Japan 8.8 earthquake & Tsunami

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People march on the street during an anti nuclear demonstration in Tokyo on June 11, 2011. Thousands of people staged anti-nuclear rallies and demonstrations in Tokyo and elsewhere as radiation continued to leak from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, some 220 kilometres (140 miles) northeast of the capital.​

 

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People observe a moment of silence at 14.46, the same time of the earthquake that occurred on March 11, overlooking the destroyed town, on June 11, 2011 in Minamisanriku, Miyagi, Japan. The Japanese government has been struggling to deal with the earthquake and tsunami, as well as the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The fears of an outbreak of an infectious disease are mounting due to the approaching humid rainy season and delays in the clearing the debris.​

 

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Masashi Chiba, 63, prays for his daugther who worked at Minamisanriku City Hall Disaster Prevention Center and lost her life in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami on June 11, 2011 in Minamisanriku, Miyagi, Japan.​

 

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In this combo of two photos, a ship swept away by tsunami sits amid debris-covered residential area March 12, 2011, left, while the ship stays in the same position in the area getting cleaned up June 3, 2011 in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan. Japan marks three month since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami Saturday, June 11, 2011.​

 

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In this combo of two panoramic photos, cherry blossoms are in full bloom along Kamiyama River with damaged cars and debris still scattered in the water April 28, 2011, top, while the river is almost cleaned up June 6, 2011 in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan. Japan marks three month since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami Saturday, June 11, 2011​

 

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In this combo of two photos, an overturned car sits on the rooftop of a damaged building after being swept away by tsunami March 18, 2011, left, and the car still stays in the same position on the building while its surrounding area is almost cleaned up June 3, 2011 in Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan. Japan marks three month since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami Saturday, June 11, 2011.​

 

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In this combo of two photos, tsunami waves surge over a residential area March 11, 2011, top, and power shovels are in reconstruction work in the same area June 3, 2011 in Natori, Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan.​

 

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In this combo of two photos, a tsunami-beached ship lies among debris in Kesennuma, Miyagi prefecture, northeastern Japan, on March 13, 2011, days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami hit the area, top, and the same area, bottom, with the ship remained there as photographed on June 3, 2011.​

 

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In this combo of two photos, tsunami survivors walk with plastic containers and kettles to carry drinking water through a street blocked by a fallen tank and other debris March 14, 2011, top, and only one damaged house, center, stands along the same street June 3, 2011 in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan​

 

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(Left) March 12 (Right) June 3​

 

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Debris from Japanese tsunami headed for Pacific 'garbage patch'
Millions of tons of debris washed out to sea from north-east Japan by the March 11 tsunami has embarked on a 10-year circuit of the Pacific, endangering shipping and wildlife.

Japanese police search for bodies of victims of the earthquake and tsunami, Miyagi Prefecture Photo: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex Features
By Julian Ryall in Tokyo
7:00AM BST 23 Jun 2011
The French environmental group Robin des Bois estimates that a large percentage of the 25 million tons of debris created by the magnitude 9 earthquake and the tsunami that it triggered has been sucked out to sea.

After being caught in the swirling currents for a number of years, it will congregate into two floating "garbage patches," one in the east and the other in the west of the Pacific.

The debris includes damaged fishing boats, cars, shipping containers and the contents of thousands of houses, including refrigerators, along with plastics, wood, rubber and items made of PVC.

Many of the vehicles will discharge their oil and fuel, creating numerous spills, while containers from industrial facilities will leak pesticides, chemicals and a wide range of other pollutants, the organisation said.

The waste will move at a speed of between 5 and 10 miles a day, catching the North Pacific Current and crossing the ocean in as little as 12 months.

Off the coast of California, debris is expected to circulate either north or south, taking either the Alaskan or North Equatorial currents back to the western reaches of the ocean.

Much is predicted to end up caught in the vortex of the Eastern Garbage Patch, which is estimated to measure between 270,000 square miles and 5.8 million square miles.

"Over time plastic debris eventually fragments into tiny particles creating 'plastic plankton' or 'microplastic,' which is a serious long-term concern, particularly for marine food webs." the organisation said.

 

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‘Safety Myth’ Left Japan Ripe for Nuclear Crisis
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
SHIKA, Japan — Near a nuclear power plant facing the Sea of Japan, a series of exhibitions in a large public relations building here extols the virtues of the energy source with some help from “Alice in Wonderland.”

