That was the year that was 2005
At the close of 2005, KS looks
back at what didn’t happen to you.
A Series
of Unfortunate Events
Earlier this year on the afternoon of April 25th, a largish
crowd gather-ed in front of the suspended video screen marking
the start of Namba’s frenzied eatery row on the Dotonbori
Bridge. Mini-skirted teen shoppers, sunburned tourists and lunching
salarymen paused, squinted in the bright sunshine and muttered
into cell phones while they took in the dramatically unsettling
sight on-screen: hundreds of emergency workers, surrounding an
apartment building wreathed by what appeared to be a train car
bent into a ruinous, gunmetal grey “L.”
As unfortunate as the ‘What?’ and
‘How?’ turned out (speeding Japan Railway train in
Amagasaki takes corner too fast, derails, rams an apartment building
and kills 107 people), the ‘Why?’ became a particular
point of debate: it turned out the conductor was running a couple
of minutes behind (here, actually a couple of minutes behind)
and was speeding to make up time.
An unquestionably dreadful and depressing event,
but after consi-dering that the building rammed in the accident
was mostly empty and that the derailment occurred shortly after
rush hour (at 9:18 a.m.) instead of right in the middle of it,
many people took stock and summed up the accident with a phrase
that could well sum up the state of things in Osaka this year:
Well, It Could Have Been Worse.
As of this writing, there have, in Kansai 2005,
been no incidents of: vicious terrorist attacks; colossal earthquakes;
disastrous typhoons; or horrific outbreaks of avian influenza.
Fiery riots have not raged for weeks across local cities (France,
November), hundreds of anti-govern-ment protestors were not shot
dead by the government (Uzbekistan, May), no cafes were blown
up by suicide bombers (Bali, October), no religious pilgrims were
killed in a monstrous bridge stampede (Iraq, April), no roadside
bombings (Iraq, pick a month), no ongoing power outages in 110
degree heat (Iraq, pick a month), no citizens ‘collateral
damaged’ in a rain of incendiary phosphorus bombs (guess
where; pick a month).
Things in Kansai — breathtaking collapse
of the Hanshin Tigers aside — could have been worse. This
year, for instance:
Kansai was not Leveled by
a Whopping Natural Disaster
“[My husband, New Orleans police sergeant
Kenneth Watzke] sounded scared,” former New Orleans resident
Brenda Watzke told the Houston Chronicle several months ago. “He
told me prisoners are rioting, the water is rising at the police
station, and bodies are floating. He said it’s like the
end of the world.”
For a solid week in late August, people worldwide
sat dumbfounded, astonished, as citizens of the Richest Country
on the Planet died (and lived) miserably following Hurricane Katrina’s
sweep through the Gulf of Mexico and eventual landfall on the
28th. More shocking, perhaps, that a storm could do such massive
damage were the hours and days afterward, a drastically awful
period of time the phrase ‘categoric failure’ could
have been invented for.
“I think [the preparedness level of most
Americans] is quite low, actually,” says Deep Survival author
and survivalist Laurence Gonzales. “Just in terms of, say,
the hurricanes, we kind of take things for granted and just assume
that things are going to be okay for us. We don’t really
believe that someday our infrastructure could just collapse and
all the things we take for granted will just disappear. We’re
always told ‘Everything will be okay, everything will be
okay;’ we’re taught that we don’t have to worry
about much of anything — so when things do go bad, we’re
particularly unprepared.”
Due to Kansai’s unique geographical positioning,
typhoons aren’t so much of a problem; there is, however,
that other natural disaster that keeps popping up.
“We live in an earthquake-prone country
— so preparedness, of course, is very important for everyone,”
says Osaka Information Service for Foreign Residents Coordinator
Kayoko Kitada. “
Historically, the Kansai area is much safer
than Tokyo, as far as earth- quakes go. But, we still must be
prepared; the Hanshin earthquake was not very long ago. It’s
important to keep emergency supplies on hand — food, batteries,
things like that.”
This year, of course, opened in the aftermath
of an extraordinarily deadly earthquake and tsunami in Asia, and
will close in the aftermath of an equally awful quake in Pakistan.
(And yes, donations are still needed.) “As far as when the
Big One hits [Kansai],” Kitada says, “your guess is
as good as mine.”
Kansai was not Leveled by
a Terrorist Attack
The late American writer Hunter S Thompson (dead
this February from a self-inflicted gunshot wound), on the state
of the US in the days following Sept. 11, 2001: “Make no
mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody —
and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest
of our lives.”
