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I hear that Sept 11 is (or has been) winding down in the US, as headlines and news reports talk about returning to normal. I don't have CNN here in Japan, but from the report I heard at Christmas time, the number of hand-made gifts increased greatly this year because so many people where glued to their TV watching the War on Terror. Other than this, I don't really have a gauge to know what it's like there... (I'm just now listening to the archived "live coverage")

I noticed something interesting today though... I have been looking back through past topics in NPR's Talk of the Nation. Here are some of the topics from August 2001...

• New Rules for Driving


• The Art of the Talk Show


• Dog Parks


• Twins


• Sharks


• Boomer Bashing


• Ssssnakes

Of course I haven't listened to any of these, they my be hard-hitting, but it is interesting to note that the next topic that come close after Sept 11, is Annual Bird Show/ Christmas Bird Count on Dec 28. (Friday is always science related).

January seems to be returning to frivolity with Salary Cap Good For Sports?, and then BEAUTY CONTESTS Feb 3. The Art of Courtship report is excusable because it is Feb 14. There few other topics as uncompelling as these between Sept 11 and today... certainly nothing like Ssssnakes.

By the way, I hear a lot of people talking about where they were when they heard the news, and I don't know if anyone cares, but being in Japan of course, without CNN, I'll tell you what I was doing.

It would have been around 9 or 10 pm here. I was sitting at my desk at work and Bryan (my boss) got a call from his brother in the US. Of course there is no TV there, so all we could do to "follow" it was reload the top page of cnn.com every 10 minutes or so. They had streaming coverage, but they were getting so much traffic they had to replace the top page, which is full of images usually, with a simple text only html file (I think there may have been one photo). I couldn't connect to see the video stream, so I stuck to the text stuff.

I rode the next to last train home, and of course no one else on the train knew what was happening. I turned on the TV when I got home and found only one news show talking about it, but they talked more about what the World Trade Center was, rather than the attack. The next day too, I heard very little about it. I never overheard any Japanese people talking about it, and (although I know they were) it appeared that no one here was even aware.

I myself was not as affected as everyone in the US appears to have been. I didn't feel anger, or sadness really, but I did (and do) feel sick that this could happen when I actually think about it... beyond the news reports. For instance, (what really brought this up today) I was reading Fighting to Live as the Towers Died on the New York Times web site. They pack a a lot of dramatic and horrible stories of individuals into 8 pages. It's interesting and sad to read. But for me, to really think about it... beyond the news reports, you have to just take one of the personal stories from one of the eight pages. Any story would do. I picked one at random.

"I can't go anywhere because they told us not to move," Ivhan Carpio, a Windows worker, said in a message he left on his cousin's answering machine. "I have to wait for the firefighters."

Now spend the rest of the time it would normally take you to finish reading the article, and concentrate on imagining that it was your cousin, or brother, or son who left that message on your machine.

I was telling someone the other day, that what would really scare me a lot more than a threat to blow up the Statue of Liberty, would be a threat to attack a random small Mideastern city. As it is now, I am fairly confident that my family is safe... after all, why the heck would a terrorist attack Bay City?

Anyway, that's the short take on Sept 11 from one American in Japan. Stop reading my crap and really think about it... beyond my bastish comment.

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