forcing Tepco not to abandon the plant.
“Prime Minister Kan had his minuses and he had his lapses,” Mr. Funabashi said, “but his decision to storm into Tepco and demand that it not give up saved Japan.”
–New York Times
But at the time I didn’t really understand how long it would take to shut down the nuclear plant and the amount of radiation that would be released. I guess I just trusted the Japanese government during the time of crisis. But as anyone who has read this blog for a while can attest GaijinAss is not a Japanese apologist site. The Japanese government is a regime that didn’t build dikes big enough to block the tsunami because if they did they would have to admit that the dikes that existed weren’t high enough and nuclear plants weren’t safe. This is a Japanese government famous for robotics yet prevented companies from developing nuclear disaster robots because the existence of nuclear disaster robots would have admitted that nuclear meltdown was possible.
experts claim the government was previously unwilling to finance projects to develop robots that could be used during a nuclear accident, fearing such a move might imply that a nuclear disaster was possible and cause the public to question the safety of atomic plants.
I live outside the nuclear sacrifice zone, 200km away in Tokyo, and I have no control over the nuclear plant and its radioactive emissions. I have friends and acquaintances that can’t handle this “threat” and are constantly stressed about it, willing to give up everything to get away. I honestly believe that the stress caused by radiation is many times more harmful than than any “threat” radiation actually causes. Already in one year over 1300 people have died due to stress related to 311 disaster. It really blows me away when I hear people talking about leaving Japan because they’re worried about either another earthquake or the radiation threat … Really?
I once read that scientists did a study on living next to a old hydrodam that had serious structural damage and had a high risk of breaking and killing everyone downstream. The scientists did a survey and found that the further away from the Dam they got the more people got stressed out. Those right next to the Dam had no fears while those hundreds of kilometers away stressed about it everyday. So maybe that is me always so close to something that I can’t see the danger.
And there is a danger. ”Experts in Japan have warned that the chances of a powerful earthquake striking Tokyo in the next four years could be as high as 70%.” (Read: 5 ways to survive the aftermath of the Great Tokyo earthquake) Yet I’m not planning my exit. If a quake hits Tokyo it would be devasting the last time a major quake hit the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake basically leveled the city. Obviously modern Tokyo, with its strict earthquake design codes, is much better position to handle an earthquake now than say Vancouver, Canada or San Francisco which both have a similar earthquake threats.
The total destruction after the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake
I live in a new building that will withstand a major quake but there is something else, I almost want to live through a major disaster. A part of me wants the earthquake to happen….
(This is our 300th post, so since you have all rode our thunder for so long with us asking for nothing, we humbly request that EVERYONE pushes this post. ReTweet it, Facebook share it, LIKE us on Facebook, Email it to everyone on your Christmas list, Send a faxed copy to your Sick Grandma, print it out and mail a copy to your hot Russian Pen-Pal. Anything. )
THIS IS GAIJINASS!
This will be our 300th post here on GJS and we have done it all, pulled out all the stops, and we want to share both our accumulated knowledge while at the same time gloating about our new skill bonuses, since I am now an 18th level barbarian-necromancer, and Yosomono just found the ice key to the Amethyst dragons portal to the Zaekarean dimension. Suck it Thieves guild!
But in all seriousness…
When two men join forces and write 300 posts about the art of lunacy, it’s inevitable that they learn a secret about the unicorn that lives in your panty drawer and organizes your razor blade collection. While we won’t tell the world that particular bit of private, we can share with you now, 7 things that writing this website has taught us.
Now, I know what you might be thinking….
…but love us or hate us, read on and be enlightened.
7. Animals can teach us how to not get groped and raped.
Obviously, in nature there are symbiotic relationships. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. However, a helpless woman on a crowded train with some guys hand on her ass is considerably different from a little bird that pecks insects off a Rhino, or for example, Master Ruling Bartertown astride Blasters strong, firm, developmentally challenged back.
"Seriously though, who rules Batertown, Bitches?
Ideas have been proposed and discussed. It seems though, that when one is being felt up, be it by a man or a woman, the proper reaction can be somewhat elusive.
