Following the
March 2011 earthquake in Japan, commercials largely disappeared from television. To fill space between the news reports and lists of missing people, the
Ad Council of Japan put together a number of PSAs. Since there were only five or ten of them, the PSAs
played thousands of times over the course of a few months, searing themselves into the memory of the Japanese public. Most were typical messages about
common courtesy,
perseverance,
listening to your kids,
conservation, and
international support. But
one PSA in particular quickly took on a life of its own, instantly being mashed up with a classic Japanese TV trope:
Robot Transformation Sequences!
[more inside]
posted by azuresunday
on Mar 11, 2012 -
37 comments
On Monday, Google released
Memories for the Future, a website that allows you to "... walk the scarred coastline [after the Japanese tsunami] virtually". "
... it is possible to see the full extent of the damage by finding an image in Street View and then clicking the “Before” and “After” links at the top to see how the earthquake and tsunami impacted that area." The Japan Real Time blog has a
good introduction and writeup.
posted by woodblock100
on Dec 13, 2011 -
9 comments
The Honeymoon From Hell. Stefan and Erika Svanstrom had planned a long trip that would start in Singapore in early December and end in China four months later.
But things didn't go exactly as planned. They encountered floods, fires, tsunamis and earthquakes along the way.
posted by mannequito
on May 6, 2011 -
14 comments
Covering Tohoku The Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan (
FCCJ) has posted a special edition of its
No. 1 Shimbun covering the Tohoku Earthquake:
FCCJ members, many of them freelancers, were the first on the scene after the quake and have led coverage since. Weeks after the global media pack left, they're still here. There's articles by veteran Japan reporters such as
Charles Pomeroy who recently retired to Otsuchi after covering Japan for 50 years, to newer stringers such as
Gavin Blair who worked as a "fixer" for foreign prima-donna journos dashing in and out of the disaster zone. There is a photo by photographer
Rob Gilhooly who recently made
a heartbreaking trip into the exclusion zone near the plants. Although not included in No 1 Shimbun, freelancer
Yas Idei provides a Japanese perspective (in English) about the multiple disasters.
Idei's piece about Rokkashomura is pretty enlightening, frightening, and depressing.
posted by KokuRyu
on Apr 12, 2011 -
23 comments
"In November 1855, the Great Ansei Earthquake struck the city of Edo (now Tokyo), claiming 7,000 lives and inflicting widespread damage. Within days, a new type of
color woodblock print known as namazu-e (lit. "catfish pictures") became popular among the residents of the shaken city. These prints featured depictions of mythical giant catfish (namazu) who, according to popular legend, caused earthquakes by thrashing about in their underground lairs. In addition to providing humor and social commentary, many prints claimed to offer protection from future earthquakes."
posted by madamjujujive
on Apr 8, 2011 -
19 comments
Amidst the massive aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami being discussed in
this thread, the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plants
continues to unfold. For objective information, discussion, and analysis of the ongoing efforts to stabilize the fuel cores in the boiling water reactors of the type in Fukushima, nuclear engineers such as
@arclight are providing laypeople with a much needed crash course on the inner workings of nuclear reactors.
[more inside]
posted by Dr. Zira
on Mar 12, 2011 -
3157 comments