It has been 10 long years since the Aum cult
released sarin gas into the Tokyo subway system, and since that
time, Japan has been very, very blessed to have suffered few attacks
from enemies, myste-rious or otherwise. This, of course, may be
just as well — the country has no official counterpart to,
say, Britain’s MI6 or the United States’ CIA and FBI;
and if recent visits to Kansai International Airport are any indication,
security concerns are considerably more lax than they are in other
countries.
However, though horrific bombings this year
ripped the psyches of Jordan, Bali and London (among far too many
other places), some people are not so concerned.
“I’m not worried, in the immediate sense, about terrorist
attacks. Mainly, because they are extremely rare — very,
very rare events and there are far more immediate hazards people
should be worried about,” Gonzales says. “‘Terrorist
warnings’ are a tool used to instill fear — things
I think governments use sometimes to keep people afraid. And that
certainly isn’t to say that terrorism isn’t a very
real thing and a real concern, and that there aren’t people
around the world who are willing and plotting to do you harm.
“But, the average chance of someone being
killed by a terrorist, really, is extremely low,” he continues.
“You’re more likely to get hit by lightning than you
are to be killed by a suicide bomber.”
Kansai was not Leveled by
a Flu Epidemic
“Because diseases have been the biggest
killers of people, they have also been decisive shapers of history,”
writes Jared Diamond in the first installment of his massive Guns,
Germs and Steel historical series. “All those military histories
glorifying great generals oversimplify the ego-deflating truth.
The winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best
generals and weapons, but were often merely those bearing the
nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies.”
The phrase “deadly worldwide plague”
is not something that frequ-ents the lexicons of most people;
smallpox in ancient Rome, or bubonic plague in Europe, or the
Spanish flu pandemic of 1918; or even AIDS today, while deadly,
don’t quite hold a large amount of panicked immediacy for
most people. Similarly underestimated (as well as the newest bully
on the block) is avian influenza, a flu hosted by birds but —
as concerned parties note with increasing alarm — one that
could easily evolve, make the jump to human beings and (in the
words of the World Health Organization) cause “a global
human pandemic with a very high mortality rate.”
There was no small alarm at the discovery of
Japan’s first human case of bird flu in December of last
year; a contaminated poultry farm in western Kyoto was the noted
culprit. Steps were taken, birds were ‘culled’ (a
polite way to say ‘rounded up and incinerated’) and
Japan is left to breathe a slight sigh of relief even as every
neighboring country from Vietnam to Thailand records new cases
of people infected with the flu for birds.
The WHO, the organization notes on its website,
divides a pandemic into six categories of seriousness. “Most
health authorities categorize the situation as of 2005 at Phase
3, by which is meant that human infections of a new sub-type has
occurred but there is little evidence of sustained human-to-human
transmission.”
How to Survive in East Asia
While there are a great number of events for
which there is no defense (being secretly poisoned by your 16-year-old
daughter, for instance), some experts argue that surviving the
unsurvivable and getting through life’s more untenable situations
is less a matter of luck than of keeping your eyes open.
“[The most common mistake] is peoples’
own attitudes and assumptions — not knowing what’s
going on, not really being aware of their surroundings,”
Gonzales says.
“For example, I’m on vacation right
now. I’m in a hotel room somewhere in San Antonio, fourth
floor. I don’t know the area, and I don’t really know
the hotel, but I do know where the fire escape staircase is and
even which windows to head for if the building suddenly caught
on fire. I checked for that, and made a mental note, and now I
have that information. And certainly, that may sound a bit like
paranoia, but fires do happen, and in the event that one does
happen, even though I am in an unfamiliar place, I know that I
have avenues of escape.
“I guess a key thing is, lead an examining
life,” Gonzales continues. “Start paying attention
to your surroundings, start paying attention to other peoples’
behavior. Think to yourself that if you’re in a man-made
structure 100 feet off the ground, it’d be a nice idea to
actually know how to escape if something bad happens. Approach
your life with a little more observation; if you have that first
little bit of foreknowledge, you can do a lot of good for yourself.”
It could have been worse.
Good luck in 2006.
For more information, go to:
• World Health Organization: http://www.who.int.en
• U.S. Centers for Disease Control: http://www.cdc.gov
• Japan National Institute of Infectious Diseases: http://www.nih.go.jp/niid/index-e.html
• Author Lawrence Gonzales: http://www.deepsurvival.com
• Osaka Information Service for Foreign Residents:
http://www.pref.osaka.jp/osaka-pref/kokusai/OIS_web/english/
• International Committee of the Red Cross: http://www.icrc.org/
Text: Jeff Lo • Photos: KS
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