Google announced on March 4 this year that it was sending the crew to capture "Street View" of Namie-machi, Fukushima Prefecture, at the request of Mayor Baba.
Not all of Namie-machi is captured yet, but here it is. There is no one there, and houses and stores are broken, deserted; there is nothing left in the farmland along the coast. In the center of the town, there are stores side by side, one utterly collapsed, the other seemingly intact.
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I don't know if Google Japan plans to send people to the high radiation spots within Namie-machi, such as Akougi and Tsushima.
There are many in Japan who seems to think anything done by a company based in the US has something to do with "conspiracy" to defraud Japan. According to such people, the reason why Google Japan has already started showing the Street View (they said it would take a few months) is because the mayor of Namie-machi has sided with the national government, so all the goodies like Google Street View will be quickly done, as some kind of perks.
Sided with the national government? It seems that for such people, having to agree to the reorganization of the no-entry zone into three new zones in preparation for future return (as if these mayors have any choice), as pushed by the national government, is the same as colluding with the national government.
I thought of responding to someone who clearly seems to think that way, but then I looked at the desolation captured by the Street View. I'd rather thank Google instead. Thank you.
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12 comments:
Very sad
!!!!
Only the great movie "The Road" showed anything as bleak as this. And, this road is a looooong way inland! Gripping reportage by Google. Very sobering.
Alas, let the politics rage on.
Those people you follow on the internet are bit weird, they might end like the guys from aum shinrykyo.
Well, I really feel that the desolation captured is both the one of the earthquake and of the tsunami. Even without the nuclear plant, all the area would be in a pretty bad shape.
Strange to see (very near the location selected by ex-skf above) what appears to be a surprising house on stilt, until you realise actually its ground floor has been washed away, transforming into stilts the concrete pillars that are all what is left from it, with the first floor almost intact.
Anon at 7:20AM, the comment I described in the post is not from people I follow.
Blaming the US for everything that's gone bad in Japan seems to be the default position for many in Japan, and Japanese outside Japan, particularly after the nuclear accident started.
Blaming the US for everything that's gone bad in Japan seems to be the default position for many in Japan,and Japanese outside Japan, particularly after the nuclear accident started.
It is surprising and sad how far this is taken by some.
Not just the earthquake, but the nuke accident, the economy... everything, seems to be the fault of an evil conspiracy to steal Japan's money.
I have heard a Japanese person go on at length about how mucg they admire Putin, and how they sincerely wish that Japan could find its own Putin to challenge the world.
laprimavera, I see. I guess I check 2ch too much. Right wingers there always seem to find a way to blame the Japanese Koreans for everything, but I wouldn't consider them anything else than a fringe minority of really sad individuals.
Anon at 9:38PM, if ANA ads on google is any indication, the whole nation is made up of a "fringe minority" at this point.
But 2ch is really something. This intense hatred for Korea and Koreans (in Korea or in Japan) wasn't there when I was growing up. I think it's the past 10 years or so. I was really shocked when the Korean Japanese archer won the bronze medal for Japan in London Olympic and she was trashed by the Japanese.
yeah loads of hate in japan for korea and china, its basically racism and bad blood, the japanese find it impossible to look in the mirror of how fucked up their culture really is so they point the finger at outsiders...
Hatred for the zainichi has always been there, probably depending if there was a big korean community in your city. Internet just made it visible. Just read any Japanese Korean author: http://japanfocus.org/-John-Lie/2939 The same for the discrimination toward the Burakumin, which is even more difficult to understand for a foreigner, I guess.
Anon at 2:07, your ability to see other society's problems but not your own sounds awfully like racism to me.
Japanese call it "leh-shizumu" (racism; there is no "r" pronunciation in Japanese unless it's a rolled "r" in Edo dialect), without fully knowing what the hell that means. I can pronounce "r", I can do a rolled "r" as a true Edokko, but I don't know what they mean by racism any more.
People I follow on Twitter may be an odd assortment of people. I don't know who "normal" people are any more. I don't know about Aum Shinrikyo. If you mean people with cult-like followers, then again that's nothing new in Japan. Many people just love to have someone who thinks for them, so that they don't need to worry about thinking on their own and taking responsibility for their own thinking.
Racism, xenophobia, call it whatever you like. It's the ability to blame a single community of being the cause of very complex problems, usually because acting otherwise would require a great deal of analysis and/or self-criticism.
It can be the Jews, the US, the illuminati, the Japanese Koreans or the blacks. The question is blaming "others," blaming "them." This way of thinking is very comforting, since it prevents the speaker from having to consider his or her responsibility and at the same time triggers the us-versus-them tribal response.
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