12th March 2013
How easily some are astonished, and yet how easily the senses of most are dulled by the astonishing around them. The second anniversary of the Triple Crisis in Japan passed with most of the nation feeling mildly sad and contemplative, yet there were few utterances of astonishment. Those came mainly from outside Japan. The BBC, ABC, CBS, KBS (Korea), The LA Times, Washington Post, The Guardian: they all lined up to declare their astonishment, and when one considers how astonished they are, and by what, then it rather begs a number of questions. Are they astonished simply because they haven’t been paying attention to what has been happening in Japan for most of the past year or two? Are they astonished only because this is Japan, and expectations are so greatly different compared to expectations of their own countries? Or is it simply that marking an anniversary of a tragedy has so little impact as a news story (and foreign news of tragedy seems all so easily dismissed in the modern editorial process), therefore the requirement for added astonishment as garnish upon the otherwise predictably bland dish of fare?
There are certainly grounds for astonishment. The simple facts are enough, with 15,881 confirmed killed by the tsunami and quake on 11th March 2011, 2,668 missing, and even now 315,196 living as evacuees from their homes. Of the latter, some are lucky enough to live in close proximity to their home areas, removed only a couple of km from their former homes, on higher ground. However, many have been forced to move much further away, and the elderly have suffered particularly as they usually lack the ability to drive themselves around, or to cycle or walk long distances, and thus are easily isolated. For the many elderly living in pre-fab housing blocks in evacuation areas some have begun a system of ‘yellow flags’, based upon a 1970s film whereby a wife would hang a yellow handkerchief out every day, as a signal of welcome just in case her estranged husband were to return. The present yellow flags are put out in the morning by the aged to show that they are alright today. The absent flag soon leading to knocks on the door to ask how they are. This is an organic form of community care, but was provoked by a spate of deaths due to neglect, and a spate of suicides among the elderly, and it is this wave of post-trauma deaths, often quietly, in isolation that is one of the truly astonishing phenomena of the 3.11 story.
The main foreign media astonishment centres upon two aspects of the crisis that clashes with perceptions, positive and negative, of Japan. This relates to technology, resources, and capacities, and is characterised by wide-spread admiration for how quickly Japan repaired roads, train lines, and other infrastructure after both 3.11 and the Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. The assumption is that Japan, of any country, has the amazing ability to move and act quickly and accomplish things that seem beyond the power of most countries, by the application of technology, resources, and the Japanese capacity for hard work that is famed throughout the world. The astonishment comes from the gap between the expectations that are raised by such a favourable evaluation and the actual achievements in reconstruction of the Tohoku coastal communities and dealing with the Dai-ichi nuclear power plant crisis.
To see the coastal communities of Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate is to see a devastated area of hundreds of kilometres. When the scale of the devastation is seen it seems remarkable that the casualty figure wasn’t far higher, as much of the coast is low-lying, with communities huddled around inlets, harbours, river mouths, and coastal plains. After two years there has been precious little rebuilding, partly as some have moved away, some have died, and where there are people present they have often been unable to rebuild due to lack of funds, or due to the problems with hastily re-drafted building regulations and urban planning ordinances. Simply, these low-lying, flat areas are widely considered to be too dangerous for habitation, and possibly even too dangerous as workplaces, which for fishing and related family businesses is a major step towards destitution. In many areas, this perception of danger is widespread, but without any comprehensive alternative plan for community planning, employment, or even community identity, as whole towns have been dismissed as untenable. NHK on the anniversary had special programmes and a double-length news bulletin at 7pm featuring both memorial ceremony coverage, particularly of 14:46, when the initial quake struck, and features upon survivors. Among the latter, there were several people whose homes were destroyed or badly damaged by the quake or tsunami, who have rebuilt those homes at their own expense. Now, many of them are facing the prospect of their homes being demolished to make way for new public works projects, the most common being higher and deeper river levees. There are those who have attempted to rebuild, but have been stopped by the local councils. And naturally, there are those who are having to pay-off mortgages on homes that no longer exist, or which exist within the nuclear evacuation zone, so close to the Dai-ichi plant that they will in all likelihood never be able to return. Compensation has trickled through to these people but it has been both slow and insufficient. For a rich nation like Japan it is truly astonishing to see so many of its people reduced to basic lives just above poverty simply due to natural disaster and the lethargy of government and corporate entities.
