The Skyhooks said it well when they described the evening news as 'a horror movie right there on my TV'. The small screen loves disasters: fires, floods, tornadoes, cyclones, tsunamis, earthquakes. It also loves displayed emotion, as evoked by the tasteless 'How does it feel?' question often asked by tabloid television and press reporters.
This was brought home to me as a visitor to Japan in the months after the March tsunami, the Fukushima earthquake and nuclear power plant disaster in the Sendai regions. I have been here since June, based at Yamaguchi University, an internationally oriented university in Yamaguchi City. This inland city is nearly 800km south-west of Fukushima and further away from Sendai.
Yamaguchi has no N-plants. Nor is it an area with active earthquake patterns. Nonetheless, before we left Australia people asked, 'Are you still going?'.
All too often anxiety trumps reality. In Melbourne in recent years, we received emails from friends overseas worried that we might be affected by the Queensland floods or NSW bushfires. We were of course hundreds of kilometres away.
Unfortunately, TV prefers emotions to time and place. Commercial tabloid current affairs TV never shows map locations, even on Australian stories, and the ABC's 7.30 Report is rarely any better.
Apparently one television tabloid reporter — the classic fly-in or parachute journalist who knew nothing about Japan — reported that the Japanese were wearing masks for fear of a nuclear threat. In fact they usually wear masks to avoid spreading colds and flu.
Japan does have problems, some immediate and some ongoing. The regions around Sendai and coastal Fukushima have been battered. Japan has a long-term problem as an energy-less country reliant on N-power. Like Australia, it has failed to learn from Germany about developing solar power. Its regulatory systems also have severe weaknesses.
But Japan is not, in general, a disaster zone. For most people life goes on as normal despite a revival of the 'no tie' policy introduced some years ago by then Prime Minister Koizumi, due to higher temperatures in offices. People are urged to save power and while there are fears of outages, they're concentrated in Tokyo and its Kanto region rather than the rest of the country.
Across Japan, while N-power stations are checked and tested, some businesses and offices, and people at home, are running air-conditioners at 27–28°C rather than 20°C. Car plants have moved their 'weekend' to Monday–Tuesday to lessen the weekday power load.
At the same time, Japan is aware of the human and economic costs of the tsunami and the nuclear power problem. Tanabata, a summer festival where people seek good things for the future, including relationships, has made people think about those they have lost and what they have. News reports have suggested that in anxious times the security of marriage has become more appealing.
Japan remains a place of considerable courtesy, with an increasing number of signs in English, and helpful people who often take lost tourists to their destination. Its supermarkets and fruiterers have bananas which are both cheap and of the highest quality, as is all food, including ice cream, chocolate and other delights.
As long as you like sushi, teriyaki, noodles, pizza, pasta and salads, Japan is also cheap. Prices have not risen after almost no inflation for over a decade. Japan is also remarkably safe — the only country in which I carry my wallet in my back pocket when travelling!
As Victorians found when tourists avoided Healesville after the Black Saturday bushfires, one thing that regions and countries afflicted by disaster don't want is an end to tourism. That applies to the islands of Japan, too, from Kyushu and Shikoku in the south to Hokkaido in the north, as well as to the main island of Honshu.
Disastrous television news exaggeration is a disaster we can do without. In contrast, travel is one way to begin international understanding which deepens wisdom. What Australians need today, as always, is a mature international approach to the world — a world which is even more interesting than it is complicated and accident-prone.
Stephen Alomes is an Adjunct Professor in the Globalism Research Institute at RMIT University, currently on attachment as a Visiting Professor at Yamaguchi University.