The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (30 page)

Later I met Yoshiteru Murosaki, the director of the National Research Institute of Fire and Disaster, who told me that one of the reasons for the many tsunami deaths was that a lot of people sought refuge in places that would have been safe in the last several tsunamis. But this one was much higher, as high as the 1896 tsunami, if not quite as high as the monster waves of 869 are said to have been. Others trusted the seawalls to protect them, but the water overtopped them and kept coming. Roughly two-thirds of the dead were over sixty, people less able or willing to evacuate. (In Hurricane Katrina the elderly made up a disproportionate percentage of the dead for similar reasons, and the same is true of many disasters.) Murosaki told me that the way to deal with tsunamis is to have good evacuation procedures rather than to avoid building on the seacoast. Twenty thousand died here, but in countries without building codes, without sirens and evacuation drills and awareness, the number of dead might have been many times higher. Nevertheless, many communities are retreating from the tsunami zone and rebuilding on higher ground.

That much can be said for the foresight and prudence of the Japanese government. Then there’s Fukushima Daiichi, the six nuclear reactors that were also battered by the tsunami: not by the highest waves, but by waves high enough to overtop the little protection that existed and to flood the basement where the emergency generators were fecklessly located—the generators that instantly became useless. Thus the nuclear power plant was completely disabled as no such plant had been before. As Arnie Gundersen, an energy consultant, put it,

There were numerous red flags indicating potential problems for anyone following Tepco [the Tokyo Electric Power Company] during the past
decade. Crucial vulnerabilities in the Fukushima Daiichi reactor design; substantial governance issues and weak management characterized by major frauds and cover-ups; collusion and loose regulatory supervision; as well as understanding but ignoring earthquake and tsunami warnings, were key ingredients of the March 2011 disaster. Moreover, all these crucial vulnerabilities had been publicly highlighted years before the disaster occurred.

One of the casualties of the disaster was the relationship between the people and the government. Almost everyone I spoke to, even the most mild-mannered, said they no longer trusted the government, and they said it bluntly, or angrily, or with a deep sense of betrayal. Activists and radicals—with whom I also spoke—didn’t have a lot of trust to lose. But for many people, recognition of the initial failures and cover-ups—the secrecy, lies, and tolerance of contamination, the prioritization of business over protection of the vulnerable—has meant a great and terrible rupture. “We have to fear properly,” Murosaki said. “Not too much, but enough. What is proper fear?”

Governments fear their people. They fear we will exercise our power to change them, and they fear we will panic. The first is a realistic if undemocratic fear, since changing them is our right; the second is a self-aggrandizing fantasy in which attempts to alter the status quo are seen as madness, hysteria, mob rule. They often assume that we can’t handle the data in a crisis and so prefer to withhold crucial information, as the Pennsylvania government did in 1979 at the time of the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown and the Soviet government did during the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. Panic is what you see in disaster movies, where people run about doing foolish things, impeding evacuation and rescue, behaving like sheep. But governments and officials are not very good shepherds. During the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007, the university authorities locked down the administrative offices and warned their own families, while withholding information from the campus community. The Bush administration lied about the toxicity of the air near Ground Zero in New York after 9/11, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk for the sake of a good PR
front and a brisk return to business as usual. Disasters often crack open fissures between government and civil society.

Around the time of the anniversary it emerged that, early on, the prime minister had looked at the possibility of evacuating Tokyo. But you cannot evacuate a city of 35 million densely packed people. Where would they go? It would have been a crisis on the scale of the Second World War for Japan and a huge blow to the international economy. A couple of weeks after the anniversary it was revealed that the most damaged Fukushima reactor had nothing like the water-cooling levels it was thought to have and was in fact hotter at that point than it had been at the time of the accident. This is the worst disaster the country has faced since the end of the war, and it occasioned the first public speech by a Japanese emperor since Hirohito announced defeat on August 15, 1945, less than a week after the second American nuclear bomb exploded over Nagasaki.