This is where our good friends, the animals, come in. As Yosomono has proven through exhaustive field work and university research using “computers”, many animals simply do not give a fuck. This is instructive for a variety of reasons. While whoever is fondling your goodies in the number 7 car on the Chuo line, and your self-respect is running away from you faster than a Republican from Black Excellence month, an animal in your situation might choose a more simplistic approach to curtailing this behavior i.e. Rip the persons goddamn face off.
There it is; train groping problem solved, people. You feel that cheeky rub-rub in a crowded train car, simply growl, then screech at the top of your lungs as you bite the offenders mug off.
"Yeah, it works for me. Never been groped, not once."
6. Teaching in Japan, the Art of not Losing ones Mind.
Teaching anything, anywhere, can be a rewarding yet challenging experience; just ask David Koresh. However, working as a teacher in Japan can present unique and often unforeseeable ways to drive you completely mad.
Besides ones very livelihood being threatened by robots that have a secret, human hating agenda programmed into their fully self-aware, mechanical hearts, the day-to-day grind of existing within a system that likes to pretend you don’t exist within said system, can lead to all manner of whackyness.
Buy the ticket and ride that little pony all the way to very edge of your fragile sensibilities.
A lot of people villanize English teachers in Japan too. We get that in the comments from time to time. I find it funny that the majority of these comments are full of grammatical mistakes/homo-erotica and personify what the English language might look like if it were actually a group of retards trying to fuck a doorknob in a Calvin Klein Commercial. Someone must be bitter about a bad experience in their past.
Maybe, the pony hurt them, hurt them someplace secret.
"Occasionally, when I write a joke about a Killer robot, I can tell it's watching me."
5. Japanese celebrities are a dying breed.
It’s a well-known international fact, proven by things like Science, that Japan invented “Weird”. Japanese television is the hybrid love child of a robotic tentacle monster driven by an angry chimpanzee and an omni-lingual dolphin ,named “Mikey”, that manages AKB48 and sells Methamphetamine’s to school children because, according to its therapist, “Mikey has abandonment issues”.
It just makes absolutely no sense what-so-ever.
In resent years, sure, Japan has tried to clean up its act, but that’s really simply been a token gesture. A lot like child pornography finally being curtailed. No, TV here is as bizarre as ever and the celebrities on it are complete maniacs, morons or people who practice Sorcery.
We covered the manhunt for the “uber-criminal” Noriko Sakai after her loving husband ratted her out to the police once he was arrested on drug charges.
If you want a country of able-bodied men that are willing to sky dive from 25,000 feet on supplemental Oxygen, assassinate a foreign dignitary with his own lunch box and then play a no limit game of Texas Hold’em on his bloody, prone-position corpse, you need to teach them how to be hard as coffin nails. The best way to do this is movie magic and regular beatings. However, the following simply does not engender much in the way of HARD-ness:
"...this inspires me to wish I had a little dress to wear to a lovely tea party."
No, it takes something unique to completely squelch any kind of humanity that might stop someone from kicking some haji in the face when he/she doesn’t obey your commands at a water distribution point in Baghdad.
Something like this…
"Your first mistake was bringing your arms to a bone snapping contest."
…but this is also acceptable…
"SAY IT!" "I'm a...faaaaag."
But oh how far the mighty have fallen. Now, action movies are largely based around Computer graphics instead of good ole fashioned stunt-man-hurting. People like Channing Tatum are allowed to mouth diarrhea all over everyone, and the gods of the past can’t make movies unless the story revolves around a cyborg on the loose in Eastern Europe.
2011 did everything in its power to not only destroy the super-soldier program known as Gaijinass.com, but it also tried to totally obliterate the very country of Japan at the same time.
We aren’t making any of this up. This really is a Super-Soldier program.
Lions, Tigers and Bears- OH MY! The gods really pulled all the stops out with massive earthquakes, a colossal tsunami and just general mayhem and carnage in Northern Japan. Anyone who was in Japan at that time will never forget March 11th 2011, and we talked about some of the things we learned when the world started shaking and baking.
In the end, with so much excellence and knowledge having been bestowed upon Earth by us, we finally turned to the only thing left: Japanese Porn Myths.
Yep, we even shot holes in your fantasies, fantasies.
And since you brought up sex, lets move on to our final lesson learned.
