Media Meltdown

The extraordinary images from Japan over the past week evoke not only sympathy but awe. The damage wreaked by the natural disasters, in both human and economic terms, has been colossal. Entire communities have been reduced to little more than shattered glass and driftwood. The death toll is already well into the thousands, with more bodies being washed up on the country’s shores each day. Yet what we see in Japan is not despair; it is an extraordinary stoicism. Strangers helping each other as if they were family. A nation pulling together.

The hysteria has come not from the Japanese people, but from the rest of the world. The tsunami’s death toll may run into the tens of thousands, yet western attention is instead fixated on the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Even as the plant’s workforce continued to toil around its stricken reactors, western observers were dusting off a lexicon that had rarely been touched since the Chernobyl disaster.