Blackout

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This morning I awoke to the news of a blackout that hit wide swaths of Tokyo and nearby areas. That brought several train services to a halt, and left more than one thousand traffic signals without power for a few hours, according to ABC news. The area where I live was not affected. Seeing this as a good chance to see if what I said about the Japanese media in the last post has any truth to it, I checked several news media on the Internet, both national and international, to see how they reported it: CNN com. international was the first to report the news, only about an hour (0:11 GMT) after the power outage occurred due to an accident at a construction site. Even ABC news reported it less than an hour after CNN did, and was the first to report that the power was restored. Of the English versions of three major Japanese newspapers and the Japan times, Mainichi was the first, about the same time or slightly later than ABC news. Daily Yomiuri, about four hours later, in the form of "flash news" about the occurrence of the blackout, well after ABC news had reported that the power was fully restored in all the areas affected. And the other sites, instead of updating any information, kept posting what they had posted last Saturday, for most of today. All this seems to suggest that for those now staying in Japan who cannot read Japanese, it's much better to rely on the American media than the Japanese ones if they want to get information over the Internet about what's happening right now in this country. That way they can be better informed for their own security in cases of emergency.