1. The World loves Japanese Sex Things
China basically hates Japan, and despite all the talk about “Nanking” or “Imperial Aggression” or “China not sucking”, in reality it’s more basic. If you put two Japanese female tourists on a beach in Bali, and then you put two Chinese female tourists on the beach in Bali, and all four of them order margaritas, guess who is getting their drinks first? Correct- Not the Commies.
See, the world over, Japan has developed, alongside its weirdo-ness, a sexy-ness spawned by an obsession with cuteness, that has become pretty well-known. It shows in our stats every day, and although it was a big surprise to me that “Sex Sells!“, who would have imagined (?!), it’s definitely helped put Gaijinass.com on the map.
Basic right?
"Can I get that Margarita Frozen?"
It’s been interesting to learn just how many people want to read about a Japanese Dominatrix. The terms used in search engines tell us a lot about our readership, and apparently “Pain yes demand Japan Queen” is an actual thing.
No big surprise that Porno is popular, but when people really start paying attention to tongue in cheek directions regarding the finding of a “woman of the night” to help service your needs, it leads one to think a bit. It hasn’t just been the Japanese that people have been interested either, but stories of foreign women making their way in the world today as well.
If we were to put a finer point on things though, not just “Sex”, but get more detailed, it saddens yet fails to surprise me that insane computer games, and in particular the infamous game devoted to a mission of raping and impregnating women purely in the name of vengeance, gets so much attention. But on the other hand, how else does an aspiring sex offender practice this sort of thing? Because you can’t just go around raping people, unless they want you to, and use the secret signal or dressing like a slut to clearly let you know what they really want. I’m no anthropologist, but I think it says someplace in the Bill of rights that “No means Yes.” Or have people got that mixed up? Either way, watch out for the face biting, though.
In conclusion…
Japan, a peaceful place. And a place that really likes boning.
Hope you have learned as much about Japan as we have about all your dark, filthy secrets. Send this article on to someone cooler than yourself!
Read more Nonsense from GaijinAss by Checking out:
The “Death of Japan” is obviously, very sensational, but when it comes to an earthquake potentially much bigger than that of March 11 2011, SENSATIONAL! makes all the sense in the world to me.
Just to keep us all on the same page, in the below diagram I define SENSATIONAL!
"Sensational! You know it, I know it, the Government knows it."
That’s right, there is a possibility, supported by very demonstrative empirical data, that there are more big earthquakes to come, and Japan is sitting on the most dangerous fault line in the world, known as the “Ring of Fire” (Sensational!)
C/2010 X1
If you haven’t heard of Comet Elenin, you probably will soon. Also known as C/2010X1 (I had a pair of sneakers with the same name in 1985) or simply Elenin named after the Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin, is a “long-period comet” that is basically headed in our general direction.
"Please, say hello to Elenin, the harbinger of your doom."
Now, in case you grew up in a cave (or a government laboratory; Sensational!) then you probably learned years ago in junior high that comets are pretty normal. They are flying around space wonderful and carefree, a lot like my homosexual friend after his HIV test came back negative (I lost 5,000 yen on that bet, but so did he). I even had a “Haley’s comet” T-shirt at one point in my childhood. Elenin however has popped up on all the “alternative” blogs with a vengeance in the last few months for some very disturbing reasons.
Elenin and Earthquakes
Is there a connection between Comet Elenin and the increased seismic activity that has been rattling the world recently? According to Dr. Mensur Omerbashich PhD there sure is.
Dr. Omerbashich’s paper “Astronomical Alignments as the cause of – M6+ seismicity” has been referenced and referred to often of late by those who predict cataclysmic levels of increased seismic activity, particularly in September around the 25th to the 27th as Comet Elenin passes very near to Earth when apparently the Sun, Earth and the comet all align.
You can actually check that out here, on this very cool “rocket projection super display ultra” that NASA boringly refers to as the “JPL small body database browers. Jesus NASA, it sounds like a Hmong hooker online catalog when you say it like that.
The following video explains a popular theory that has been adopted by many people online.
The video is well done and the science seems well founded. Until you actually learn about science. The following figures however, “clearly” display a correlation between astrological bodies aligning, including Elenin and our increase in earthquakes.
