Tokyo was bound to be my next destination, as it is certainly a major worldwide benchmark for consumerism. Tokyo is a heavily industrialized city, as you can clearly see, but besides its good fortune, Tokyo’s very high consumption rates have reverberations throughout the world.
Many products purchased for mere pennies in Tokyo were pain-stakingly smelted in some factory like those in Islamabad, by some worker working in poor conditions, who doesn’t have more than a few possessions to his/her name. Also, every neon sign lit, wooden mansion built, car driven, and laptop created have a Co2 output in several places of their production and transportation. These are the kind of things that can easily be forgotten, since they don’t yet seem to impact the consumer, but in the long run it affects us all.
At the moment, though, Japan has more tragic issues to deal with.
You see, the country is situated on a convergent subduction fault, and as the ocean plate slid under the continental plate, there was a considerable (9.0 Richter!) earthquake, which combined with an ensuing tsunami to create massive damages. Many lives were lost, homes were wrecked, and it was just an awful thing for everyone involved. The country will pull together and move on, but it was a scary reminder of the unforgiving nature of the Earth beneath.
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