Although Linus is from Finland, he comes from the Swedish-speaking minority population there and his native language is Swedish. Sweden itself is pretty PC, but I don't know if that goes for the Finnish-Swedish as well, or if it is just Linux being Linus
My mother's husband is a Swedish speaking Finn and the cultures are quite the same. They are not Swedish people, they are Finns. The difference may be that they're a bit more international and also some studies say they enjoy life more than a typical Finn.
The whole country has two official languages, but Finnish-Swedish people use Sweden as their everyday language.
Actually we don't know that, since most of the reactor building in inaccessible. Also, the latest info from Tepco says that they lost coolant before the tsunami struck, which suggest major earthquake damage. However, if the tsunami hadn't been this severe and they had kept power, perhaps they could have brought the situation under control.
"The March 11 earthquake was preceded by a series of large foreshocks over the previous two days, beginning on March 9th with an M 7.2 event approximately 40 km from the March 11 earthquake, and continuing with a further 3 earthquakes greater than M 6 on the same day."
I'm in Tokyo, and I have lived here for 12 years. The paper is quite interesting, and I have no major disagreement, but of course it is not the full picture. As I see it, the main problem Japan has is that the education and work culture is good at iterative learning and refinement, but bad at picking up and acting upon ideas that are far from how things are currently done. This is a consensus society, and things have to be broadly agreed upon in the group/company to have a chance. If there is a risk of disagreement the idea will either be buried in endless meetings, or simply dropped without discussion. This makes decision making slow and unimaginative.
Software is a good example. Most software and home pages in Japan look like they have been designed by committee, where every person in the room has a pet feature that has to be on the front page. This leads to software that is cluttered and hard to use. There is also little innovation; most new software seems based on designs already in use.
However, there is one aspect where Japan shines. People care about visuals, and graphics and icons are often pleasing. This at least is an advantage in game software, where Japan is not lagging as badly as in business software.
The game visuals in Japanese games are very pretty and stylistic. However this is just the surface and the game mechanics itself is poor. I find the Japanese games are typically a grind, collect them all, or single path perfection.
The game software reflects back on the real world. Lots of style but no substance. Example, the typical Japanese offices have very shiny reception area but where the real work gets done is a cramped, uncomfortable place.
Indeed Japan feels like it's run by a committee. I worry that Japan is like General Motors. Some very interesting products, some very passionate capable people, but the culture doesn't allow innovative things to happen.
