Category Archives: Japan

While driving around with Billy McMichael in Tohoku it emerged clearly that there’s no consistent policy as to whether property and former house owners will be allowed to rebuild their houses in areas that were swept by the Tsunami. The arguments for/against are clear, I suppose.

No, don’t allow rebuilding: It might have been a once-a-millennium Tsunami, but that’s just an average, so re-building should not be allowed so as not to raise the expectation that they state/municipality backs homeowners up when there are recurring disasters.

Yes, allow rebuilding: a) It’s private property, owners should be allows to do with it what they want to do.  b) It’s their home and returning to a rebuilt home may be an important part of grieving and recovery.

In Soma and Shinchi it seemed that rebuilding would not be permitted while in Nattori it seemed like there were preparations under way for rebuilding.

If there’s any rebuilding, will more protection against Tsunamis be built? 10-15 years ago, the Japanese government would have enthusiastically said, “Yes, let’s build a 40m dyke, that will show the waves!” and would have begun mixing the concrete. While the current government is not noticeably smarter with these kind of decisions, it has noticeably less financial leeway, so that is not an option. Improvements to the Tsunami warning system are being considered, however.

As an aside, my new prepaid phone that AU made me get as the old one was using a CDMA generation that is about to go out of service, has an earthquake warning function built in. No good, if you’re a prepaid (i.e. cheap) customer as prepaid doesn’t include any data traffic, but imagine the warning before a quake is about to strike. Presumably phones buzzing all around…

The other big questions regarding rebuilding is not about private residences, but about the economic bases of towns. Some of the towns on the coast were obviously highly dependent on specific industries or employers. Some fishing towns may have been deriving as much as 70% of the overall residents’ incomes from fishing (fishermen themselves, longshoremen, harbour operators, packers, freezers, shippers, etc.). With harbours entirely out of commission, many of the under- or un-employed are hiring on with the construction crews that are cleaning up Tsunami debris.

The situation in towns closer to the nuclear plants is even more tragic in that jobs have been lost as adding insult to the injury suffered from radiation.

Any agricultural or fishing products will obviously also suffer from the spectre of radiation for some years to come to the extent that consumers in Japan or elsewhere will be able to identify produce/products from Fukushima and Miyagi.

So, should towns, prefectures and the national government encourage re-building when many of the affected areas were already in demographic decline? What’s the alternative to encouraging economic rebuilding? If there was a serious push for green energy (unclear whether PM Noda will continue PM Kan’s recent anti-nuclear rhetoric), wouldn’t it be terrific if some of the r & d or production could be located in Tohoku? But will that really revive these towns on the coast?

I am contemplating some limited research to investigate the role that juku (as low capital-cost, high social integration potential for communities) might play in the revival of some rural towns. One of my main juku contacts in Tokyo lost his mother in the Tsunami while his older brothers still reside in Kesennuma. He is eagerly waiting for some local leadership to emerge (no one has any illusions about any of the DJP (or LDP for that matter) leaders becoming true leaders in the sense of charismatic visionaries) to (re)consider the future of these towns. I hope that juku might give me a little bit of an angle to examine the future development of Tohoku.

On Aug 18, I made my way to Fukushima City and then headed toward the cost with Billy McMichael from Fukushima Univ. After some hours of volunteering, Bill was kind enough to drive me to the cost to see some of the devastated communities there. I felt a bit uneasy as a bit of a “disaster tourist”, but I’ve spoken to several people from Tohoku since then and they are actually very eager for visitors to see the current situation which made me feel a bit better about visiting.

Before I even arrived in Fukushima, I noticed from the Shinkansen, especially in Koriyama, that many of the houses looked like they had blue tarp “band-aids” on their roof. I first couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, especially since I kept seeing more and more tarps weighed down by big rocks, but one particular house made the explanation quite obvious, i.e. individual roof tiles that had been dislodged in the earthquake or aftershocks and holes that were now covered up to keep the rain out. Billy confirmed that Koriyama had seen  much more severe shaking than Fukushima City, due to differences in the rockbed in their specific locations.

The next things I noticed in the drive toward Soma city that Japan really is quite jungly in the summer. I had not been here in July-August since the late 1990s, having simply avoided travel to Japan during this hot and humid season. With frequent visits in the late Fall and early Spring, my mental image of Japan had slowly become that of dry rice paddies or bare trees. Summer is not that by any stretch. I mention this because the verdant growth everywhere clearly has begun to cover up some of the earthquake/tsunami scars. This vegetation cover lends some areas an immediate air of normalcy as it requires at least a second glance to notice signs of the recent destruction.

I saw an unusual number of freshly planted sunflower beds. It appears that the fast weed-like growth of the sunflower means that it absorbs some of the cesium out of the ground (can anyone speak to this with any expertise?), but I wonder what will happen to the dry plants at the end of the Fall. Certainly no dumping of radioactive sunflowers in my backyard!

When we came closer to the coast in Soma (some 15km or so from the radiation exclusion zone), some大 震災 damages became more visible quickly. It was very obvious quickly that a massive clean-up effort is under way on the Tohoku coast. Backhoes dotting the landscape as far as the eye can see in affected areas. Clearly, construction and clean-up crews are busy and this must be an economic relief as it also must offer employment opportunities to local residents who may have lost their livelihood in the 大震災. For example, towns that are within commuting distance from the No. 1 nuclear plant may be suffering from the after-effects of the 大震災 and the on-going nuclear crisis, but their harbours as well as the many jobs associated with the two large nuclear complexes in Fukushima have also been eliminated.

Most of the clean-up effort currently seems to be directed at scraping debris together into large piles for later disposal. In residential areas near the cost, this means that all that remains are foundations. Having visited coastal towns like Soma and Shinchi in the past, I can imagine what these residential areas may have looked like before the 大震災, but entire streets with mere foundations in place certainly do not look like vibrant coastal towns.

In most areas, there are often individual structures that remain standing, though typically with broken windows or otherwise damaged. I can only imagine that specifics of topography may have redirected Tsunami water masses away from such structures to allow them to remain standing. Clearly, some houses have chunks taken out of them where something else must have smashed into them.

The closer to the shore and the further up north, the more visible debris and damage I saw. We ended up driving past Sendai to Natori (名取) where the clean-up is in full swing but hasn’t progressed as far as further South. There are still lots of boats and other debris in rice patties and some neighbourhoods are still standing in their destroyed states.

Near the Ocean in Natori (名取)

名取, August 2011

One of the more startling visual clues to the power of the tsunami is the highly compacted cars that can be found everywhere. The car in the picture was a ミニカー as made clear by the yellow plates, but that refers to the size of the engine, not necessarily of the car body.

Driving toward Sendai we saw lots of stretches of dry, salty rice paddies with the earth cracking is is usually seen in pictures of droughts. The contrast with the jungly vegetation everywhere else was particularly stark in these areas.

Clearly, the on-going clean-up and reconstruction on the Tohoku coast will take years. What long-term damage has been caused to the local population beyond their immediate material losses, we’ll only likely know in decades.