The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Opens a New YouTube Channel

The YouTube Japan official blog recently announced the creation of a Tokyo Metropolitan Government channel. It is all in Japanese but has some surprisingly interesting videos (unlike a lot of the other YouTube channels of Japanese government agencies… I’m looking at you MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology) because I had high hopes for that.

The Tokyo YouTube Channel is still growing but already has a few interesting videos and a good candidate for a long-running series in it’s “Ano Hi, Ano Toki” or “That Day, That Time” series of short videos showing one small piece of the history of Tokyo in video.

Here is an link to one of the videos they’ve put up which shows about 30 minutes of video from different times and places just after the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. The video shows a lot of minimally edited bits of Japan and some of the work done by responders. As is often the case with many “official” type videos in Japan, they don’t allow anyone to embed the videos.

One of the interesting things about this video is that it shows the silence that accompanied the rescue efforts and evacuations. In most of the amateur video I’ve seen there’s someone talking constantly through the video, most often the person doing the filming. In this case there is the silence of people trying to do what they have to do.