the Japanese are actually on full alert – as well as other “Western-friendly” parts of SE Asia.

My mum was trying to call relatives in Malaysia and the circuits had been blatantly shut off (numbers which worked last week returning NU tones), yet my relatives can still use their mobiles or the internet – its standard procedure in certain Asian countries to start restricting international telephone calls when the alert state goes up (they are harder to monitor than Internet as you need people to listen in and often translate foreign languages)