“It’s terrible, just terrible,” the White Rabbit says in the first exhibit. “We’re running out of energy, Alice.”

A Dodo robot figure, swiveling to address Alice and the visitors to the building, declares that there is an “ace” form of energy called nuclear power. It is clean, safe and renewable if you reprocess uranium and plutonium, the Dodo says.

“Wow, you can even do that!” Alice says of nuclear power. “You could say that it’s optimal for resource-poor Japan!”

Over several decades, Japan’s nuclear establishment has devoted vast resources to persuade the Japanese public of the safety and necessity of nuclear power. Plant operators built lavish, fantasy-filled public relations buildings that became tourist attractions. Bureaucrats spun elaborate advertising campaigns through a multitude of organizations established solely to advertise the safety of nuclear plants. Politicians pushed through the adoption of government-mandated school textbooks with friendly views of nuclear power.

The result was the widespread adoption of the belief — called the “safety myth” — that Japan’s nuclear power plants were absolutely safe. Japan single-mindedly pursued nuclear power even as Western nations distanced themselves from it.

The belief helps explains why in the only nation to have been attacked with atomic bombs, the Japanese acceptance of nuclear power was so strong that the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl barely registered. Even with the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the reaction against nuclear power has been much stronger in Europe and the United States than in Japan itself.

As the Japanese continue to search for answers to the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, some are digging deep into the national psyche and examining a national propensity to embrace a belief now widely seen as irrational. Because of this widespread belief in Japanese plants’ absolute safety, plant operators and nuclear regulators failed to adopt proper safety measures and advances in technology, like emergency robots, experts and government officials acknowledge.

“In Japan, we have something called the ‘safety myth,’ ” Banri Kaieda, who runs the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which oversees the nuclear industry, said at a news conference at an International Atomic Energy Agency meeting in Vienna on Monday. “It’s a fact that there was an unreasonable overconfidence in the technology of Japan’s nuclear power generation.”

As a result, he said, the nuclear industry’s “thinking about safety had a poor foundation.”

Japan’s government has concentrated its propaganda and educational efforts on creating such national beliefs in the past, most notably during World War II. The push for nuclear power underpinned postwar Japan’s focus on economic growth and its dream of greater energy independence. But as the carefully fostered belief in nuclear safety has dissipated in the three months after the March 11 disaster, Japanese are increasingly blaming the nuclear establishment for Fukushima. In a politically apathetic country, tens of thousands have regularly held protests against nuclear power. Young Japanese have used social media to organize and publicize demonstrations that have been virtually ignored by major newspapers and television networks.

A song, “It Was Always a Lie,” has become an anthem at the protests and a vehicle for Japanese anger on the Internet. Its author, a famous singer named Kazuyoshi Saito, wrote it by changing the lyrics of a love ballad, “I Always Liked You,” that he composed last year for a commercial for Shiseido, the cosmetics giant. Mr. Saito’s performance of the song, surreptitiously uploaded on YouTube and other sites, has gone viral.

“If you walk across this country, you’ll find 54 nuclear reactors/School textbooks and commercials told us they were safe,” the song goes.

“It was always a lie, it’s been exposed after all/It was really a lie that nuclear power is safe.”

Caught Unprepared

In the days after a giant tsunami knocked out Fukushima Daiichi’s cooling system, the prime minister’s office and the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, the plant’s operator, wrestled over whether to inject cooling seawater into the reactor buildings to prevent catastrophic meltdowns, and then over how to do it.

With radiation levels too high for workers to approach the reactors, the Japanese authorities floundered. They sent police trucks mounted with water cannons — equipment designed to disperse rioters — to spray water into the reactor buildings. Military helicopters flew over the buildings, dropping water that was scattered off course by strong winds, in a “performance, a kind of circus” that was aimed more at reassuring an increasingly alarmed Japanese population and American government, said Kenichi Matsumoto, an aide to Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

What became clear was that Japan lacked some of the basic hardware to respond to a nuclear crisis and, after initial resistance, had to look abroad for help. For a country proud of its technology, the low point occurred on March 31 when it had to use a 203-foot-long water pump — shipped from China, an export market for Japanese nuclear technology — to inject 90 tons of fresh water into the No. 1 reactor building. But perhaps more than anything else, the absence of one particular technology was deeply puzzling: emergency robots.

