Two Years and Counting

There are about 315,000 people living in temporary housing today, two years after the earthquake, tsunami, and multiple nuclear power plant meltdown spread destruction across Tohoku and fear even further. I've seen some of that temporary housing, and it's aptly named. While far better than the school gym or public hall alternatives they replace--and there are still people living in emergency, not temporary, "housing" as far away as Saitama--they're neither fancy nor inexpensive to build, as you can see in Phil Brasor's and Masako Tsubuku's article in their Yen for Living blog. Two years is a long time to live in cramped, mostly pre-fabricated places, thrown into communities very different from those in which you've lived most of your life, with little more charm than the refugee camps they are.

There are also many areas at least partially reliant on volunteer donations of food, water, and labor, such as the Minami-Soma area with which I'm most familiar.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has promised to speed up reconstruction, but he's also pretty clearly aiming at restarting the nuclear power plants around Japan as part of his "Abenomics" policy. My best guess is that the former will be viewed skeptically and the latter disdainfully at best, particularly among the 57,000 people who have not yet returned to Fukushima, as well as among those who live there but cannot return to, or rebuild, or in some cases ever even approach their homes. Abe's Liberal Democratic Party made lots of promises during its decades-long run as the ruling party, and has been an integral part of the "nuclear village" which through arrogance, denial, misinformation, mismanagement, naivete, falsification, cover-ups, and outright lies was largely responsible for the position in which, for example, the one-time residents of Futaba, Fukushima--now living in a defunct high school in Kazo, Saitama, find themselves.

That's the same LDP whose party politics of obstructionism is at least partly to blame for the delay in reconstruction. Yes, I know that they were then the opposition party. I also know that "reaching across the aisle" and "consensus building" and "keeping the greater good of the citizens" only really plays in speeches, not in the real life of Nagatacho. I consider myself a cynical realist, and I suspect there are a lot of people in Tohoku who share my view of politicians and--especially--bureaucrats, but the victims of the disaster deserve considerably more common decency from the government, even though based on experience they have precious little reason to expect it, particularly from the LDP.

The right to live in temporary housing has been extended for another year. Few if any of the residents have much real hope of being able to find better housing anytime soon, even if they can somehow gather the funds with which to do it. There is plenty of determination still, and plenty of tough people committed to somehow getting along, getting better if at all possible. There are not a lot of reasons to harbor hope, and plenty of reasons to despair...which makes their determination in the face of relentless stress all the more admirable.

Much of the debris from the disaster has been hauled away. "Much" is not "all" by any means, however: there are still ships perched atop seawalls, vehicles rusting in the middle of what used to be rice paddies, gutted shells of buildings, vast areas scoured of all but foundations, and fast-filling "temporary" storage spaces for trash, not a little of which is contaminated to various degrees by radiation. An NHK documentary recently showed contaminated topsoil and debris being disposed of by being wrapped in vinyl sheets and "temporarily" buried in private gardens, for lack of space elsewhere.There are insufficient resources of people, equipment, and money for clearance, much less rebuilding. There is also very little progress on finding space for and building facilities--even interim, much less permanent ones--for storage of more seriously radiation-contaminated debris.

Nevertheless, in many of the devastated areas people are working to rebuild their businesses and provide jobs for themselves and their neighbors. The efforts are often hampered by difficulty in attracting labor and investment.They are also hampered, much less forgivably, by red tape of all sorts, often exacerbated by bureaucratic turf wars and/or inertia.

The excellent Shisaku blog has a collection of useful, and at least to me disheartening, statistics. I sincerely hope that both he and I will have much better news to report at this time next year. Meanwhile, I will continue to do what I can to help. I wish that it were more, and I really wish that the government could be relied upon to match their promises with swift and decisive action.

It has been two years, and the Tohoku victims are still counting. It's a pity that they can't count on their government.