Yesterday I wrote of some of the developments following the double tragedy of the killer earthquake and monster tsunami to strike northeastern Japan. At that time I wrote of the only positive news I had found in the past several days, namely unconfirmed rumors that "many" of the missing 10,000 from Minamisanriku were sheltering in the nearby city of Tomoe. I also added a photo of one fortunate man who had survived the earthquake, been caught in the Tsunami, apparently buried in the rubble and was extracted alive after more than two days in the cold of a Tohoku winter.
I am sorry to say that I can find nothing so hopeful to report today. The news, it appears, is almost uniformly bad. Not only has there been no follow-up on the missing people, it appears that Onagawa, another town, situated like Minamisanriku at the end of a bay, also has about half its population of 10,000 unaccounted for.
I'm sorry to say that, at this point, a look at the coastline suggests that Minamisanriku may be, rather than the singular tragedy that initially caught my attention, prove only to have been the first to inform the authorities. The very justified fears about radioactivity notwithstanding, the final tally is likely to find the wave to have been the biggest killer by far. I fear we are not even close to a final tally.
Yesterday I wrote of how Minamisanriku's location relatively close to the epicenter, together with its situation on a flood plain at the end of a bay facing the oncoming tsunami spelled doom for the town, if not all of its residents.
Apparently as the wave came in, the land mass broke it up and created other wave patterns which interacted with one another, leading to constructive interference. This essentially focused all of the waves destructive energy on the receiving flood plain of Minamisanriku. The results are as you see below:
(Disclaimer: The above was an explanation I got from my wife's summation of a clip she saw on Japanese TV, so I can not vouch for its scientific validity other than to say that it makes sense to me. In any event, whatever the cause, the results were what you see.)
The town, having lost 41 people to an tsunami as a result of the 1960 earthquake in Chile, took the threat of tsunami quite seriously and had annual tsunami drills to practice their emergency procedures, but the monster wave that descended on them was simply too much. Minamisanriku Mayor Sato Jin said that "the words 'beyond expectations' simply don't even come close to describing this dreadful wave." If anything, Mayor Sato was probably guilty of understatement in this description.
At the time the tsunami struck, he and about thirty others were on duty in the town's Emergency Response Center. They repaired to the roof to survey the incoming wave. Upon seeing it leap suddenly over a 7 meter retaining wall, they realized that they were in trouble. In almost no time at all, the wave was upon them, washing over the top of the building and carrying off about twenty of the people who were there. That was the first wave.
It was followed by seven more.
This is the Emergency Response Center after the waters finally receded:
Mayor Sato and the others survived by climbing to the top of the two antennae on the top of the building. During the time that they did, the waves washed the building clean of concrete. Clearly, many others in the town never had a chance.
Now there is word that Onagawa is missing a similar percentage of its people.
Onagawa, like Minamisanriku, is situated on a plain at the end of a bay facing the direction from which the waves originated:
There are other such towns. The death toll from the quake and wave will continue to grow precipitously, and that's not even counting whatever eventuates from the nuclear complications.
And as if that weren't enough, racist goon and Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro had to take the day to prove that America has no monopoly on right-wing assholes willing to exploit tragedies for their own ends. Ishihara, who will be responsible for overseeing relief efforts in Tokyo, said of the twin disasters:
The biggest shock from the last year was that there was a woman who had been collecting the pension checks of her grandfather who had been dead for 30 years. In the whole world the only nation that is this way is the Japanese. I'm sorry to say that our identity has become nothing but selfishness. It's a shame, but when you have a feckless cabinet this sort of thing is bound to happen. It was the same with the Murayama Cabinet [and the Kobe earthquake]. Government is tied up in selfishness and doing things for the sake of populism. We have to use this tsunami to maximum advantage in order to push that away in one thrust, to wash away the filth that has accumulated in the hearts of Japanese over the years once and for all. This was divine retribution on us as a people. Those affected by this disaster were truly unfortunate.
What an asshole.
Update: If you are interested in what is happening in Japan, please visit the Japan Earthquake/Tsunami Mother Ship to learn more. Please rec it as well so that we can keep these issues on people's minds.