My family and I briefly stayed in Hong Kong because of the Great Tohoku Earthquake in 2011.
Did you know that Japan’s largest earthquake occurred there?
We were living in the Tokyo metropolitan area at the time, and at the same time as the earthquake, a nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture also exploded.
At the time, the Japanese media refused to report any accurate information, so I continued to get information from overseas.
Just like with the COVID-19 pandemic, the information available in Japan and overseas was completely different.
The earthquake didn’t have a major impact on the Tokyo metropolitan area, but I was afraid of radiation contamination from the Fukushima nuclear power plant, so I decided to temporarily leave Japan.
At the time, many Japanese people believed the information provided by the media, and no one around me was worried about radiation contamination.
On the contrary, many Japanese people seemed to think people like me were crazy.
I had been feeling a disconnect between Japan and the rest of the world since 2021, and this incident confirmed it.
I was deeply impressed by the frightening nature of the Japanese media.
I decided to temporarily evacuate to Hong Kong, a country I had been to before.
When I went to Hong Kong, I found that the people there had heard about the radioactive contamination in Fukushima.
Japan’s national broadcasting system also broadcasts news overseas, and it reports news that is never reported in Japan, so the people of Hong Kong were aware of it.
So, while I was unable to talk about the Fukushima nuclear power plant incident at all in Japan, I was able to talk to many people in Hong Kong.
I made several trips back and forth between Hong Kong and Japan, and many things became clear to me.
