The mega-disaster in Japan has produced some strange economic effects. Firstly, there was the massive sell-off in the Japanese stockmarket, due to many factors including interruptions to supplies, rolling power blackouts likely to be affecting production for months, uncertainty about the Fukushima nuclear plant situation and so on. Some shares were particularly hard hit: TEPCO, the power company responsible for Fukushima plants, lost about two-thirds of its value, although has since recovered somewhat.

There was also the affect on the currency markets, which I found a bit perverse at first. The Japanese Yen had a staggering rise against all the major currencies – and proportionally even more against the Aussie Dollar.

Of more general interest though has been the “on the street” economic affects in Tokyo and other areas that were spared the brunt of the earthquake and tsunami’s forces.

In the immediate aftermath, and given the timing of the quake (on a Friday afternoon), there was a rush on “disaster” supplies, which extended widely around Japan (and even beyond, as we shall see). The first things to go seemed to be pre-prepared meals (“bento” boxes, sandwiches and the like), along with white rice, bottled drinking water, instant noodles, petrol, heating fuel (kerosene), torches and batteries.

Like many people, this caused us a reasonable amount of concern – possibly even a bit more than an average household since we are currently five in the house and we also tend to buy meals or ingredients on the day, so don’t have much in the way of “emergency rations” on standby.

The local Dynacity Mall and Robinson’s where we usually shop was closed completely for a few days (if my memory serves me correctly). Where the front open-air carpark is normally full and there are a hundred or more bikes, there was basically nothing.

The next problem we encountered was that our car wouldn’t start, which was an added stress we could have done without. It turns out that someone (very small) had left the internal light on and we had a flat battery. Fortunately we could get a local service guy to come out very quickly and we were on our way – sort of: we had to drive around for an hour or so first to re-charge the battery. (This is itself a bit of an oddity in a Prius, given that the “big” battery in the car was almost fully charged, but if the “little” battery – like normal cars have – goes flat, you are stuffed…)

We didn’t have a huge amount of petrol either, and somewhat less still after having to drive around “aggressively” to re-charge the battery (“Pretend you don’t own a Prius…” as the Toyota guy said.) We quickly found that basically all of the petrol stations (gasoline stands) around Odawara had sold out, shut their doors, and gone home.

Finally, after negotiating horribly bad traffic, we found one with a tanker pulled in re-filling its main tanks. There was already a queue waiting, and we were on the wrong side of the road and only just allowing traffic through, and the station attention told us it would be at least 30 minutes just until the refuelling was done, so I decided to abandon that.

Fortunately we were lucky to find one petrol station that was open and that still had fuel. And a long queue. Things were orderly, people were waiting patiently, the several station attendants were being polite and helpfully squishing as many cars as possible into the queue and around the pumps.

It took quite a while to get our fill, but it felt good to know we could, in theory, drive somewhere a fair way away now if we needed to – although in practice I knew that if any further disaster caused us to flee, we’d unlikely be the only ones making that decision, and the roads would probably be so busy as to prevent us going anywhere useful.

(I should also point out here that I also had “hoarder angst” afterwards for having bought our 25 litres of fuel that could have potentially otherwise gone to the northern prefectures that really needed it at the time; the same way I felt when we finally could buy some rice and water).

Most of the stores we tried were also closed completely, and we probably visited five or six.

Finally we found a conbini (convenience store) that was open. The only problem was, it was no longer very convenient: not much of the stuff we actually wanted. No sign of any pre-made meals…

And no sign of any bread…

We settled for some potato chips, chocolate and the last remaining nikuman (steamed pork buns). The food situation remained bleak around here until about Tuesday following the quake (four days later), at which time at least more stores were opening back up again – though still without rice, water and so on.

We gathered up whatever we thought could pass as food in a prolonged no food situation, just in a case. I think in hindsight we did the right thing, and certainly don’t think we hoarded as such. But it was difficult not to buy expecting the stores to be even more empty tomorrow, given the ongoing uncertainty. And this was the problem, not just here in our little city of Odawara (population 200,000) but particularly in Tokyo (with 100 times more people, and a little closer to the “action”).

In all, I understand that food purchases doubled in Tokyo during the days following the quake. Of course sudden unexpected surge in demand, particularly coming over a weekend, meant widespread shortages, and came on top of infrastructure damage, communications difficulties, fuel shortages, ongoing large after-shocks and the threat of nuclear meltdown causing mild panic (especially to anyone reading foreign media).

Some products suffered from far greater demand. The respected Asahi Shinbun reported that the demand for rice was 10 times normal levels, and the demand for bottled water was 26 times normal. Meanwhile, on top of the distribution issues and the critical need to deliver safe drinking water to the surviors further north, the water bottler had suffered damage from the earthquake slashing its production capacity by two-thirds. Empty shelves promoted ongoing further panic buying.

We gathered up various items of a storable nature in modest quantities that we will eat in due course, like cereal and nuts. I even bought a can of spam – hoping I won’t have to eat it, but figuring it would be a good source of protein in the absence of anything else, and may come in handy as a prop for some email pun in more peaceful times.

I did, however, baulk at a somewhat similar protein source that I had never noticed before, that seemed to be in plentiful supply once the supermarket reopened: canned horse meat. (For the record, I did once eat horse meat shabu shabu style in Nozawa Onsen, but I don’t think I’ll be rushing to do that again.)

We did “hoard” the last 4 packets of noodles for our lunch, once we finally spotted some on the shelves: Yoko looked very pleased at the discovery.

