Japan

Wednesday March 16th, 2011

The earthquake in Japan has been tragic and overwhelming. We got in touch with some of our Japan-based photographers to make sure everything was alright.

I emailed Makoto Ishida, and he reassured me: “I am doing fine in Tokyo. There is almost no damage in Tokyo.” However, his plans have been affected. “The earthquake happened just two days before my two weeks fun trip to South America,” he told me. “Of course, I canceled everything and am spending this nation’s difficult time with my family in my hometown.” For the most part, these are the kinds of problems that residents of Tokyo seem to be facing. “Other than worry for the many ongoing problems in Northeast Japan, the daily scheduled three hour blackout is causing problems for many people and businesses.”

Raymond Patrick left the country just before the earthquake started, and had already noticed some signs. “The week before I left there were quite a few tremors,” he said. “I remember I was in a coffeeshop in Harajuku and the building was shaking for 45 seconds.” Raymond thought it was the subway, then “a friend of mine said this is definitely an earthquake.”

Raymond reiterated that “Tokyo is essentially intact, there’s very little damage in Tokyo,” and his friends and family are all okay. Still, he is worried by the “depressing news,” and concerned for people he knows, like a girl he recently met at a friend’s party. “She went to go see her father up there where the tsunami hit, and texted my friend that she was okay after the earthquake, but then there was no response after the tsunami and still we don’t know what happened.”

Like Makoto, Raymond points to the disruption of daily life as the main problem in Tokyo. He was supposed to return to Japan in two weeks for a shoot for Ritz-Carlton, but that has been postponed. There is a widespread feeling of panic; “every day the convenience stores get emptied because people just go and buy everything,” he said. Train service is very limited as they are trying to conserve electricity, but in such a heavily populated and congested city, everything is radically slowed down and people living on the outskirts can’t get into the city to go to work. Raymond hopes that the “general paranoia or fear in Tokyo” can be calmed down, since “otherwise life is generally normal”; sometimes the media is blowing things out of proportion, which could interfere with the kind of recovery that would help the hard-hit regions.

Since our photographers have been outside of the areas affected by the disaster, we don’t have images of that. (If you’d want to get an idea of the effects, you can see a before/after demonstration at the New York Times site.) Instead, we’ve reproduced some of Raymond Patrick’s images of Tokyo, to remind ourselves of the possibilities for recovery and redevelopment.

If you are interested in contributing, San Francisco photographer Jeff Singer is offering to send 100% of the proceeds from sales of his prints on Etsy to the Red Cross for disaster relief in Japan. Just mention his blog post when ordering.

-Asad