Past Alignments
Date
Location
Magnitude
Elenin – Earth – Sun
Feb 20 2008
Indonesia
7.4
Elenin – Earth – Sun
Feb 25 2008
Indonesia
7.2
Elenin – Earth – Neptune
May 12 2008
China
7.9
Elenin – Earth – Sun
Feb 18 2009
Kermadec Islands
7.0
Elenin – Earth -Jupiter
May 18 2009
Los Angeles, US
4.7
Elenin – Mercury- Earth
July 15 2009
New Zealand
7.8
Elenin – Mercury – Earth
Aug 09 2009
Japan
7.1
Elenin – Sun – Earth
Sept 09 2009
Sunola islands
8.1
Elenin – Earth – Venus
Feb 18 2010
China/RU/N.Korea
6.9
Elenin – Earth-Sun
Feb 25 2010
China
5.2
Elenin – Earth-Sun
Feb 26 2010
Japan
7.0
Elenin – Earth- Sun
Feb 27 2010
Chile
8.8 [Earth knocked off axis]
Elenin – Earth- Sun
Feb 27 2010
Argentina
6.3
Elenin – Earth – Mercury
Mar 04 2010
Taiwan
6.3
Elenin – Earth – Mercury
Mar 04 2010
Vanuatu
6.5
Elenin – Earth – Mercury
Mar 05 2010
Chile
6.6
Elenin – Earth – Mercury
Mar 05 2010
Indonesia
6.3
Elenin – Earth – Mercury
Mar 08 2010
Turkey
6.1
Elenin – Earth – Neptune
May 05 2010
Indonesia
6.6
Elenin – Earth – Neptune
May 06 2010
Chile
6.2
Elenin – Earth – Neptune
May 09 2010
Indonesia
7.2
Elenin – Earth – Neptune
May 14 2010
Algeria
5.2
Elenin – Earth – Jupiter
Jan 03 2011
Chile
7.0
Elenin – Earth – Sun
March 11 2011
Japan
9.0 [Earth knocked off axis]
If you don’t have the “time” to watch the video, allow me to sum it up. There is a comet heading toward our area and based on the theories postulated by Dr. Omerbashich (The “Rogue Warrior” of the Geophysics community), the theory being that astrological alignments can cause changes in our atmospheric pressure, tidal activity and seismicity also referred to as the Hyperresonation, as comet Elenin gets closer and aligns on September 26th, there will be a huge bloody earthquake, likely somewhere around the pacific fault area. Also discussed in the video, is that Comet Elenin is not a comet at all but in fact, a Dwarf Star (Dark star) and for it to have any effect on our planet its mass would have to be much larger than that of a faggy flying space snowball, unless it’s actually an asteroid and is totally going to hit Earth and NASA is hiding that fact….??? Yup! SENSATIONAL!
1+1= Wrong
Are the theories being put forward by Dr. Omerbashich revolutionary? Yes and without any doubt. If he is correct then essentially, Einsteins theory of relativity is wrong, and subsequently the entire field of quantum psychics would be wrong. Trillions of dollars and innumerable man hours would go whizzing down the toilet based on one mans, rather simple, theory (Overly simple? Insanely simple even?).
Now does this mean his theory is incorrect? Not at all. Science is constantly evolving and moving and just because the majority believes one thing does not mean that they are not wrong. Also, based on the data, it would seem that his theory of georesonator, or Earth as a forced Mechanical Oscillator is potent. Is his supporting data potent? It is if you think our solar system consists on only maybe, 9 major bodies. Otherwise it’s ridiculous, but I digress.
"Never go up against a Jew-hating Bosnian Geophysicist when DEATH is on the LINE!"
Trouble in Paradise. That’s right, there always is isn’t there. The trouble is as follows: If one prescribes to and accepts my boy Omerbashich’s theories, then by default you have to negate many of Einsteins. They simply are not compatible. This is my problem with Terral’s video. He is quoting data and science from two opposing teams of thought and throwing them together into his D&D collage alongside a Fairy Princess with +5 cold crit. Shield of Frost and a Berserker with a Broad Sword of +10 strength bonus (except against Snow dwarves and hill wargs, respectively.)
You can’t have your magical- fantasy- pseudoscience cake and eat it too. That isn’t how this works. IF our jew-hating doctors theories are correct, and he really does hate Jews, than the MASS of the object known as Elenin will not apply. If it IS a dwarf star will it raise hell? Of course it will, but NOT based on the georesonator or hyperresonator theories.
