Japan needs you!

The title of this article sums everything up in itself! Indeed, this is the kind of phrase you could see everywhere after the terrible earthquake which hit the “Land of the rising sun” couple months ago.

In Australia, there has been a very huge reaction to this catastrophe. Indeed, even if the origin of this very big reaction is somehow hard to determine, the thing you cannot ignore is that every single individual got really involved in actions aiming to help Japan. 

The proximity between Australia and Japan is very important in this story. This is probably the main reason for the Australian reaction. Indeed, Australia is really close to Asia and there are a lot of Asians living here, but also the Asian culture is very present in this country. Thus, people were really concerned about the near future of Japan and Japanese people.

This proximity brought two big concerns to this country. The first one was that a lot of Asian people living in Australia have relatives in Japan, so a lot of people here were really sad because they lost some close friends or family or they were kind of worried about what will happen next to the people they know up there. The second concern was basically the “homeland security”. Indeed, all Australian people were very worried about all the radiation clouds that were supposed to come down directly above Australia and that meant a lot of health problems for the people in here.

This reaction was, like I said, huge! There were a lot of actions taking place in all Australia, especially fundraising actions. Indeed, there were a lot of individuals or associations that organized events such as Japanese food sales in the streets. Also, there were always updates of the situation in everyday news on television. You could really feel the concern that Australian people had for the situation. Every newspaper had at least one double page article about Japan for like three weeks; it was really like you were there! Finally, all these special events came to some kind of an end after approximately one month, but even now you can still be asked for support for the Japanese people in the streets of a big Australian city.

Cheers.