Japan’s $100BN Plan to Disaster Proof Tokyo

Disaster video game series resurrected with support from the Kobe Fire Department

The Zettai Zetsumei Toshi disaster survival video game series has been revived, and will be more realistic than ever before.

The Zettai Zetsumei Toshi (literally translated as “A City in Desperate Straits“) video game series created by developer Irem seeks to recreate the atmosphere and tension of survival immediately following a serious environmental disaster. The series debuted in 2002 on the PlayStation 2 with its first entry, set on a crumbling artificial island. The game, which was localized as Disaster Report in the US and in the PAL region as SOS: The Final Escape, featured survival gameplay from a third-person perspective, where you as the main protagonist must make your way off the island, utilizing whatever items you can loot from the debris, whilst making sure to stay hydrated by locating potable water, and helping NPCs on the way. With sudden deaths from falling construction and collapsing walkways continually interrupting gameplay, it’s a tense yet often frustrating experience, although it does feature kooky gameplay elements like being able to build your own raft and paint it with polka dots to float downriver to reach your objective

How not to spend disaster relief money: Japanese Style

Around 200 billion yen of public money earmarked to help people hit by Japan’s 2011 quake and tsunami has been spent in areas unaffected by the natural disaster, the government admitted Monday.

In far northern Hokkaido, a project to boost tourism based on the area’s wine and cheese culture benefited from the money.

In a town in the southern prefecture of Kagoshima, around 1,300 kilometers from the devastated city of Ishinomaki, three million yen was spent on the protection and observation of sea turtles.
Ten people were employed to count the creatures as they came ashore and to remind sightseers not to interfere with them.
“We only counted sea turtles and were not required to move eggs to safe places or do other things. It wasn’t even for sea turtles, let alone those hit by the disaster,” the daily quoted one of the 10 as saying.

According to the Asahi, other publicly-financed projects included the production of a restaurant guidebook in Aichi, central Japan, and the publication of leaflets encouraging safe use of the Internet and mobile phones in nearby Mie.

I'm sure that the promotion of industries, tourist destinations and restaurant guide books in locations that were hundres if not a more than thousand kilometers help all those people who were actually effected by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster at Fukushima-Daiichi.