Also, clearly explained both in his published papers as well as in interviews, Omerbashich makes it clear that TIME is the most vitally important component regarding increased seismic activity, complications in our ionosphere (birds and fish just up and dying all over), tidal irregularities etc. As one can observe on his paper, about 3 days is the beginning of a “long alignment” in which other celestial bodies can affect Earth. As Elenin gets closer to the sun and hence Earth, it will speed up, and the time it has to be aligned with earth will actually decrease, hence the likelihood of enhanced seismic activity on our planet will decrease.
However, it will increase again slightly in October and November as Elenin moves away and slows down and there is more time for celestial alignments.
What’s my Point?
IF Dr. Omarbashich is right, then there will be no big-bang super death earthquake on September 26th. If he’s wrong, then that whole video upstairs is bullshit anyway. So it’s a moot point and there very well might be a super earthquake but for reasons totally undiscussed in “TerralO3′s” video.
I encourage anyone interested in this to read the Doc’s paper and check out his website. The theories he puts forth are ingenious, very Tesla-esque and sublime in their simplicity and reasoning (EXTREME SIMPLICITY. Makes you go Hmmm). It is put well on his site, when addressing Einstein’s physics, which although I am not a physicist, yet, I have often wondered about…
If you can’t put it into layman’s terms, then it’s probably bullshit.
"Waaa-hahaha...I fooled you all!"
What this post DIDN’T discuss
Alien invasion. SENSATIONAL!
During the above video it is mentioned that the space craft seems to be “intelligently” piloted. There is an article on Russia building 5,000 new bomb shelters because (cough-bullshit!) the comet Elenin seems to be “controlled”.
The “European Union Times” is about as dependable a news source as a pedophile in a confession booth – “what happens at Disney Land stays at Disney land” (Until I find out, and dig my chain saw out of storage.) It’s all Bullshit. It’s just a wordpress account and they copy and paste news from where-ever, combining anything and everything at will.
Terral (maker of the above video) you challenged us to check facts and I have. I apologize, but it is unlikely that Elenin is an intelligent Dwarf Star coming to rain down havoc and despair in late September.
I have also ignored anything and everything about this being “Planet-X” or Niribu or whatever. I did this because to me, watching G.I. Joe, The Rise of Cobra is more productive and rational. If you know me or this blog, you will then know that I give myself spur of the moment circumcisions with my old key chain before I watch anything with Channing “A Dildo on wheels” Tatum in it.
SENSATIONAL!
In closing, a wonderful and very clear-headed video featuring Michio Kaku, a world renowned astrophysicist. His views on potential Alien life and why they do not contact us seem far more rational and well thought out to me.
Everyone…just try and remember sure, Star Trek was a cool show, and Uhura wore the shortest little booty skirt this side of Pattaya, but it isn’t REAL (the show, not her booty, or Pattaya which I can assure you is very real). It’s just T.V.
If you want real, it’s all about X-files. Everyone knows that.
He said this just as he set his beer mug down on the table and shook his head. I took several swallows of the cold, thin beer and then set my mug down as well, reaching across the table I picked up a stick of yakitori and waited for him to continue.
“There is no massive wall of water racing toward the skyscrapers or any of that shit. There’s no running down the street to escape it. ” He shook his head again as he stuffed some garlic fries into his mouth. I shook my head as well. I finished the yakitori.
“You saw the videos online. It’s as if someone left the facet on. The sink just overflows and it keeps coming and coming. ” He zones out slightly staring off at something only he can see and then just when I think he’s going to say something else, he just lets out a sigh.
“It was just consuming man. Cars, bicycles, houses -fucking houses- man.” I say and then pick my beer up again
“All we needed was Godzilla stomping around breathing fire and eating the citizenry and we would have had a hit Japanese monster movie. “
That was one of the hundreds of conversations I have had in the last month and a half regarding the earthquakes and tsunami that absolutely ravaged northern Japan and set people all over the world on edge.
Japan is an advanced nation with resources, technology, money and means. If the earth can just stand up and slam one of the most powerful countries on the planet in the face with a wide flying right hook, than nobody anywhere is safe.
It dawned on me the other day as I stood at the bus stop outside MDC watching the rain fall on the pavement, the hills, the trees and the patches of gardens and rice fields. If nobody ever made another weapon or started another ridiculous war we would still all essentially be fucked. That’s how insignificant we actually are. Our arrogance usually blinds us to the fact that we need the earth, not the other way around.
