Tokyo is fucking weird at the moment, not bad, just weird. I live smack bang in the center of Tokyo near the giant crossing for reference. Most things seem to be running as normal in the city, you can rent movies, go to restaurants, hit arcades and my wife's studio is tattooing as normal. The major differences I notice at the moment are
- Vastly (volunteer?) reduced silly consumption of electricity so many usually bright areas are very dark. The electric company posted schedules of rolling blackouts which seem to only have partly taken effect.
- Stores are very low on dry goods, bread, rice, bentos and things. I think that is probably a combination of some food being relocated to fukushima, deliveries over the weekend being disrupted and people panic buying.
- Trains are a bit erratic, Tokyo currently has a public transport system which could be a bit jealous of London's,
- A lot of aftershocks, lost count since friday.
- Very tense, uncertain outlook about the future of the plant, a lot of the expat community seems to be panic evacuating.
My personal (highly unqualified) opinion on things is thus:
1 - The last 4 or 5 days of media coverage are going to be taught in classes on why vast amounts of media time + yellow journalism of the worst kind + social media - any form of sensible filtering in country with a fabulous infrastructure where everyone has a 4g cellphone is an extremely volatile mix, tailor made to generate lots of hysteria and very little useful information.
It pretty much leads to people making decisions on out of date / unqualified / unverified / erroneous data which is never a good thing.
2 - The very best information that I can find indicated that even in a worst case scenario (utter catastrophe at plant + highly unusual weather conditions) the chances of a significant effect to people's health in Tokyo are vanishingly small assuming people in Tokyo aren't utter fuckwits.
3 - The longer the situation at the plant continues without a huge catastrophe, the lesser the effects of the catastrophe.
So while I wouldn't exactly say things are peaches and cream, the situation looks a lot brighter than it did a couple of days ago.
Also for anyone who is interested, by far and a way the most fact checked, concise and useful source of information I have found is on the Something Awful forums. If you don't know what SA is, tread carefully and treat it as NSFW