The moment that Japan remembers as 3/11 was not one disaster but three—an earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear meltdown. And then there was the repercussion that nobody expected in the rush of stoicism and sacrifice that so impressed the world. As evidence piled up of government failures—cover-ups, bureaucratic paralysis, an industry that disguised honest assessments of the risks—Japan’s confidence in the political establishment that has created its modern miracle collapsed: the “fourth disaster” of March 11,” as one commentator puts it.
In Tokyo, there was a memorial service, of course, with the emperor standing in black at the National Theater. But there were smaller events, too. In Rikuzentakata, the city that lost more people than any in the prefecture, a Buddhist priest in a purple robe rang the bell at a temple overlooking an empty slab where houses once stood. In Sendai, the city launched fireworks—twenty thousand of them—one for each person who died. In Onagawa, they simply stood and faced the sea.
At moments like this, we find comfort and order in some of the accounting: The stores that reopened, the tax incentives available for rebuilding. And it can be inspiring: Even a year later, more than three quarters of a million dollars in donations still arrive from around Japan every day. In other cases, we run from the numbers. Officially, the earthquake and wall of water that ran across Japan’s northeast coast killed nearly sixteen thousand people. Another three thousand three hundred are still classified as “unaccounted for.” To this day, members of the police and coast guard are still engaged in a kind of pantomime, combing the rivers and shorelines for bodies that nobody but the families imagine can be found.
One of the more amazing numbers involved is zero. That’s how many people have died so far of radiation, and that’s not because it’s not dangerous. It’s because of luck and sacrifice. People were more afraid than they needed to be, but they can be forgiven for that because the engineers were more cavalier than they should have been. A year later, the effects of radiation are most readily measurable in mental health. Scientists still don’t know whether the increased radiation received by hundreds of thousands of citizens will cause more cancer (though, even if it does, it will be virtually undetectable, lost in the cancers that forty per cent of us will contract in our lifetimes anyway). But the psychological effects are vast and obvious —an “anguished uncertainty” in the words of physicist and historian Spencer Weart. The combined effects of stigma, dislocation, and fear of the unknown are “a recipe for social isolation, anxiety, depression, psychosomatic medical problems, reckless behavior, even suicide.” As of today, three hundred and forty thousand people still live as refugees inside their own borders, either in chilly temporary housing (“huts,” as one local official calls them) or in hotels or with relatives. Forty per cent of them lost their jobs or sources of income. In the twelve-mile radius around the plant, scientists are still trying to figure out how to decontaminate the land, but one number they’ve settled on is this: It will take forty years to decommission the Fukushima operation.
Meanwhile, Japan’s public broadcaster held a six-hour “concert for the future” with popular musicians and idol groups including the all-girl band AKB48 and boy group SMAP. There was a far smaller event as well, but telling in its own way: The rock group called The Frying Dutchman, out of Kyoto, planned a protest concert in Okinawa and urged anyone who couldn’t make it to show solidarity by playing the band’s anti-nuclear song “human ERROR.”
The Fukushima meltdowns shattered trust in nuclear power in Japan and elsewhere, and it’s not clear how much of that will recover. For the moment, there is an unsettling dynamic in the making: As public opinion turns against nuclear energy, the only places left to develop it are places that are less sensitive to public opinion—exactly the kinds of political systems that are least equipped to respond to technical and public-health crises. Nuclear becomes the pride of governments ill-equipped to handle it. After the Fukushima meltdowns, China was one of the first countries to freeze its nuclear program and order a comprehensive review. It has taken a year, and very little information has come out. But according to a new Global Nuclear Materials Security Index, China still ranks twenty-ninth among a group of thirty-two nuclear nations in terms of security and transparency. Senior energy and nuclear-industry officials are undeterred. In recent weeks, several financial newspapers have reported that the ban on the approval of new nuclear reactors could be lifted as soon as next month.
Original Article
Source: new yorker
Author: Evan Osnos
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