wee doors banging

You can’t have escaped hearing the recent terrible news from Japan, and perhaps you’ve been wondering how much of what you hear is true and what is media hype. Wonder no more, we have a man on the ground in Tokyo.

My friend, fellow Norn Irelander, and Team Lard cyclist, Norwin, is currently on holiday in Japan and was in Tokyo itself when the main earthquake hit. He’s been interviewed once or twice for the Belfast Telegraph and Radio Ulster, as well as recording his experiences of the quake and life afterwards on his blog Destroy All Onions.

And he’s been doing a good job of cutting through some of the “apocalyptic headlines” we see in some of the papers here.

Someone told us that the background radiation in Tokyo was ‘about a banana‘, which was hilarious, and puts so much of the media scaremongering into focus.

I joked that I saw people ‘panic buying’ books and CDs, and picking up their dry cleaning … there’s no air of disaster, people are going about doing the normal things

Though, more worringly:

Pot Noodles have sold out.

It’s worth taking a few minutes to listen to the entire interview:

Norwin is due to be in Japan for another couple of weeks. Follow his updates on Destroy All Onions, and also check out the blogs of Marty and Karen, two Norn Iron ex-pats who have been living in Tokyo for a number of years.