#Japan #Earthquake: Japan Missed the Boat

Japan, you missed out, again. No one cares about the small nuclear problem of yours, or the lack of food, or the run on the bottled water in Tokyo. Just when you are finally coming to grips with the reality and some people in some government agencies or some outside experts have started to speak up (where the hell were they all this time?) and the residents are finally getting some relevant information and starting to take their own precautions by leaving for safer locations in Japan, the whole world yawns.

Just taking too long.

Initially, experts outside Japan were very eager to help, but their offers for help were turned down by the Japanese government. The US military started to share the data from the drones immediately after the earthquake with the Japanese government, but the Japanese government sat on it (still is sitting on it). The foreign media reported the grave situation at the Fukushima plant, which was hardly reported in Japan and which proved to be more accurate than the Japan's highly optimistic version.

Then about two or three days ago, the world got tired. OK, if you want to play the game of hope, or extend and pretend, go right ahead. There was a sudden proliferation of the supposed "experts" on Reuters live coverage of the Japan earthquake, for example, who say "Nothing to worry about, it will be all just fine", and they are not Japanese. A fund manager in the US demanded an apology from the US media for over-hyping the Japan's crisis. There are bloggers like him, whose information is clearly limited to some English language sources, who are calling the whole situation bogus and hyperbole.

Two to three days ago, that's when some people in some agencies in Japan started to speak up.

So now Japan and the rest of the world are switching places. If the situation in Japan gets worse, the world will move the opposite, and they won't care.

That's the price you pay for having been so utterly out-of-sync with the information - it's not something you can massage to fit your fantasy in the crisis like this. It always wants to be free and it will break free sooner or later, which may be finally, slowly happening in Japan. Unfortunately it was "later", and the ADD world has moved along. You're pretty much on your own, with only your inept government to "help" you, who has screwed up every step of the way and will probably screw up all the steps going forward, as it plans to be the central force for "recovery" by blowing tens of trillions of yen on "public works" and other central government "initiatives" that have served the country so well in the "lost decades".

For once, Bank of Japan seems to be outdoing the Federal Reserve in dumping so much money to prop up the financial markets. Nothing to worry about. It's gotta be good when the stock market keeps going up. The Fed will try to out-compete BOJ by doing QE3.

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