Emperor Akihito, Hirohito’s son, made his first public broadcast on March 16, 2011. At age seventy-eight and recovering from heart surgery, he made his second broadcast in Tokyo for the anniversary. Along with an audience of media personnel and local officials, with bereaved families in the front rows, I watched the feed in the huge theater of the International Center in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi Prefecture and the largest city in the disaster region. The stage held an enormous triple bier of white flowers, before which a huge screen dropped down to show the stage in Tokyo, with its own elaborate array of white flowers. The empress was dressed in a traditional kimono, her eyebrows raised into a single line of perpetual distress, next to the emperor in an elegant dark suit. They bowed deeply before the flowers and the inscription—“spirit of the victims”—and the emperor spoke. “As this earthquake and tsunami caused the nuclear power plant accident,” he said, “those living in the designated danger zone lost their homes and livelihoods and had to leave the places where they used to live. In order for them to live there again safely, we have to overcome the problem of radioactive contamination, which is a formidable task.” This passage was censored by the networks when the speech was broadcast.

Overcoming the problem of contamination remains a formidable task. The government’s preferred approach has been to play down the problem
and call for team spirit. With radiation present in the vicinity of the nuclear reactors, the official exposure safety limit was at first raised to twenty times its previous level. When no one wanted vegetables from Fukushima, the Ministry of Education decided to buy them up and put them in school lunches. This put the burden on parents and children to opt out, not an easy thing to do in a society that values harmony and conformity. Nicely dressed mothers in Tokyo met with the heads of their municipalities to demand that school meals be tested; they were assured that everything was fine. In Fukushima just over half of the fifty-nine municipalities test for radiation in school lunches, some before the children sit down to eat, some afterward. Whether or not they change the menu when the levels are too high is not clear. Several municipalities complained that they didn’t have the measuring equipment, and citizens have sometimes obtained the equipment themselves. People often find that the government is obstructive or useless in disasters and do much of the crucial work themselves as members of ad hoc or nongovernmental organizations. In Japan measuring radiation is now one of those activities.

An old man in Tokyo proposed that the elderly should volunteer to consume the rice from Fukushima, since they are less susceptible to the effects of radiation, but in November it was still being prepared for school lunches in Fukushima Prefecture. There, notices to evacuate were given late or not at all, and, by stopping short of declaring many contaminated areas unsafe, the government has avoided the burden of compensation for residents, who of course have no buyers for their homes. Even so, more than 63,000 people have evacuated the vicinity of the plant. Like the people who fled Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the nuclear bombs were dropped in 1945, Fukushima evacuees feel they must conceal their origins when they move elsewhere. I also heard about a teacher who was ostracized by his colleagues for expressing a desire to leave. Fear of ostracism sometimes outweighs fear of radiation.

Disasters in the West are often compounded by the belief that human beings instantly revert to savagery in a calamity, with the result that the focus shifts from rescue to law enforcement and the protection of property, as it did recently in Haiti and New Orleans, and in San Francisco after the
1906 earthquake. In Japan the greater problem seems to be conformity. In Fukushima, children who refused to drink the milk in their school lunches were called to the front of their classes and humiliated by their teachers. “They were treated like traitors during the war,” a woman said in a video clip I saw on television. (She was telling the story to the chief cabinet minister and the trade and industry minister, who chuckled in response.) A mother I met in Sendai was told by the in-laws she lived with that she could leave if she wanted to, but her husband and child were not going anywhere. Leaving meant leaving the group.

Seigo Kinoshita, a sixty-seven-year-old evacuee in Iwate Prefecture, told me in the small parlor of his temporary housing that he was tired of people saying
ganbare
, an exhortation that roughly translates as “do your best.” Even the milk box next to his front door had a sticker on it that said “ganbare” and, in English, “Never give up!” It’s hard to be lectured by your milk box. There were four calendars on the walls of the tiny room in which we talked, maybe because they were the only decorations he had, maybe to make time pass faster or express how greatly it weighed on him in the little terraced house on a roadside high above the wiped-out town of Rikuzentakata. He had initially taken refuge in a chilly Buddhist temple with three hundred others, including eighty children from a daycare facility, not all of whom had parents to claim them when the roads opened three days later. Now he was a displaced person.

