Naoko Watanabe is a resident of Tokyo. Her first-person blog describes how the residents of the capital city and the citizens of Japan are worrying about an uncertain future.
Japan is realising for the first time that it is a country divided between west and east. I live in Tokyo - the west - and the tragedy happened in the east. It is an odd feeling to be so emotionally scarred by the tragedy but so little affected physically.
Eleven days after the earthquake and huge tsunami and the radiation fears, we know through the media what has happened but we still don't know what IS happening, what WILL happen and, most importantly, what we should and should not do.
People are dealing with the situation quietly and being extremely patient. There is no public outcry, just acceptance.
But we are all so tired. And no-one is telling us how we can help those who are still suffering and what is really going on.
Every second is important but we have not yet been given any clear instructions by our government. This is the most frustrating thing of all.
And it is not just the government that is hopeless here, but the home media, too. Everything is presented as if it's a story, and not reality.
While we accept our leaders will be cautious in a situation of chaos, we need to be told more and we need to be given clear information. We are ashamed we cannot rely on our government. This, too, is a new feeling.
News from the internet and our friends abroad have helped us to learn what is true and what is not. It is a new feeling among the Japanese to find we are making our own individual decisions based on all the global reactions and support.
Before the event, we had a feeling that "something bad" might happen soon, but we were not prepared for all this.
Global warming, too much energy use, economic development, over-population, waste, waste, waste, this was all lying heavily on our collective conscience before. Some of us feel now we were too lazy in trying to make the world better on our own or within small groups, not through trying to make a drastic change to the government and their relations to big companies.
A lot of us in Tokyo have been feeling this for a long time and now we are guilty. Perhaps because of this guilt, people are staying quiet, and doing all they can to help each other.
Now we hope Tokyo will change and learn. Maybe the bright lights outside will be switched off, or we will change from electricity to solar energy. And we can cut back on TV programmes that have no meaning, and take less interest in material goods.
Perhaps we will choose to buy fewer things for our children and maybe provide better public spaces for them to learn from nature.
The adults might turn from cars to bicycles, creating cycle lanes for the city, and - on a very basic level - we will have to adapt our food.
Instead of focusing on fresh food, we will need to accept some "fake" food with preservatives is necessary. It does not rot so quickly and it can be stored easily for when we experience another tragedy as this.
We just hope that we can all learn from this, and really start to make a better world.
But that is for later. At the moment, there are so many innocent people suffering, we cannot complain.
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