Guess again

Reading about the train crash in the international news is driving me up the wall. This story says that the train

derailed in Amagasaki, an Osaka suburb about 483 kilometers (300 miles) southwest of Tokyo...

There are two things that annoy me in this. First, since when did Amagasaki become a suburb of Osaka? Have I been writing my address wrongly for all these years? I thought I lived in Amagasaki City, in Hyogo Prefecture. Now I find out I'm living in a suburb of Osaka suddenly. Oops.

And 483 kilometers southwest of Tokyo? What does Tokyo have to do with anything? You might as well say that Amagasaki is 590 km east of Pusan. I mean, really! How many non-Japanese can locate Tokyo on a map of Japan anyway? I know I couldn't, before I lived in Japan. Why not just mention that Amagasaki CITY is next to Osaka, which is Japan's second largest city? (To give an idea of how 'close' Tokyo is to Osaka, I have been there exactly twice in the 15 years I've been here. But I work in Osaka twice a week, Kobe once a week, and Amagasaki once a week. That's how close THOSE three cities are.)

In this story, I apparently moved when I wasn't paying attention. Instead of being 483 kilometres southwest of Tokyo I am now 410 kilometres west of Tokyo.

Wired News doesn't even mention Amagasaki. They say that the train crashed into an apartment block in the suburbs of Osaka city. And according to Reuters, too, the building the train crashed into is on the outskirts of the city of Osaka.

This Malaysian online news site gets it right, and three cheers to them. It is entirely true that I live in the industrial city of Amagasaki near Osaka. Apparently when Bernama check the facts of their stories they DON'T use other news outlets (which have it wrong) to confirm their guesses. They look at a map. How utterly brilliant of them! They also might have consulted the Wikipedia entry, or even (gasp, how bizarre) the Amagasaki city government's official English web site .

But apparently Reuters and the other major news sources didn't think of doing anything quite so tricky and time-consuming as LOOKING IT UP. It appears that they ... guessed? How else would you come to the conclusion that Amagasaki is a suburb of Osaka when it's not even the same prefecture?