On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) finds itself metaphorically treading water at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (see blog post below)  as it continues to inject cooling water into the three damaged reactors on a 24/7 basis.  At the same time, it is dealing with the contaminated drainage from the reactors that mixes with incoming groundwater by partly cleansing it of most contaminants and storing it in huge steel tanks.

March 11, 2011 is a day most of us living in Japan at the time will remember for the rest of our lives.

At 2.46 p.m. a magnitude-9 earthquake struck 72km (45 miles) off the northeast coast of Japan, causing local damage as well as high-rise buildings 770km from the epicenter down in Osaka to sway for minutes. But the real destruction occurred an hour later when a tsunami came roaring in and devastated much of the coastline, sweeping inland as far as 10km and reaching a run-up height of 39 meters (128 feet) in some areas.

​An antenna made out of seawater? At first glance, it may seem on the level of an engineer’s idea of a parlor trick, but Mitsubishi Electric believes its SeaAerial Antenna has a future both on sea and land as a simple-to-set-up mobile antenna.

Scandal-muddied Toshiba Corporation recently announced it was terminating its long-time relationship with Ernst & Young ShinNihon, its rubber-stamping auditor and will hire PricewatherhouseCoopers Arata to replace it.