Japan, after all, is the world’s leader in robotics. It has the world’s largest force of mechanized workers. Its humanoid robots can walk and run on two feet, sing and dance, and even play the violin. But where were the emergency robots at Fukushima?

The answer is that the operators and nuclear regulators, believing that accidents would never occur, steadfastly opposed the introduction of what they regarded as unnecessary technology.

“The plant operators said that robots, which would premise an accident, were not needed,” said Hiroyuki Yoshikawa, 77, an engineer and a former president of the University of Tokyo, Japan’s most prestigious academic institution. “Instead, introducing them would inspire fear, they said. That’s why they said that robots couldn’t be introduced.”

Even before the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, Mr. Yoshikawa, a robotics expert, and other researchers began building emergency robots capable of responding to a nuclear accident, eventually producing a prototype called Mooty. The robots were resistant to high levels of radiation and capable of surmounting mounds of rubble.

But the robots never made it into production, forcing Japan, in the aftermath of Fukushima, to rely on an emergency shipment of robots from iRobot, a company in Bedford, Mass., more famous for manufacturing the Roomba vacuum. On Friday, Tepco deployed the first Japanese-made robot, which was retrofitted recently to handle nuclear accidents, but workers had to retrieve it after it malfunctioned.

The rejection of robots, Mr. Yoshikawa said, was part of the industry’s overall reluctance to improve maintenance and invest in new technologies.

“That’s why the safety myth wasn’t just an empty slogan,” said Mr. Yoshikawa, now the director general of the Center for Research and Development Strategy at the Japan Science and Technology Agency. “It was a kind of mind-set that rejected progress through the introduction of new technology.”

Entering a New Age

The deliberate effort to rally Japanese behind nuclear power can be traced to the beginning of the atomic age, scholars and experts say.

In August 1945, Yasuhiro Nakasone, a young naval officer who would become one of postwar Japan’s most powerful prime ministers, was stationed in western Japan.

“I saw the nuclear mushroom cloud over Hiroshima,” Mr. Nakasone wrote in an essay in the 1960s. “At that moment, I sensed that the next age was the nuclear age.”

For many Japanese like Mr. Nakasone, nuclear power became a holy grail — a way for Japan, whose lack of oil and other natural resources had led to World War II and defeat, to become more energy independent. The mastery of nuclear power would also open the possibility of eventually developing nuclear weapons, a subject that Japan secretly studied when Mr. Nakasone was defense minister in 1970.

It was precisely because of nuclear power’s possible link to nuclear arms and its close ties to the United States that left-leaning politicians, academics and intellectuals became fierce opponents. As a countermeasure, proponents of nuclear power stressed its absolute safety, so that each side struck extreme positions, a standoff that lasts to this day.

The nuclear establishment — led by Tepco among the utilities and the Ministry of Economy — spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and educational programs emphasizing the safety of nuclear plants. The ministry’s division responsible for nuclear power has budgeted $12 million this year for those programs, said Takanobu Sugimoto, a division spokesman. Mr. Sugimoto said he “regretted” that the ministry might have “stressed only” the plants’ safety.

The government and the utilities encouraged the creation of many organizations that propagated the message of safety. One of the oldest, the Japan Atomic Energy Relations Organization, receives 40 percent of its financing from two ministries that oversee nuclear power and 60 percent from Japan’s plant operators. In addition to producing information promoting nuclear power, the organization sends nuclear power experts to speak at secondary schools and colleges, at no cost.

Mitsuhiro Yokote, 67, the executive managing director of the organization and a former nuclear engineer at the Kansai Electric Power Company, acknowledged that the experts conveyed the message that nuclear plants were absolutely safe. Mr. Yokote said he “regretted” that his organization had contributed to the safety myth.

In a country where people tend to reflexively trust the government, assurances about the safety of Japan’s plants were enough to reassure even those at greatest risk. In Oma, a fishing town in northern Japan where a plant is currently under construction, Chernobyl made no impression on local residents considering the plant back in the 1980s.

“What could we do but believe what the government told us?” said Masaru Takahashi, 67, a member of a fishing union in Oma. “We were told that they were absolutely safe.”

A Public Relations Drive

After Chernobyl, the nuclear establishment made sure that Japanese kept believing in safety.