Some of the most powerful antinuclear demonstrations since March 2011 have been orchestrated and dominated by mothers. Many disaster-zone families are emotionally or physically divided, since women tend to be more concerned about the radiation, and often it is the women and children who have fled, leaving the husband/father behind because his job ties him down or because he worries less about his health. On November 1, 1961, women in more than sixty American cities demonstrated against nuclear weapons, and for years Women Strike for Peace remained one of the most extraordinary activist organizations in the United States. The atmospheric nuclear detonations—dozens a year between 1945 and 1963, mostly in Nevada—were contaminating breast milk and leading to fears about children’s health. Women Strike for Peace played an important role
in bringing about the end of above-ground testing and, later, in the creation of the anti–Vietnam War movement. After Fukushima, too, breast milk was contaminated, meaning the most elemental act of nurture could be deadly. You can clean up after an earthquake or hurricane but you can’t see what may be inside you, ready to harm the children you may one day have—that is terrifying at first, then demoralizing. Often in disasters people feel tremendous solidarity with all the others who have undergone the same upheaval and loss, but in a situation like this, it isn’t clear who has sustained what damage and when, if ever, it will be over.

I met a graduate student in Sendai who told me that one of the major problems survivors reported was the presence of restless ghosts: the spirits of the dead that were still hanging around in need of comfort and propitiation. Right after the disaster and on Obon, the day of the dead in Japan, huge bonfires were lit on the beaches for the ghosts to find their way to shore. In the Tōhoku region, my friend Ramona Handel-Bajema co-directs large-scale relief with AmeriCares, an independent humanitarian relief organization, and I drove out with her to see a small garden project that was not yet planted—mid-March is still wintry in northern Japan. Gardens are one way of restoring people’s lives, particularly those of the elderly with time on their hands. Ramona told me about people tending gardens in the foundations of their destroyed houses. To see “cabbages growing where their bedroom once was” represented a consolation and rebirth of sorts. She also told me about a community she works with where the schoolteachers fell into an argument about evacuating the elementary school. One teacher took a handful of students to safety and the rest were drowned. Another of Ramona’s projects is taking care of the older siblings of these drowned children, whose parents are lost in mourning, and helping them to enjoy the natural world again.

The priest in charge of a Buddhist temple in Sendai showed me how the stands of tall, thin pine trees that had been planted along the coast had been shattered into spears by the tsunami. He was now working on a scheme to turn the huge mountains of rubble into levees of sorts on which mixed forests of native trees might be planted. While many were preoccupied with the suffering in the present, he was thinking about preventing
the next calamity, and pressed on me DVDs of a tree-planting cartoon superhero’s adventures in English and in Japanese. In Sendai I met other Buddhist priests and—a rarity there—a Christian priest, all working as counselors and social organizers dealing with the trauma: one with the Philosophy Café, where people could come and talk about their experiences; another with Café du Monk (
monku
means “complaint” in Japanese). “The only thing I can do is stand beside people in grief—focus on listening,” one of them said, but the ecumenical group was also working on more practical projects to do with displacement and housing, and with measuring radiation in food and breast milk.

Before I left Japan I went to Hiroshima and met two
hibakusha
, survivors of the atomic explosion. Both men are now in their eighties. They had been at middle school in that era when students were taken out of school to do manual labor for the war effort; neither had been ready to talk about what had happened to them until a couple of years ago, when their sense of posterity’s need to have this information finally outweighed their desire to leave the horror behind. It can take a very long time to come to terms with catastrophe—a year isn’t very long when it comes to knowing how a society will remember, regenerate, and transform itself.