How Far Is It? Adding Perspective in a Larger World

During our Australia trip, a conversation about perspective came up. Think about looking at a downtown cityscape. If you’re in the middle of the city, you see the individual streets and buildings. But if you’re 20 miles outside of town, the city becomes two-dimensional. The dozen blocks worth of buildings are now a single row of buildings.

Japan is about 142,000 square miles, similar in geographic size to Montana. From north to south, it’s roughly the northern border of Oregon to the southern border of California. But news from Japan in the U.S. flattens like the cityscape from a distance. We often get questions from friends and family as to how far away we are from natural disasters and crazy weather.

To help put our location in perspective, I prepared the following handy dandy chart showing our distance (as the crow flies) from major Japanese cities as well as a comparative distance from Portland to another U.S. city. I also added places like Sendai, which suffered major damage in the 2011 earthquake, and Ōkuma, home to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.