Conversations like that one I had at a “270″ izakaya in Shinjuku, there are 8 of them now within a 10 block radius (it’s like the new McDonalds), with Yosomono have dominated all discourse here since 03/11 and how could they not? Nobody likes having their entire reality questioned. Talk it away. Try to “figure it out”. Define small. Personify expendable.
“Where were you when the earthquake happened?” I asked her. I just say the earthquake despite there being earthquakes daily. There was one the night before just after I had gotten in bed, but when you say “the earthquake”, everyone knows what you mean.
“I was on the train. It was shaking so much. My whole body went cold I was so scared and when it stopped I realized I was holding onto some middle-aged salary man! My arms completely wrapped around him. I didn’t even know I had done that.” She was smiling as she recounted the story to me. At least Misa still smiles her smile, but 17 year olds can do that. Of course they can also lose it.
” I totally lost it.” Mayuko told me, almost running over Misa’s story with her intensity and the black shock horror she clearly still feels like it just happened. ”I was at Tokyo Disney Land with my friends, and was about…about to take a photo with…Mickey…” She paused and stared at my eyes for a moment. I looked at Misa (still smiling) who was looking at Mayuko who was staring directly at me with a blank expression which proceeded to crack and devolve into something I never like to see. Tears from a woman. She continued with effort and necessity.
“…then everything started to shake. It was slow at first but everyone stopped moving, then it started to shake so hard and I started screaming. Mickey Mouse turned and ran off and I just screamed and clutched my friends who were also screaming. It was horrible.” Her eyes, shimmering nightmare mirrors, full of tears quivered for another moment and then the bell rang. Sixth period had ended. Disney land will never be the same again.
It was after the talk with Misa and Mayuko, standing in the freezing cold under the tin shelter at the bus stop listening to the rain drops popping off the roof trying to explain things to me. It was freezing that day. The morning had been bright and warm but by three in the afternoon it had become early February again.
I should have known something was wrong that day. I had awoken to a wine glass, left haphazardly perched on the edge of a bookshelf, clanging to the floor at 4:30 in the morning compliments of yet another earthquake.
Waking up in the middle of an earthquake is a unique experience that I will recommend to no one. The first half-dozen times this happened in the last 6 weeks, I flew out of bed like a member of a Chinese circus and was at my front door, cash-phone-passport in hand, within 30 seconds. One problem that has arisen amidst all this seismic activity, something I would not have predicted before, is the development of a totally lackadaisical attitude when confronted with any kind of earthquake less than say- a level 7. The earth-shaking and knocking over glasses or throwing pictures off the wall is “no big deal”, it’s on the same level of annoying as the cats making sweet feline love at 3AM outside my flat- and boisterously sharing their passion with me via sensuous kitty-cat screams.
The fact is, one should never answer the awesome physical dominance of the Earth with your hands in your pockets, a shrug of the shoulders and a half-hearted “meah“.
The shaking woke me up at 4:30 and I just laid there. I woke up, my eyes opened and I groaned a few explicatives but I didn’t move. I just laid there on my back, looked up at the ceiling and waited for the shaking to stop. After about thirty seconds, the heater/cooler on my wall, the one directly over my head came into view and I imagined it breaking off the wall and falling, crashing onto my face. This depressed me even more when I realized that I surely wouldn’t die from that, it would just hurt a lot.
Perhaps a minute later things had calmed down. My world had not ended. So I closed my eyes and let myself drift back to sleep. Approximately five minutes after the quake quit and about two minutes after I fell back asleep my mobile phone started screaming and strobing wildly. My “earth quake alert” had just gone off, warning me about an impending earthquake. The one that had happened five minutes before.
“Son of bitch I’m sick of these goddamn earthquakes.” Angry words thrown into the dark of my room for anyone, or no one.
“I hate Japan. I never wanted to live here again.” Miki couldn’t have said those two sentences with more conviction or more melancholy. I’ve known Miki for six years. When I first met her at a dinner party half a decade ago she spoke no English, and had no interest in learning it or learning about anything outside of Japan. Through a series of events so convoluted and ironic they deserve a quirky comedic motion picture, she moved to Canada and became a snowboard instructor somewhere around Banff. These days, she refuses to speak to me in Japanese. Her dislike of her homeland stems from things that might be best left unsaid, but she jumped ship and saved nothing for the swim back.