Once some more items started to come back on the shelves, the queues were the longest I have ever encountered. Here we were about 20 deep waiting to check-out at one of about 15 registers at York Mart (with about 6 people behind us). Very shortly after taking this photo I also encountered one of the few instances of outright rudeness I’ve ever directly experienced in Japan: an elderly man blatantly pushed in in front of us in the queue (and refused to meet my stare, to boot). Maybe he didn’t like the fact that I had (subtly) taking a photo. Or maybe he was just in a hurry. Who knows.

Things slowly came back to the shops: By Tuesday, some rice returned at the speciality rice shop within Robinson’s, which charges a decent premium and sells only the finest rice. Even there, there was a queue of about 10 people and as you can see from the photo below, nearly all the rice types were all but sold out. We did manage to get a little though.

By now, things have largely returned to normal. I can’t buy my favourite relatively healthy breads yet, but there’s a reasonable selection of bread back on the shelves and the quantities are back to normal. Several industrial trolly-fuls of 5 kg white rice packs have also taken a prominent place on the floor in Robinson’s, and are still in good supply now a few days after their appearance, so the hoarding seems to have passed (or at least supply and re-stocking is happening efficiently again around here).

Bottled water is back too, albeit not lasting long on the shelves, particularly since the scare yesterday that Tokyo water supplies in some areas had been found to contain radioactive particles at quantities that exceed the local legal limits (which, in turns out, are very strict by world standards). Tokyo-ites (as well as others in Saitama and probably Fukushima and surrounds too) have been advised not to give tap water to infants. (The levels in Tokyo have now fallen back below Japan’s legal limits.)

While there was no queue for the water on this particular occasion, it didn’t last long. Shelves were empty a short time later (apart from San Pellegrino and such, which seemed unaffected by all the panic buying and was always in good supply – which struck me as odd; personally I’d be happy to go out in style with some imported bubbles). Today there were just a handful of small bottles around and no large ones.

I read on Twitter about one elderly lady in a Tokyo convenience store buying “all the water you’ve got”, and the Twitter user congratulated her on the baby…

Meanwhile, in this photo which I have blatantly knocked off from 47news.jp, someone was caught buying up like crazy. He must have a crazy number of babies in his house, that’s all I can say.

Meanwhile, the Tokyo local government decided to hand out three days worth of bottled water to everyone with infants, to get around the lack of supply via the usual retail channels.

So that is about how it has been here for the bare necessities. But just what are those necessities. Is there anything I’ve missed? Ah yes, toilet paper. Great, forest-decimating quantities of toilet paper have been bought in the aftermath of the quake. Is it because people anticipate their water-squirting, hair-drying, remote-controlled, heated, massaging Washlet toilets might be without power for a few hours every now and then? Or is toilet paper one of those essential pack-and-run items in an absolute emergency evacuation (maybe, a little bit…)

It may be that the real cause was the memory of some housewives and obachans of the Great Toilet Paper Panic of 1973. During the oil crisis, a rumour of unknown origin came about that Japan’s (mostly imported) toilet paper shipments had been delayed indefinitely. While there was no basis to the rumour, people quickly snapped up whatever they could find, creating an actual shortage. They then experienced the same thing we have seen here with water, rice, etc; any time any trickle of stock makes it to the shelves, it is immediately snapped up resulting in more panic about the empty shelves, and more hoarding. It is said that it was only once many households had years worth of toilet paper supply that they finally felt confident to stop buying more and the “crisis” was brought to an end. (Cuba also had a TPC – Toilet Paper Crisis – lasting several months in 2009, due to the global financial crisis and hurricanes.)

The radiation fears from the Fukushima plants also caused a rush on iodine, since high doses of iodine can be taken as a thyroid blocker to prevent the body’s ability to absorb any more iodine, thus allowing any radioactive iodine to pass through without being absorbed. A lot of this panic buying of iodine occurred in places too far away to realistically be at any real risk – Tokyo for instance, which by all sensible accounts would have been a pretty safe place to be even in the event of a multiple meltdown. Fanned on by the international media frenzy, there was also a mass buy-up of iodine pills in Korea, along the US Pacific coast and other far-flung places.

Presumably a reasonable portion of those pills actually got consumed already (as a “precautionary measure”), and no doubt caused more ill effects to people that the radiation would have had any chance of doing. It also means there’s a shortage of usable iodine for those that really need it – emergency workers and power plant staff in the “hot” zone.

Perhaps most bizarrely of all, there was a massive run on salt buying in China (with rumours circulating that iodised table salt might somehow do enough to help protect against radiation, if it came). It’s worth noting that China’s own nuclear reactors are thought to “leak” a noticeable amount of radiation into South Korea on a fairly predictable basis, if South Korean media is to be believed.

Chinese traders took the opportunity to raise prices to many times their usual levels, and still the panic buying continued, with salt being snapped up as soon as it was placed on shelves. While all that buying and selling would have shifted little bits of wealth from the panicked-and-gulliable to the opportunistic-and-greedy, the China Daily Show reports that one chap did especially well.

Mr Lu, a college drop-out former vinegar trader who moved into the salt business, rather unsuccessfully until last week it would seem, since he was on the verge of bankruptcy. It is reported that he “sold the company to a Hebei-based conglomerate for a billion-dollar figure” – and he’s already managed to spend a decent chunk on partying, coal mines and becoming “serious player in China’s burgeoning art market”.

Phew. What a 13 days it’s been…