<div><br></div><div>remains of p2p , face to face , people to people,</div><div>connections to rely on, after a devastating tsunami ?</div><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername"></b> <span dir="ltr"><Erc...></span><br>
Date: Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 7:42 AM<br>Subject: [gang8] Japan - the real aftermath<br>To: <a href="mailto:gang8@yahoogroups.com">gang8@yahoogroups.com</a><br><br><br>
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<div align="center"><strong><font size="4">Japan's problems</font></strong></div>
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>Old people are the least able to survive a tsunami. I read in this
morning's <em>Times</em> (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. </div>
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<div>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. </div>
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<div>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? <br></div>
<div>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.</div>
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<div>"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."</div>
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<div>"Surprising numbers of Japanese keep their savings at home in
cash." </div>
<div>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."</div>
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<div>"Tomoaki Abe, a headmaster, hopes the bank clerks will give him access to
his account because they know his face".</div>
<div><br>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<em> Britain and Overseas</em>, the
quarterly journal of the Economic Research Council, this time last year. </div>
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<div>Chris M</div>
<div>London </div></font><p></p>
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