[Nyororin]

Originally Posted by MMM

There is one flight a day from Tokyo to Portland. Today was the second day the flight was flown in a row. On the local news they showed a Japanese woman with her two sons. She said they had "evacuated" from Tokyo. She said Narita was full of thousands of people trying to evacuate. She also said the shelves in grocery stores and drug stores were empty. She couldn't even buy toilet paper in or around Tokyo.

Is this true?

From friends, family, and colleagues in Tokyo and the surrounding area, it seems the story went sort of like this;

The earthquake shut everything down and caused fires
That calmed down, and things went back to almost normal
There was talk of an electricity shortage, so people started buying batteries
They implemented the rolling blackouts, so the trains were reduced or taken offline
Despite only being in 3 hour blocks, people panicked and started buying up all the dry foods as possible
They find that there is nowhere to safely store deliveries of gasoline, so rumors start of a possible shortage
People go crazy and start hoarding gasoline, triggering a real shortage that leads to implementing a ration system... That triggers even more panic, and people driving around to every gas station they can find to buy more and more gas and get around the ration. I`m hearing more and more about people who filled up their cars and then drained the tank into gasoline containers, and then went back for more... Even if they never drive.
The shortages due to hoarding panic people more, so they are buying up every delivery coming in and hoarding it - friends speak of obasan buying 20+ packages of 12 roll toilet paper, etc

Those we know in Tokyo are actually finding it easier to order stuff online and have it delivered, as the majority of the shortages seem to be panic-hoarding behavior rather than an actual real shortage (other than gasoline, as the tanks to store it have been damaged, but even that wouldn`t have been as bad if everyone hadn`t felt the need to fill up everything they owned).

So... Everyone is hoarding gas, making it harder to deliver the goods (that are plentiful to the west) to Tokyo, sparking more panic, and more panic buying of gas and goods... making them even more scarce... repeat repeat repeat


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ETA;

So, from my understanding, Tokyo and other big urbanized areas are not that bad (considering the quake and tsunamis) but everything else has suffered major destruction, right?

Not quite. The earthquake was NORTH of Tokyo, with the worst shaking far north. The damage from the earthquake itself was bad, but not absolutely horrific. They are currently estimating that the number who died in the earthquake itself as in the 150~250 range. Bad, but not REALLY bad. It was the tsunami that has caused the terrible damage, and as a tsunami is, well, a tsunami - only the coast was hit by it.
So the areas suffering horrible damage are fairly limited to the coastal villages, towns, and cities north of Tokyo.
There is a huge amount of Japan that suffered no significant damage, and huge areas that did not feel the quake at all to the west of Tokyo.

This has been a horrible disaster, but in terms of where was hit - it was a pretty small part of Japan that suffered the real damage. You`d think, based on some of the overseas news, that most of Japan was in ruins, but that is very far from the case.

Yes, but that's only in the more urbanized areas, isn't? Unfortunately.

I think in general the image of natural disasters is shaped by those that are familiar... In the case of large scale events like this, it seems the common image in the mind of the public is falling down buildings in the middle east. Enough people have commented to me about the difference in the appearance of survivors that I am pretty sure this is the case. They expect to see people covered in dust from disintegrated concrete buildings, in a desert like setting. The environment in Japan is different, and the disaster itself was of a different type. Most of the people who survived weren`t pulling themselves out from the rubble - they fled and so were not washed away. They were never "dirty" to begin with... And while there is plenty of mud, there isn`t concrete dust floating around.