Practical Useful

By Wednesday last week it was clear that there was no one else available to make the journey to Seoul and help our partner there give a demo of our Workforce Optimization suite to a new potential big client. This did give me a great opportunity to catch up with the same guys who worked with me on our last big WFM project; the one that took me to Brazil for a week and gave me almost two months without sleep. This time though working with them would give me the chance to catch back up on a night’s sleep away from the baby!

I was not totally keen to go, I admit, as my Mum is in town visiting and it is still worrying to be separated for any length of time from Wife and New Baby after recent events, but needs must. As it turned out, the guys didn’t really need my help at all, other than to demonstrate that we care enough about this deal to send me along and show we are keen on supporting our partners.

Some quick notes on my thoughts on South Korea after this my third visit…

The Japanese say that Koreans have Italian hearts, meaning that they are warm and romantic, that is certainly true – the welcome I receive there is always huge – but they have a work ethic and drive that defy’s belief to go with it.
Everything in South Korea revolves around business, in the newspaper you will find important business page articles in the main news section and every other item will mentions the potential business impacts of any story if there are any. These guys care deeply about growing their economy and are focusing all their energy on it.

There is a large amount of fear and ignorance (among otherwise very bright people) about the situation in Japan – many seem quite convinced that the food is radiocative and Tokyo is not a safe place to be. Curiously, the disaster is always referred to as the “earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster”. This is slightly distressing to me, as a much more accurate description would be “earthquake and tsunami disaster (and accompanying, distracting Fukushima accident)”. I doubt though that SK is unique in seeing it the other way around… the media drive to play on people’s fears about nuclear power to sell papers is surely still as strong elsewhere. I think I convinced one guy at least to put his plans for a Tokyo trip back in place, with a promise of some guided tour time and the assurance that I think it is safe enough to live here with my two month old child!

Lastly, on my “night off”, I awoke twice out of dreams. Once I was dreaming of an aftershock and the other I was dreaming of changing baby’s nappy. There seems to be no escape, even in the arms of Morpheus!

Life goes on.

The needle keeps getting bounced out of the groove by the aftershocks and a little bit of the old music repeats – a gulp of fear and a glance around the environment to check you are in a survivable area in case the shock gets big. Luckily these aftershocks are now fewer, further between and not nearly so strong; apart from the mag 7 one the other week (the long predicted large aftershock) which left the nerves a little more rattled.

Meanwhile the catalogue of errors and judgement mistakes that TEPCO executives have made over the past few years as well as over the first few days of the accident begins to trickle out and the official accident level has been raised to 7 – the same as Chernobyl. But despite all this, I think my faith in the fundamental safety of the plant was completely justified. It is still not “a Chernobyl”, nor could it ever be one, and no one is going to die as a result of it. Not even in twenty years of cancer.

Life goes on in Tokyo and is basically unchanged, but my eyes have been widened not just by the terror of my own brief experience, but more by being on the periphery of a genuine disaster. The real one, not the media fantasy one.

Life in Tohoku, meanwhile, goes on but will never be the same ever again. Hopefully soon we will stop counting the dead and start paying proper attention to the living, stranded among the ruins of their own lives and desperately in need of aid. If you haven’t read Tracey and Dee’s account of their first trip to help, please do – but be warned you will need the tissue box to hand, I well up just thinking about it.

The broken lives and lost towns and villages, the videos of schools swept away by the flood, the pictures of the tangled remains of roads, homes, cars and fishing boats dashed against each other… all of it has left wounds not just on the landscape but on the people. Especially those who are left bereft, but also on me too.

So what can I do? There is a helplessness in the face of the scale of this that makes action difficult. Donate, donate and donate again to the relief efforts and encourage others to do the same and lend whatever support one can to the brave souls charging out to volunteer with the relief efforts directly. Encourage others to do the same. Which brings me to the real point of this post: #quakebook.

Out of that desperation was born an idea, in the shower of Our man In Abiko. Germinated on Twitter and assembled with a speed and tenacity that defies belief. The very creation of the thing was a joy to watch, as it unfolded before our eyes 149 characters at a time, and the final result is incredible. This is not just some charity book. The works in here are touching and empathic, they will transport you through those dark moments of horror and back into hope for the future of this beautiful nation.

What can you do to help? Well you can buy a little slice of hope and beauty amid the darkness and every penny will go to the Japan Red Cross. Every penny will help.

So go download a Kindle reader for the device of your choice and buy #quakebook (US Amazon or UK Amazon).

This is one of the little aftershocks of March 11th that makes my heart leap with joy, not fear.