It's raining in Tokyo.

It's raining outside my window in Shin-Koiwa. I've just woken up after a late night surfing the news about the earth quake in Chile. Such tremendous forces at work underneath us. I spent the last few weeks in Sichuan, China that got hit real bad in 2008. The sheer destruction that is still visible there is still somewhat incomprehensible for me. And I have stood on the ridge over Beichuan city peering down into the empty ghost town. Nevertheless, I still can not fathom how it must be to experience such a catastrophic event.

It makes one think though on the extent of destructiveness that we can get caught in. In Chile the death toll seem to be far from the massive losses in Haiti according to the first reports. The news report on how Chile has been preparing for such an event for a long time and how this might have helped keeping the numbers down. We'll see in the days to come. In China, the government has vowed around 1 trillion yuan to rebuild. The events themselves are cataclysmic, they are natural disasters, but the responses to them and the situations before them are nothing but man made. And one also can not forget the post-situation and the effect that such a cataclysm have on people and on society, long lasting effect.

It's raining in Tokyo today; I imagine that heaven is weeping.

Beichuan, February 2010. The town lays in ruin as a reminder. A new Beichuan is built elsewhere