I know this isn't "cognitive dissonance" in the strictest sense, but living in Japan right now has me feeling like the country's living a split reality. What I'm seeing might be pure conjecture and totally off-mark, but as an outsider looking in I'm observing some interesting things about how the nation's coping with this latest natural crisis.

Last Friday at work, I was sitting at my desk thinking I was either sick or passing out. Turns out I was just sitting in my very first earthquake. But a few hundred miles north of me there were folks getting nailed with a (relatively deep) 9.0-magnitude earthquake that would originate a massive tsunami rolling at coastal cities across Japan's northeast coasts.

To put this weekend's events in perspective:

  • The only other recent earthquake in Japan comparable to this was The Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe, Japan, and that was a 7.3-magnitude earthquake. This was 9.0.
  • Those affected by the earthquake in northern Tohoku were 81 miles from the epicenter, which was out at sea. The tsunami was traveling inland at 500mi/hr. That means they had a little over 9 minutes to react and get to safety amidst aftershocks.
  • The soonest any civilian got notice of the impending earthquake was 80 seconds prior. Even so, it's still the most advance notice recorded in history, despite it being slightly over a minute.
  • Of Japan's 84 nuclear plants, around 1/10 of them were damaged in the quakes. All of them are located in areas of major seismic activity, but are architecturally engineered to anticipate these exact scenario. 3-4 were considered to be in meltdown despite the good construction. Besides tarnishing the environment around it, it's put a giant black mark on nuclear plants in general.
  • The last nuclear disaster of this magnitude was Three Mile Island back in 1979. Japan's situation has not exceeded the severity of it yet.

So with all this chaos and wreckage, and the general size of Japan (being about 3/4 the size of California), you'd expect the entire nation to be in panic mode. But aside from TV news stations, the entire country's been extraordinarily calm.

On Friday evening, despite everything, I still went to an izakaya and found the place to be lively and full of laughter, drinking, smiling faces, and general happiness. People weren't sitting in their homes glued to the TVs. They weren't all bringing up the terms "tsunami", "jishin", "tsurai", and other terms you'd be expecting. It was just like any other night in Notogawa. For a developing national crisis, it seemed like half of Japan didn't get the memo.

Saturday rolled around and we got an early start for some ice skating in Seta. Getting on the train, I was expecting half the train to have their phones whipped out with TV antennas extended. The situation grew more dire in the past 12 hours with new worries about massive aftershocks and radiation fallout. Yet the entire train was silent and, on its face, no different than any other train I've ridden. People were texting quietly. Sports teams were passed out in their seats. People had shopping bags in their hands. I felt like I was the only one to have CNN open tracking the status of the quakes.

Then Sunday came with Sagicho, the massive festival of drinking, ramming giant floats together, and setting them on fire. I spent most of the afternoon inside doing my own thing while keeping up on events, but eventually meandered towards Omihachiman at night to see stuff ablaze. What I found wasn't a somber, pacified group of people keeping their attitudes in check in leiu of recent events, but massive crowds of smiling, drunk, extremely festive people. There was laughing, dancing, drunken running in circles, and everything you'd expect from any other festival. You'd never guess 500 miles north there were thousands of people being pulled out of rubble and fished out of sea currents.

It all struck me as very weird. Like everything from Nagoya on down was unaware or blissfully ignorant of the goings-on up north.

I wondered how America would be reacting in a similar situation. Thinking back to 9/11, Katrina, and all other sudden disasters, I distinctly remember events being cancelled (or very much scaled back) in the wake of the crises. Everywhere you went there were mumblings of the event. People were trying to fill their friends in or voiced their concerns of follow-up events. People posited their hypotheses about the causes and preventions. Schools had assemblies and moments of silence. But not here.

In a way, I can respect how the Japanese are dealing with this. It's likely they're silently coping with the issue and their feelings towards it, and during their private time learning about events. They're not taking their feelings, suspicions, and worries out with them in public. But at the same time it shines a very strange light on the nation from the perspective of an American. Maybe our media's just too sensationalist. Maybe we're subconsciously trained to bring these things up in public to make it appear we're interested and concerned. Maybe our way of coping with disasters is communication and information-gathering.

In any case, there's some cultural divide. And it's a bit unsettling.