Trauma and Sadness for Japan, and the Crisis Isn’t Over

Posted on March 17, 2011 by iancondry

Like everyone, I’m shocked and horrified by the images of destruction in Japan, and I wanted to add a brief post to express my sadness, and my hope that this disaster can bring the world to a better place in terms of international sympathy and cooperation. Five days after the quake and tsunami, the nuclear crisis is still unfolding around several reactors, and it’s not clear how bad it will get.

In Boston, the Japan Society is also planning a Vigil for Japan on Monday, 3/21/11. More info here: http://www.japansocietyboston.org/

If you want to make a donation, my friend and colleague Dave Leheny sent along a note from a woman who works with the NGO called JEN. If you wish to support relief efforts in Japan with a donation to a group with ties to local communities, this is one opportunity. Chika Watanabe, who has worked with JEN says this:

I’m writing you all to ask if you would contribute to the relief and rehabilitation efforts in the hardest-hit Tohoku region by a Japanese NGO called JEN: www.jen-npo.org. As some of you may know, I worked with them briefly, and I can say with confidence that they do amazing work. They have been working in emergency situations—postwar and post-disaster—since the 1990s, and they are considered to be one of the best. In addition to projects in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc., they have a program in Niigata where they’ve been supporting a small community of elderly farmers to rebuild their lives after the Niigata Earthquake in 2004. Seeing their work there, I know that JEN can and will respond with care to the needs of victims, not only in the immediate relief, but in the long years of recovery ahead.

There must be other large organizations mobilizing for action right now. While they also do good work, it can also be limited. Small but highly skilled NGOs like JEN can do what large agencies cannot do—be attentive to the multiple local needs and act according to each situation. This means that they can choose to work in neglected and hard-to-reach areas, work flexibly according to the fast changes of post-disaster conditions, without large overhead costs, and without bureaucratic constraints. They will also continue to be there when others have left after the relief phase. In short, your donations will go far to help victims directly.

If you’d like to contribute, you can do so using your credit cards or through the post office:

http://www.jen-npo.org/contribute/form01_1.php (credit card, in Japanese)
http://www.jen-npo.org/en/involved/donate1.php (credit card, in English)

Our hopes and heartfelt thoughts are with the people of Japan.

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Arrival in Japan

Posted on September 2, 2010 by iancondry

Tokyo, Japan: A land of contradictions and endless potential. I arrived today with my wife and three boys after the 24-hour, door-to-door from Boston to our apartment in the Waseda section of Shinjuku. We suffered the long leg of the trip, Newark to Narita, on a 777 fully equipped with individual on-demand video and music capability (even in economy), but the food was still terrible. Like the Eva robot going through the waves in Brian Chan’s remake of Hokusai’s wave (see image to right), we are moving into uncharted waters, hallfway around the world, seeking adventure, and for me, some insights for my research on the emerging media worlds of social networking, mobile phones, and video games.

It’s sunny, 90 degrees, towards the end of the hottest summer since 1898, according to the news updates on the train. I write as we pass the rice fields around Narita, with huge power lines overhead, and the old farmhouses with (what I think of as) tiled samurai rooftops with family crests. Next to me on the train is a guy with a Google T-shirt, going through his business cards and checking recent tweets on his Droid phone. As we loaded our bags, I saw a young guy with a T-shirt that read “Meet me in Oz,” with a character from Hosoda Mamoru’s film Summer Wars (an image from which anchors this blog). The Narita Express train now features TV screens with updated information in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean (in that order) along with constant advertisements.

I’m reading Clay Shirky’s new book “Cognitive Surplus,” and thinking about his rosy (and not inaccurate) view of the enormous potential of ubiquitous, mobile, social media. But I also wonder about the effects of me always having to tear my eyes away from the flashing TV screen in front of me (in the air and on the train) to remind myself to look outside or even to read a book.

In today’s envirtonment of ubiquitous media, I was struck by Shirky’s quotation from Edgar Allen Poe writing in 1845, commenting on the profusion of media in his day (cheap books): “The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information by throwing in the reader’s way piles of lumber in which he must painfully grope for scraps of useful lumber (Cognitive Surplus, p. 47). Shirky rightly notes that the explosion of publishing, however, adds value in other ways, but it does raise some questions.

What will we find? How should we look? And where?

Stay tuned.

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