Japan, now ....

[Pandora]

Photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon has returned to the affected areas to take a series of haunting images five months after the wave claimed the lives of 20,000 people.

They show the massive clearance operation that has already taken place. Much of the rubbish that was left behind by the retreating waters has now disappeared from the streets, but so too has life.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2026493/Japanese-tsunami-Pictures-road-recovery.html#ixzz1VF24yygU

God help these people, they still have far to go.  What they've accomplished to date, however, is impressive.

I'm your original "let's GO! let's clean this mess up!" and I would not have know where the hell to even start.

[Libertas]

Amazing pics.  And I am with ya on "where to begin".  My family and people at the lake kinda felt this (albeit at a vastly smaller scale) when cleaning up after the storm, but you just focus on one thing and chip away at it.  Same principle applies here, but the scale is just so overwhelming that despair must be near impossible to avoid.  It looks like they have cleared streets and are working on the cities block by block, so there is progress...but the open areas look like they need every piece of heavy machinery on the planet to get it hauled off.  The article says years before those two cities are cleaned up, yeah, by the end of the decade maybe.  But I'll say one thing about the Japanese, they are resilient people and I have no doubt they'll get it done.  I tip my hat off to them and I still try to remember to throw a prayer in for them.

Good post Pan, good reminder of what they're dealing with.

[MNHawk]

Meanwhile, in Obama's America

[Libertas]

Dude, Obamaville is a man made disaster, no sympathy for that is called for!

/