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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