I don’t think Aomori City was affected at all, but there very well could be some minor damage.
Now it’s bed time. I have work in 5.5 hours. Oyasumi.
Friday I was in the office and could not follow the news. Yesterday roomie was watching 1930s movies. By the time I saw this thread, it was too long for me to follow since I was doing other things. So I apologise if someone has already answered this.
I was surprised to hear a death toll of 10,000 in one city alone. I’m finding reports of that online. Last I heard (on Friday, on the radio) was ‘hundreds’ dead. So 10,000 came as a bit of a shock. Does anyone have the latest total death toll?
I’m only following it intermittently at the moment, but I think it’s 10,000 missing. Could be that many of these evacuated and have not been able to phone relatives or authorities due to downed lines and systems. No doubt many of those will indeed turn out to be dead. I think that was in one prefecture though, not one city; correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Japan has prefectures like other countries have states or provinces.
I think I read a house was washed away on Maui but otherwise not much damage in Hawaii.
Miyagi Prefecture is supposed to still have 10,000 citizens unaccounted for - several of their seaside cities were the hardest (and most quickly) hit by the tsunami, and those cities are completely GONE, with little to no real time between the earthquake and the tsunami striking. Those people would have very little realistic chance of making it to safety, so while they are officially still counted as missing, anyone surviving from those cities will be miraculous.
In contrast to the missing list, most reports are saying pretty consistently that 400 have been confirmed dead in Miyagi, and 200 dead on the Sendai beaches. I cannot tell from the reports if the 400 total includes the casualties from Sendai or not.
Other than Sendai, towns which are badly affected (names I’ve gotten from reports) are as follows:
Rikuzentakata, pop 20,000
Minamisanrikucho, pop 10,000 (I’m pretty sure this particular city is the one in Miyagi where most news agencies are getting the 10,000 dead figure from)
Tagajo (outskirts of Sendai), no pop count.
Iwaki, no pop count.
Video from the inside of Sendai airport when the tsunami hit (it does say that this is a commercial center, but the structures are the Sendai airport) looking at the access road and parking lot.
And now there’s apparently a volcano erupting:
(Firefox’s top spelling correction for Shinmoedake was ‘Ship-breaker’.)
This makes some sense, though: Tectonic activity powers both earthquakes and volcanoes. On the other hand, when will Japan finally get left alone?
I only have a facebook video link for this, but the footage in it is just jaw-dropping.
CNN is reporting that a man was rescued 9 miles out to sea from the roof of his house.
I saw this on the news this morning. Great god almighty. A sea wall? The ocean laughs at such trifles at a time like this. The people on the balcony don’t look as terrified as I’m sure I would be.
The early reports were based on bodies seen in a few places. The more recent guesses are based on numbers missing in areas that were substantially devastated, and reasonable conjecture is that many of those missing must be dead. But it will be several days at least before we get close to a realistic “confirmed” death toll.
To add to this with anecdote: on one beach on Phi Phi in 2004, when the water receded, a lone Japanese woman knew instantly what the implication of the water’s behavior was. They get the message hammered into them at school etc. She ran up and down the beach screaming “tsunami! Go up the hill!” and was largely ignored, because many people there didn’t know what a tsunami was, and others just thought she was crazy. In the end she ran up a hill with a couple of people who believed her, but the rest stayed on the beach. 
So, I hope, though the death toll will no doubt be horrifically high, many of the residents of all those houses we saw being pulverized by the waves were sufficiently primed to be up somewhere high, or a long way inland, the moment they felt the earthquake. Certainly if any country were to minimize the death toll, it would be Japan.
Colophon that video is… :eek:
Minor side note: minami (南) means “south”. So Minamisanrikucho is “South Sanrikucho”.
Likewise, nishi (西) is “west”, higashi (東) is “east”, and kita (北) is “north”. I was tickled pink to see these popping up in place names after being introduced to them in Japanese class.
ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies, that video is :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
Holy living shit.
I was taught as a little girl about when to get to higher ground by my mom, who’d been taught by some people she knew living on the Oregon coast. I don’t live near a coast but if I did, I’d pay attention. I only hope if I’m ever in that situation I have time to move; I’m guessing a lot of the people in the worst-hit areas simply didn’t have enough. 
Seriously. I mean…from a van driving up the dry road mere feet in front of the water, to half of the surrounding buildings floating away in the blink of an eye.
Absolutely amazing. I think I was most struck by how the railing on the stairs where the filmer had been standing was torn away a few short minutes later.
Minamisanrikucho (南三陸町) even breaks down a little more precisely than that, as cho (町) means block, small town, or neighborhood. Its use is similar to Japan’s famous Kabukicho (歌舞伎町) red light district. So Minamisanrikucho means “South neighborhood of Sanriku”. Sanriku (三陸) can be broken down even further to mean 3 places or 3 lands.
Oh my. Absolutely surreal.
I have the Tectonic app on my iPad. Sometimes it shows a couple of overlapping circles indicating recent earthquakes in a location. I looked at it today and, even at the largest resolution, the whole of Japan is almost totally obscured by a vast cloud of quake icons from all the aftershocks!
At school now. We have a shortened schedule. I only have class second period. The principal looked dog-tired and pale, but everyone else has been remarkably unfazed, at least on the tatemae.
I can’t wait to get back to my office honestly. My supervisor informed me that because our building is also the fire department, it has specifically been built to withstand up to a 6.0. Unless we get a direct hit, at least me and my co-workers should be safe. I feel kinda selfish when I think of others though…
I got the stress shits. Ugh. TMI sorry.