[P2P-F] Fwd: [gang8] Japan - the real aftermath

Tue Mar 22 09:05:54 CET 2011

remains of p2p , face to face , people to people,
connections to rely on, after a devastating tsunami ?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <Erc...>
Date: Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 7:42 AM
Subject: [gang8] Japan - the real aftermath
To: gang8 at yahoogroups.com

 .

*Japan's problems*

One of the particular horrors emerging from the aftermath to the tsunami is
that the low-lying areas which were hardest hit were the cheapest districts
and they had been abandoned to the aged, of whom Japan has more than
anywhere else.  They also seem from the pictures to have lived in cheap
houses made of wood and paper.

Old people are the least able to survive a tsunami. I read in this morning's
*Times* (Tuesday) in an excellent report from their staffer Richard Lloyd
Parry that in the town of Minami-Sanriku, the tsunami also engulfed the town
hall, which is now "a twisted mass of girders. All local tax records and
citizenship lists have been wiped out. The man supposed to back-up the
electronic town registers is kicking himself."  said a spokesman for the
town office.

The upshot is they no longer know who lived there in the first place. "But
it's very serious," said the spokesman. "Now we don't even know who the
people of this town are." That is creating confusion about the most basic
fact of all - the death toll. Minimi-Sanriku can only account for 9,800 of
its supposed 17,431 citizens.

Further up the coast, the number of missing is approximately 10,000 and
similar figures are reported for other towns. Are any of you surprised that
the truth is dribbling out piecemeal and in contradictory form, or that the
Japanese authorities haven't the faintest idea about what is going on? Or
that the Japanese people now trust their government less and less?
What price now the 'Japanese miracle'? It turns out to be a just another
corrupt, administratively incompetent Oriental backwater after all. See my
posting of yesterday about the BRICs.

"Even in towns which have saved or backed up their records, the bureaucratic
problem is enormous. Many civil servants were lost in the tsunami. The
Minami-Sanriku town hall lists 38 of its 230 staff among the missing."

"Surprising numbers of Japanese keep their savings at home in cash."
Now I wonder why they do that?  "And many have lost family register
documents, safes, bank books and crucially, the hanko or name stamps, which
take the place of signatures on official documents."

"Tomoaki Abe, a headmaster, hopes the bank clerks will give him access to
his account because they know his face".

What has this writer been preaching since 1991 about the utter importance of
bank managers who know their customers face to face? And that banks which
abandon that principle "have forfeited their right to run retail banking." I
said as much in an article in* Britain and Overseas*, the quarterly journal
of the Economic Research Council, this time last year.

Chris M
London

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