Butterfly Effect

Yesterday I watched the news...in Japanese. It's an interesting time right now for Japan. It's been 3+ months since the earthquake struck (although we are still having huge earthquakes). The Prime Minister is set to step down because people are upset. The nuclear meltdown has...melted. People are still living in shelters. Aid still hasn't been received. The economy keeps heading south. It's a weird time for Japan considering it's an industrialized nation.

But the news yesterday said that electricity and gas will go up 5-8%. Rice and flour will also go up 5-8%. That is BAD NEWS. My gasoline right now is 149JPY per liter, which means my gas is running at $6.99 per gallon; good thing I only drive on the weekends. In a country where the economy is already doing poorly, it's a bad time for commodities to start skyrocketing. But what can you do?

For all the economics classes I slept through, I mean, studied hard in, I learned there's a law of supply and demand. No nuclear power means all of our electricity prices will go up. Government is using gas to fuel relief vehicles, which means civilian gas prices will go up. Tsunami water wiped out fields and fields and fields of rice and wheat, which means rice and flour prices will go up. Milk prices have gone up due to fears of radiation, and it's spread up here to the dairy farms in my village. People aren't buying milk from the village (I don't know why because we're not even close to radiation...or anything for that matter). But it's affecting my students' families. It's a giant ripple effect, butterfly effect this country is going to feel for a very long time.