The thing is, life has this way of putting you where it wants you and after Miki’s cousin disappeared on 03/11, she couldn’t see any way out of it. She had to come home.
“They still don’t know where he is.” She sighed and then took a long drag from her cigarette. Newports. She had brought several cartons back with her.
“I don’t get why the hell he stayed up there. That place didn’t give him much at all. It didn’t give me anything except an excuse to run.” I didn’t say anything for a while because I didn’t have to. I know a fair share about needing to run myself and although our reasons surely are not the same, the impulse probably is and Miki knows enough about me to know when I know.
“So, your whole family is living in Saitama now?” I stretched out my legs in front of me on the park bench and slouched down with my hands in my coat pockets against the cold and wind. Miki sat on the bench indian style facing me. Her light brown hair peeking out from one side underneath a “North Face” beanie.
“Yeah everyone at my uncles place in Saitama. My dad is still in Tohoku but my mom and my sister came here. I’m glad, you know…I can’t go back. I know I need to be with them now though….so…”
We sat in the park until after sunset then went and got pretty drunk. Miki and her family found out a week later her cousin had died. He had drowned in his car and it took the search and rescue teams a long time to find his body due to him being buried underneath six feet of debris left by the tsunami.
“You know, we make more money than the people working at the nuclear plant in Fukushima.” BigBen (Young, Stoic, French), my current flat mate that lives in the basement, told me this early this morning. I had gotten up and noticing the lack of the unexplainable horniness which always accompanies a hangover I had done the morning after test: shake my head, flex some major muscle groups and then look in the mirror. If my head doesn’t hurt, if I have no odd pains or general discomfort and if my reflection is me and not some guy ten years older due to dehydration and the overconsumption of alcoholic beverages then I give myself a pat on the back. I didn’t drink too much last night. Friday night it can go either way since the usual suspects that come out to play are one and all pretty throughly functional alcoholics, madmen and wonderful.
I had wandered into the kitchen and made a coffee and had stood there noticing out the window that it was raining. Big sloppy rain drops this morning, like some kind of aggressive display being put on by someone. It was at that time that BigBen came upstairs.
“Bonjour. ” He said and I moved out of his way so he could go to the bathroom. I was still in the kitchen when he came back and that’s when he had told me about the Fukushima situation and the economic paradox of it all.
“Things are just getting worse. I heard the government is thinking about asking the Yakuza to get “volunteers” to help with maintaining the plant.” He stood by the stairs leading to his room and stared gloomily at me in a very French way and continued.
“They need new people to push the buttons or something. Nobody wants to volunteer now.”
“I guess that’s understandable.” I replied between sips of hot black coffee. I was standing by the kitchen counter in black sweats and a Marine Corps T-shirt. BigBen was wearing his standard issue white T-shirt and plaid boxers. Conversations with BigBen are a lot like dialogue from Dr. Katz.
“If that damn plant blows up, it will make life very unpleasant here. I just got hired officially yesterday, although my boss claims he hired me last week but nobody told me.”
“Well, congrats. C’est bien.”
“C’est vraiment fantastique. Parce que je n’ai pas d’argent pour payer le loyer du mois prochain.” He smiled nervously and gestured awkwardly.
“Well, rent is important. Tell your boss I said thank you.”
I went into my room, drank my coffee then I worked out for forty-five minutes. After a shower I sat on my coach here and started writing. The Earth does what it wants. We are literally powerless to stop this but I often wonder if we aren’t the cause of this. They call it “sensitivity to initial conditions”. Is humanities massive footprint affecting the earth in ways we can’t possibly understand because we tend to think of it as this rock we can just live on and use however we like? Whether we contribute to or even trigger the escalating natural disasters or not something of this magnitude gets all my wheels turning.
Hell literally broke loose on March 11th 2011 and everything else all over the world, even within the same country just kept going. If a ten story tsunami , thousands dead and the most paranoid and preparedness obsessed nation on earth totally pimped smacked with ease can be filed away and everyone can move on then who is going to give a shit about you losing your job or me getting hit by a car?
Talk it away. Try to “figure it out”. Define small. Personify expendable.
yosomono
