A few more links, two months on

This is pretty unrelated, but I thought it was an interesting article about Japanese gypsies.

The tale of one/some valiant high school student(s) in Yokohama during the quake

The last set of pictures (from a previous post) was from one month later, but even two months later the pictures are already a little different. Have a look.

In a previous post, I had a Japanese news clip about how some of coastline has sunk, flooding towns. Here's an article in English about it.

Tsunami=mud. Volunteers now have a very intimate relationship with the mud. Even going to Otsushi for a day, I could smell the mud. (Such a weird, weird, smell.) Says one of the volunteers, "We come back so people don't feel alone with their mud." Mud mud mud mud mud.

Japan=bureaucracy. Disaster management, media, everything. Tepco is annoyed at the media always wanting more and more information like baby birds asking for food so they're using the bureaucracy to their advantage. Not very nice, but kinda funny, I think.

What to do with all the piles and piles and piles and piles of wood left over from the tsunami. (Do they not know how to insulate their homes? No. Just wood inside the walls. That's it!) And once the wood is gone, then what? Says one guy (non-Japanese), "The temptation to grant survivors their last wish and restore what was lost is enormous. But it should be resisted. I say it with the frankness of a friend, that Japan must rebuild the region for its children, not its great-grandparents."

In other news, I went to Oshima for Golden Week. It was fun. I saw the volcano where Godzilla supposedly came from.