I can hardly believe it’s been a whole year.
Japan is still dealing with the aftereffects of the 9.0 earthquake and 130-foot-high tsunami that wracked havoc on the northeastern region (Tohoku) one year ago, and with a nuclear reactor that is still very much not under control. As people in Tokyo and in other areas of the country return to some level of normalcy, hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the disasters are still living in cramped temporary housing. Of course, the reconstruction efforts in Tohoku are ongoing, yet without a concrete, clear vision with how to proceed (and the issue of whether to rebuild on ground that was overwhelmed by the tsunami) and with radiation lingering that refuses to just be scrubbed away, the recovery process seems painfully slow.
“They have done a great job of neatly piling the debris and tucking it under tarps, but otherwise I see little progress,” says Jeff Kingston, head of the Asian Studies program at Temple University’s Tokyo Campus. “Partly it’s political paralysis and partly bureaucratic indecision about what to rebuild, how to consolidate, and the problem of disposing of that rubbish.”
While bureaucratic malaise hampers efforts for recovery, one important thing has changed – the Japanese people no longer trust the government (whose “safety culture” led to contingency plans for worst-case scenarios being kept under a heavy veil of secrecy) or big business (like Tepco, the electric company that owns the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plants that propagated the “safe” myth about nuclear power.)
March 11, 2011, was a transformational moment for the Japanese people. It not only shattered the public myth of absolute safety that had been nurtured by the Japanese nuclear-power industry and its proponents. It also destroyed Japan’s self-image as a “safe and secure nation” that grew out of the country’s pacifism since World War II.
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Our officials and politicians have long emphasized safety in small doses, and in the process may have inadvertently sacrificed the security of the nation at large. Any drills for a nuclear emergency were meticulously designed to avoid giving any impression that an accident could possibly progress to the severity of a meltdown, and municipalities were discouraged from taking action to anticipate the compounded risks that would be involved in the event of an earthquake, for example.
After all, why stir up unnecessary anxiety when such contingencies simply are unthinkable?
The past year has seen a groundswell in the number of Japanese citizens getting involved in grassroots-level activism, with women from Fukushima demanding better protection for children from radiation, NPOs taking up the task of monitoring radiation levels all around the country, and many large-scale anti-nuclear protests (that went largely unreported in the press-club-controlled mainstream press.)
The blogger Our Man in Abiko created a charity e-book in just a few weeks, using Twitter to gather stories about the disaster, and gave all proceeds to the Japan Red Cross. As of today, 2:46 Aftershocks (aka “Quakebook“) has raised US$39,848 and 707,180 yen. Our Man’s has just released Reconstructing 3/11, a look back at what’s happened in Japan in the year since the disasters in Japan. The contributors for Reconstructing 3/11 are being paid, but many are giving their part of the proceeds to charity.
Speaking of charity, It’s Not Just Mud is an NPO working to rehabilitate the Tohoku region.
The New York Times has an interactive slideshow up showing places the day of the tsunami and a year later.
The Asahi Shimbun has a series of articles featuring the people shown in widely released photos taken in the days after the quake and where they are today.
