Ways to Follow the Japanese Earthquake

To see what the Japanese people are watching on TV, you can go to ustream.tv for the live streaming of their public TV network, NHK. Also, here is a page with a collection of videos (scroll to the bottom of the page). But naturally, they are going to be sensitive to the feelings of the Japanese people so as not to cause any panic, which means their reporting will be rather conservative. For instance, they did not broadcast the popular video footage of the explosion of the nuclear reactor building (at least for a long time).

If you just want to follow the critical news, I think this page on Kyodo News is useful. It just shows you the latest and the most urgent news headlines.

Naturally, Twitter is useful for getting a sense of what people are talking about. Apparently the Japanese people at the disaster sites used Twitter to report the locations of the fire.

If you can read Japanese, this page on Google is useful in getting a sense of what the Japanese people are talking about. (The English version of the same thing.)

Blogs I like: New York Times, Aljazeera, Guardian, and Wall Street Journal.

And, one of the best explanations of what’s happening to the nuclear reactors by Dr. Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT.

Readings of radiation levels from different prefectures.

Among all the sensational articles, this one gives you a small dose of relief.