Of those evacuated from the Dai-ichi area the majority are within Fukushima Prefecture, with 31,000 in Iwaki City, 13,000 in Minami Soma (itself partly evacuated), 11,000 in Fukushima City, and 10,000 in Koriyama, while there are 9,513 in Yamagata Prefecture, 7,449 in Tokyo, 5,724 in Niigata, and more than 3,000 in each of Ibaraki, Saitama, and Chiba Prefectures. These figures are from the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper, one of the most liberal-radical of the mass circulation dailies, which yesterday carried the shocking headline ‘789 nuclear-related deaths’, of the ‘2,554 post-disaster related deaths’. As a critic of the former and current governments the newspaper has a large axe to grind, with vocal anti-nuclear advocacy, and its reporting accuracy could certainly be challenged, but the fact remains that two years on there has been astonishingly little auditing of the human cost of the nuclear crisis. The paper claims that certain numbers of the dead from each town or city of Fukushima can be accounted for by the nuclear disaster, as opposed to the tsunami or quake. These include all 254 deaths in Namie Town, and half of the 396 in Minami Soma, mainly due to illness or age and the consequent evacuations, many people being evacuated multiple times, with little help, and few resources available, and the first few weeks involved terrible conditions of cold and poor nutrition, as well as the trauma of the uncertainty of the nuclear crisis and the fate of missing family members. There are no claims that radiation has killed anyone, but that the fear of radiation certainly did, an assertion that is difficult to verify, but far harder to refute. The fact that most of these people are living lives of internally displaced persons, domestic refugees, is another that the media picks up on in Japan, but with the dulled sense of a familiar story, regularly seen, but not at the forefront of thoughts, and certainly not worthy of the astonished outrage often expressed by overseas media.
The sense of acceptance of the familiar and yet extraordinary is even further extended when considering the cause of evacuation. The six reactors of the Dai-ichi plant are the subject of amazing recovery efforts, but after two years it remains astonishing what is known, what is unknown, and how little things have really changed. Reactors 1, 3, and 4 experienced major explosions (probably caused by hydrogen) that for 3 and 4 resulted in major structural damage to the reactor buildings. Each reactor (1-4) is thought to have melted down, one or more of them melting through the base of the containment chamber, all but reactor 2 were thought to have resulted in major exposure of the fuel rods, and major leaks of highly radioactive material through the three explosions and the consequent venting of reactors and the release of contaminated cooling water. The venting and explosions released radioactive material into the surrounding area, and across wide areas of Japan by the winds, which unfortunately shifted from westerly to southerly, and then north-easterly. The situation today is much better, but three reactors are still without shrouds, basic coverings to keep out the elements, reactor 4 is in the worst structural condition, with spent fuel rods still in position high above the active fuel rods and with the risk of them falling and damaging themselves or those below in case of another strong quake, of which there have been many, or a structural failure, and yet reactor 3 is worse. Nobody quite knows anything about reactor 3, not even the TEPCO staff, as it seems to be the most likely to have melted through the base of the actual containment vessel, to be leaking highly radioactive matter, and has been hardly touched in two years. This is because it is so highly radioactive that humans cannot work within hundreds of meters of the building, and robots cannot deal with the debris around it, so first one set of robots must remove the obstacles, while another group of robots waits to actually get inside the reactor.
