Right, so I guess your thinking justifies/supports ys's perspective of brushing off mass casualty events as "drops in a bucket" and good for a country because of overcrowding. How absurd. Feeling empathy for people you don't know ie. strangers is pathologically abnormal? Tell that to anyone in the medical profession or rescue profession and they will laugh at you. Seriously.
Maybe you should read:
http://www.diffen.com/difference/Empathy_vs_SympathyHere is from the above site:
Emotional differences between sympathy and empathy
Sympathy essentially implies a feeling of recognition of another's suffering while empathy is actually sharing another's suffering, if only briefly. Empathy is often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes".
Empathy develops into an unspoken understanding and mutual decision making that is unquestioned, and forms the basis of tribal community. Sympathy may be positive or negative, in the sense that it attracts a perceived quality to a perceived self identity, or it gives love and assistance to the unfortunate and needy.
One feels empathy when one has "been there" and sympathy when one hasn't.
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I can certainly sympathize with the surviving victims, which requires an act of the imagination. But I agree with ys that it is insignificant in terms of casualties as a portion of the population and the deaths mean little in terms of the nation-state of Japan. Even if 20,000 died, that is (20,000/127,000,000)*100%=0.015748031%. Very small. If a tribe of 100 lost one member that would be 1%. They might mourn the loss of their member, who they actually knew (so it makes sense to empathize among the members), but life would go on much as usual.
The most damage is not in terms of lives lost but in damage to building, infrastructure, and so on, at least if you are considering the effect of the quake on the economy and society (standard of living). An enormous amount of capital was destroyed by the earthquake.
I am not concerned with the country, as the quake is likely to have little effect on the power of the state. It will likely continue to oppress the people just as it had before the quake. The danger to the population is in trying to use the quake as a justification for increasing the power of the state further. The quake could very well be harmful to the people of the country if the state of Japan opportunistically decides to expand its powers in order to "protect" the people from such occurrences in the future.
