Saturday Morning Science 007
When the god Kashima is distracted, the cowardly Namazu sees a opportunity for mischief. This giant catfish, a monster, a yo-kai, was imprisoned underground and his subterranean thrashing about is the source of earthquakes. How this is interpreted is a matter of history. At first Namasu was a replacement for the more traditional, Chinese inspired dragons. He was a resentful godling, peeved at the low regard that humans held for him (catfish is an unpopular food choice with the Japanese ) and only too willing exert himself to remind humanity of the true scale of the natural world. In later times, he becomes a very political figure as the destruction he would cause rebalances inequities in Japanese society. This is how he is depicted in relation to the great Edo earthquake of 1855 and more recently the 1995 quake in Kobe. How he will be seen this time is anybody’s guess.
The idea behind this column was to give rgbFilter readers a regular science fix with a bit of perspective. Not just a quick grab from today’s headlines but an overall look at things, noting trends and lines of possibility. The intersection of science and popular culture; it’s an easy way to put it but it’s hard to write about when for the last week one of this planet’s most technologically advanced countries has been trying to dig itself out of a situation that reads like a Hollywood disaster movie. There are other things happening in the world and I could just grab a bunch of links to stuff like Large Hadron Collider Could Be World’s First Time Machine or Seasonal Rains Transform Surface of Saturn’s Moon. Anything to avoid the here and now; even if the here is the other side of the world and the now is a situation that’s going to take years to sort out. It’s very hard to come up with the right balance of “gee whiz” and glib humour when a fair portion of Japan’s northernmost population is technically homeless in the winter and thirty percent of the country’s power comes from reactors, some of which, are in danger of melting down.
As I write this, the situation at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station is reported as stable and it appears that its malfunctioning reactor is going to be brought under control. I try to write something like…but even if the reactors are brought back online the fallout…no, not fallout…the repercussions…no, too much like aftershock…eventually I fall back into thinking about what it’s like to be cold, wet and hungry when everyone around you feels pretty much to same or what kind of guy walks into a an unstable atomic plant knowing that he’ll be the first one to feel it if this doesn’t work and even if it does work will he have taken in enough radiation that he’ll spend the rest of his shortened life in a cancer ward. The Japanese probably have a very specific word for that kind of person. In English they’re called heroes and they are that; win or lose. I wonder what they call the China Syndrome in Japan and realise that would have made a clever joke ten days ago. A set-up that needs no punch line…
This week’s instalment of Saturday Morning Science is on hold. I’m sorry but anything I’d have to say now will be beside the point. When the ground moves beneath your feet what happens to certainty? We live on the surface of a failed star. Beneath us the molten parts of the core, heated by radioactive decay, spin and provide us with a magnetic field which in turn shields us from the harsher energy output of a mostly stable fusion reactor which we orbit. We have just started to mimic the great forces that surround us in our attempts to harness energy. But when these older and greater forces exert themselves the scale of our thinking and ingenuity is tested. An Atomic Age bracketed by Hiroshima and Fukushima is a very real possibility and the irony of it is as distasteful as it is horrible. Koshima was off his guard. Namasu moves in his prison. The walls shake and once again the humans must make sense of the change.
