When the Shinkansen Hits the Fan

What to make of a society that can build robots that play the violin, but not one that can take the place of a man climbing into a reactor chamber? The answer from Germans is always the same: panic.

No, Germany doesn’t get hit by earthquakes. But it regularly gets hit by seismic waves of extreme and indulgent panic like the one that has just rolled over the country shortly after the monster quake hit Japan.

Otherwise Geiger counters are selling like bad ideas in the land that coined and added to its' wildly successful imports, the term angst.

The German news folks have all hightailed it down south to Osaka and are reporting from there (or maybe they’re in Taiwan by now).

Their rescue teams have headed back to Germany after declaring that there is no one left in Japan to be rescued.