I am a Swede living 2 hours by train south of the catastrophes in Japan. That means that we felt the earth quakes, had no electricity for a long time and people rushed to the gas stations, convenience stores and shops to fill up all supplies they could. Most telephone traffic stopped for several hours after the earth quakes and a lot of phones are still out.

After the initial  earth quakes the power blacked out in a lot of areas near tokyo and north of tokyo. That made it hard to contact people in Sweden saying that we were ok. When the electricity came back on, on Facebook, over Skype, mail and basically by any other means possible people in Sweden were trying to confirm if the people they knew in Japan were alright or even still alive.

You can only imagine the feelings of the people in Sweden when they thought of their loved ones, friends, old classmates or work colleagues in Japan, when they heard about the earth quake. “What if they were living in the part of Japan that got hit??” Was probably one of the first things people thought.

A lot of foreigners in Japan are having a hard time getting a full understanding of what is going on from the news in japanese. You can understand from the pictures what is going on to an extent but the scientific explanations about the nuclear power plants is a bit harder to understand. A lot of people are getting news from other sources than japanese media. Family and friends in Sweden, over Facebook, Skype and any other way possible.

The medias in Sweden compared to the ones in Japan are taking a much more frightening look on especially the nuclear power plants in Fukushima.  But a lot of people are hoping that it isn’t as dangerous as friends and family in Sweden are saying.

Even so hundreds of Swedes living in Japan have gone back home to Sweden incase of radiation problems. Though the japanese government and media still haven’t said that it is dangerous yet.

During catastrophes like this people come together, maybe from having more in common then they usually do. A lot of japanese people have been very considerate asking at least me if I’m ok since there aren’t really any earth quakes in Sweden.