Tokyo day 7 – life on tv
Was awoken by a tremor this morning, as the bed moved around. Got up, had a look around, checked the internet, then went back to bed; there didn’t seem to be anything else more useful to do.
Today was meant to be the day of the power outages, as the power companies tried to deal with their diminished power generation capacity, but it hasn’t happened. The outages were announced late last night, after midnight, so the outages were not well planned, and as each of the outage slots came and went during the day in each of the regions, they didn’t go through with them. At the time, the announcements were apparently very confused, and had the feel of a process where people were working out the impact of the power cuts as they thought of them (for example, how are trains supplied?).
Today the tv coverage has changed; we are seeing advertisements again on one of the news channels, which is a bit of normality. But the tv channels have changed their earthquake notifications – they are now beeping each time there’s an aftershock, which is new. Each channel now has it’s own beep, but none of them had them yesterday.
We’ve also decided on our favourite station – NNN, where the presenters started arguing earlier about how bad the government announcements were. The male presenter started waving his arms around, and shouting. According to Karen, he completely lost his cool and stopped using the polite formal language expected of a news guy, which is unheard of. They then cut the studio feed, and went to an ad break! But unfortunately this channel keep losing their signal, and putting up an apology message, so we keep having to move on. They also seem to have changed their strategy, and they are spending less time with that studio team, which is a shame.
But here, in the apartment, everything is still pretty normal. We watch tv, we read stuff on the internet, and we hope things will get better elsewhere.
Tags: Earthquake, Travel