This unknowing, and the expectations of Japan as a world leader in robotics to be able to do so much being confounded by the actuality of perpetually ponderous progress has astonished outsiders. How can Japan, the inventor of so many robots (that dance, walk up stairs, comfort the old) not have developed such a fundamental capacity? However, for the insider-outsider the more astonishing reaction has been the change in attitudes to the nuclear issue over two years. On 10th March 2011, there was no nuclear issue, or nuclear problem. Japan had nuclear power, it would have more, and that was the end of that news story. The government, media, and populace were ignorant and apathetic, if not actually in conspiratorial cahoots with the deeply incestuous ‘nuclear village’ of industry-academia-regulator. From 11th March, there were many major nuclear issues. In the following weeks the media, government, and the population at large decaled their folly, repented for their sins, and stated their determination to never repeat the mistakes of the past. Then in December 2012 a new government was formed that advocated a ‘re-assessment’ of the non-nuclear policy espoused by the previous DPJ administration, and now the widespread approach of government and public appears to be ‘nuclear power is required for Japan’s prosperity’. This may indeed be correct, but can surely not displace what had been previously experienced over the preceding two years. Nor should it be forgotten that the nuclear village has been exposed for building nuclear plants illegally on earthquake fault lines, for falsifying safety records, for compromising safety inspection procedures, and for spreading the jam of nuclear money around so far and wide that there is scarcely a fly or wasp around that hasn’t been stuck to the corporate supply at some time.
This is not to say that nuclear should be immediately scrapped. There isn’t the ability to do so, nor the will, nor the need. There also hasn’t been a body count. The radiation leaks cannot yet be shown to have killed anyone, and the same most certainly cannot be said for the equivalent pollution caused by burning carbon fuels, as the recent pm2.5 smog clouds around China and Japan illustrate, or the ‘fogs’ that afflicted Britain as recently as the 1950s, and one of which in London alone was seen as responsible for 4,000 deaths, and more than 10,000 illnesses, with a recent study increasing the fatality estimate to 12,000. However, there is concern that not enough monitoring is being undertaken. While much agricultural produce has been the subject of checks for the past year, the initial series of universal checks for children by Fukushima Prefecture were discontinued under central government pressure. Checks made on river and sea fish have been limited and widely spaced, as have those on radiation levels of river beds, mouths, and coastal areas, with much of the work being undertaken by universities and NGO due to the lack of progress being made by government ministries or local government offices. There have been limited cases of mutations in fish and butterflies, some of the more sensitive species to environmental changes, but it seems the national government does not place much emphasis upon this unique research opportunity, even if it could well ultimately prove that nuclear power is not as dangerous as its critics seem to believe.
Where Japan’s government (and the media echo) has expressed astonishment is in the relatively minor aspect of commemoration of the disaster held yesterday in Tokyo. Neither the Chinese nor Korean delegations attended despite being invited. The Chinese said they were punishing Japan for the breach of the 1972 Treaty that normalised their relations. Japan’s crime was to invite Taiwan, the country (or territory, depending upon your position) that donated more aid than any other after 3.11, to the ceremony this year, which it did not last year (PM Noda not wishing to antagonise Beijing). PM Abe made the gesture both in order to thank Taiwan, and to be nasty to Beijing, to show not only how important he believes the principle is, but also to show that he is ‘tough’ where Noda was weak. The odd one is the Korean absence, which has been blamed on a mistake. Did they leave the invitation on the mantelpiece? Go to the wrong venue? Get 3.11 mixed up with 9.11?
So, there is an astonishing lack of astonishment within Japan, maybe as there is the US concerning New Orleans (remember?), or in many countries concerning tsunami, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. However, the gap between those in Japan affected and the majority of those affected little or not at all is so great that the lack of attention devoted to it, and the concomitant stasis of government, is truly astonishing in a country that overtly prides itself on a sense of national identity, a caring society, and a culture that particularly respects the aged. There is a Respect for the Aged national holiday, in September, yet the item of news that followed the reports of the 3.11 anniversary events was that PM Abe plans to introduce a new national holiday. No, not respect for the victims, or tsunami remembrance, not even a safe-energy day. It is a ‘Japan Independence Restoration Day’, on 28th April, marking the day when Japan was freed from US-led occupation and became truly independent again (apart from Okinawa and the Amami and Ogasawara Islands, and the Northern Territories). Yes, that is a fine way to show respect on the day of the anniversary of the greatest disaster to hit Japan since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and shows what parts of Japan he most respects.
As most people in Japan wouldn’t say, ‘Astonishing!’
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