*arrives three days late with a current events comic* (I was busy this week)
Monday morning, just as I was leaving my apartment, I heard the loudspeakers posted throughout the neighborhood turn on and make an announcement. Now, because of the echo and reverberation, plus the usage of keigo (formal language), I can’t really understand what these announcements say. It’s mostly the echo. I can puzzle out keigo given enough time and thought, but when I can barely hear it and it’s all echo-y… nope. So I didn’t know what was being said, only that I had heard the same loudspeakers turn on a couple times this past summer too, in late July/ early August-ish. And, having grown up in the Midwest, where the tornado sirens are tested the first Tuesday morning of every month, I assumed that they were just testing the emergency weather sirens, given that the sky was clear. (Does Japan even get tornadoes??? IDK). So I finish putting on my half a dozen layers and go on my merry way to work.
When I got to work, however, the TV was turned on to the news. Now, we have a TV in the office, yes, but it only gets turned on in the event of national emergencies/events (and apparently prefectural parliamentary meetings, when there’s something about education, but that’s a different story). The only other times I’ve seen them turn on the TV was for a national moment of silence for the atomic bombings on August 6th (where they showed everyone observing the moment of silence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then turned it off and everyone went back to work), to check the news when they heard Hachinohe lost power due to a tsunami, and to very very briefly to check the news the one time there was a slightly-noticeable earthquake, but when they saw there was no alert for it, they turned it back off again promptly. This time, they left it on for about a half an hour to watch the news covering the test missiles North Korea fired off into the East Sea/Sea of Japan, off the coast of Akita prefecture, which happened just a couple of minutes before I recall hearing that announcement over the loudspeakers. And then it dawned on me; those other few times I heard the loudspeakers over the summer was around the time North Korea fired other missiles too… those were not emergency weather warning drills like I thought. WHOOPS. Perhaps I should try to listen to them a little more carefully next time (assuming there is a next time. Really hoping there isn’t. I hope the only thing I hear out of those loudspeakers is the daily little song they play at 5 to call children home)
On the plus side, I was able to understand a decent amount of the news coverage, probably mostly due to the fact that Japanese news/game shows are very heavily subtitled (in Japanese, not foreign languages, but it still helps). So even if the volume is turned down or the people are talking fast or using a lot of colloquial language, the gist of the sentence is usually written prominently in standard-Japanese.
For those who don’t know, Japan doesn’t technically have a military, but they do have a Self-Defense Force (or jieitai). There’s also an American Air Force base at Misawa, which is very close by. That’s comforting, I suppose, but also kind of not, because there’s always the possibility that NK will target American bases in Japan and South Korea, and given that their aim isn’t terribly accurate and my city is between NK and Misawa, that’s… not particularly good. But, I have been assured by a friend that missiles are not the same thing as nukes, and that NK doesn’t have nuclear warheads, so that’s good to know! And my coworkers didn’t seem particularly alarmed, just a bit amazed that it was so close to us. Lots of then were saying “woah, so close…”
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