Strong 6 earthquake in Niigata and Nagano Prefectures, with the focus off Niigata. The strongest surface shaking seems to have been in the luckless Chuetsu region, which got hit badly by a series of quakes in October 2004. We certainly felt this one in Tokyo, too, but I was hoping it was centered offshore in the Pacific. A bunch of nuclear facilities shut down automatically, but there aren’t any reports of damage or injuries yet.

Added later: For those unfamiliar with the JMA scale, a strong 6 is a big-ass deal–sixth out of seven magnitudes of intensity: “In many buildings, wall tiles and windowpanes are damaged and fall. Most unreinforced concrete-block walls collapse.”

Added at 17:20: NHK is now reporting five deaths and 500 injured. A train derailed with, luckily, no injuries; and as Alan comments below, a transformer at a nuclear reactor caught fire, but it was brought under control by noon.

Last week I got a rare critical link. Very exciting–there are few things I like better than a good argument! And there are few better argument-starters than health care. His post is thoughtful and full of good points. I still don’t think he’s persuasive on his main point, though:

The health care system in Japan does have it’s problems, just like all systems. But on a whole it’s superior to the States. And that’s based on my anecdotes from living and experiencing the health care here in both countries over a period of many years.

Well, all right, but plenty of us have anecdotes. There was the dentist here who gave me a root canal (over four visits, of course) and left a live nerve fiber dangling there. It made its presence known with a vengeance a few months later.

There was the doctor I visited about a sore throat, explaining that I’d already tried aspirin, it wasn’t working, and I couldn’t afford to have my throat feeling raw for a presentation at the office the next day. He gave me powdered Tylenol and Chinese herbs.

There was the dermatologist at a major research hospital who looked at my skin condition and declared she’d never seen anything like it. The next dermatologist I went to (Japanese but trained in the Netherlands) listened to my story and said, “Huh? This is one of the most common conditions any dermatologist sees!”

There was my friend who came back from a trip to Thailand with a major fever and a wacked-out white cell count. The doctors told her she might have leukemia. Maybe. Almost certainly. Uh, more tests, maybe? A week later, she suddenly started feeling fine. Oops. Guess it was just one of those infections you sometimes get when you visit Southeast Asia. Our bad, said the hospital.

I’m not saying that I’ve proved that National Health is awful. I don’t believe that at all. It’s just that we can fling anecdotes back and forth like ping-pong balls without making generalizable points that should drive public policy. My teeth aren’t any less instructive than JST’s.

He seems to think that Americans should be dissatisfied with our health care system because WHO wants us to be. But there are compromises to be made. The Japanese system guarantees familiarity and stability at the cost of innovation and flexibility. It also, in putting lots of power in the hands of government bureaucrats, creates an incentive system for bribery and back-scratching. I doubt Americans, even those who have had bad experiences themselves, would think that trade-off was a good one. I’m no lover of insurance companies or HMOs, but I’m not convinced that getting Washington involved in managing the system would increase the overall saintliness of the enterprise, while driving costs down and without impeding the implementation of new treatments.