You are…nowhere near here, lucky you
Lumme some maps. I follow international tragedies through maps. The reportage on the Japan earthquake/tsunami thing is more than usually fucked up, map-wise. Stuff changing names and moving all around. When they bother to name places at all.
I understand translation is difficult — especially with languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet — but couldn’t we agree on some conventions before the shit hits the fan?
Okay, well, nobody died and made me Gaia — I got these placements from eyeballing Google maps. But, near as I can figure it, this is the lay of the land.
Sendai is the biggest town in the path of destruction. Downtown is on higher ground and survived okay, but they lost their port. This is one of the places where bodies have been washing up.
Kamaishi is the setting of that amateur video of the wave; the one shot from high ground. The one shot in Kesennuma at street level is even scarier.
Reports about the damaged nukes are alllll over the place, but I’m pretty sure these are the three we’ve been hearing about. Of these three, the bottom one is of most concern (which is called either Fukushima II or III, so I went with Fukushima Daini. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds all Japanese and shit. Babelfish says it means “Daini”).
Despite the all the spectacular images and news overload, the devastation is confined along this fairly small portion of the Japanese coastline. The quake was huge, but the tsunami did the damage.
Still, this would be an pretty good time for Gamera to turn up.
March 14, 2011 — 10:54 pm
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