The plant operators built or renovated the public relations buildings — called “P.R. buildings” — attached to their plants. Before Chernobyl, the buildings were simple facilities intended to appeal to “adult men interested in technical matters,” said Noriya Sumihara, an anthropologist at Tenri University who has researched the facilities. Male guides wearing industrial uniforms took visitors around exhibits consisting mostly of wall panels.

But after Chernobyl, the facilities were transformed into elaborate theme parks geared toward young mothers, the group that research showed was most worried about nuclear plants and radiation, Mr. Sumihara said. Women of childbearing age, whose presence alone was meant to reassure the visitors, were hired as guides.

In Higashidori, a town in northern Japan, one of the country’s newest P.R. buildings is built on the theme of Tonttu, a forest with resident dwarfs. The buildings also holds events with anime characters to attract children and young parents, said Yoshiki Oikawa, a spokesman for the Tohoku Electric Power Company, which manages the site with Tepco.

Here in Shika, more than 100,000 guests last year visited the P.R. building where Alice discovers the wonders of nuclear power. The Caterpillar reassures Alice about radiation and the Cheshire Cat helps her learn about the energy source. Instead of going down a rabbit hole, Alice shrinks after eating a candy and enters a 1:25 scale model of the Shika nuclear plant nearby.

Since the Fukushima disaster, visitors have started questioning the safety of nuclear power, said Asuka Honda, 27, a guide here. Many were pregnant women worried about the effects of radiation on their unborn children. But the presence of Ms. Honda and other guides, mostly women in their late 20s, seemed to reassure them.

The nuclear establishment also made sure that government-mandated school textbooks underemphasized information that could cast doubt on the safety of nuclear power. In Parliament, the campaign was led by Tokio Kano, a Tepco vice president who became a lawmaker in 1998. Mr. Kano, who declined to be interviewed for this article, returned to Tepco as an adviser after retiring from Parliament last year.

In 2004, under the influence of Mr. Kano and other proponents of nuclear power, education officials ordered revisions to textbooks before endorsing them. In one junior high school social studies textbook, a reference to the growing antinuclear movement in Europe was deleted. In another, a reference to Chernobyl was relegated to a footnote.

The effect could be seen in opinion polls that even after Fukushima have indicated that young Japanese are the strongest proponents of nuclear power.

The nuclear establishment itself came to believe its own safety myth and “became entangled in its own net,” said Hitoshi Yoshioka, an author of a book on the history of Japan’s nuclear power and a member of a panel established by the prime minister to investigate the causes of the Fukushima disaster.

He said that helped explain why, at Fukushima, Tepco failed to carry out emergency measures in case of a complete loss of power, which is what happened when the tsunami hit in March. Others have said that the nuclear establishment’s embrace of the safety myth also makes it possible to understand what, in hindsight, was the most glaring hole in the safety measures at Japan’s nuclear plants. In the country that gave the world the word tsunami, few measures were taken at Fukushima Daiichi or elsewhere to protect plants against the giant waves. Neither the Dodo nor the Caterpillar makes any mention of tsunamis to Alice.

Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.

 

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Toxic truth about Japan's 'miracle': Post-tsunami harmony is a myth and the reality is startlingly different
By Richard Jones

It is an inimitable picture of Japanese order and contentment. Passengers throng Sendai Airport. In the fields and market gardens close by, farmers are tending their crops. In the city, the bullet trains are spitting out businessmen.

It is almost impossible to imagine the colossal earthquake that unleashed first a tsunami and then a nuclear nightmare just 100 days ago.


The north-eastern seaboard was devastated. Some 28,000 people are dead or missing. Sixteen towns, 95,000 buildings and 23 railway stations have been destroyed. The town of Minamisanriku has simply vanished.

No wonder the recovery, so meticulously documented in the media, has been described as a modern miracle. Today, the ships that balanced on tower blocks have gone. The debris has vanished from whole villages and towns.

It is further proof, we are reminded, that Japan is a society of immeasurable strength. And for this it can thank 'wa', or harmony. This is a collective feeling close to a sense of perfection. It ensures everyone knows their place and acts accordingly. Or so the Japanese like to tell themselves – and the outside world.

Yet post-tsunami Japan is far from harmonious. The bullet trains may be running, but in the fishing villages and tiny ports that litter the jagged coastline north of Sendai, thousands are surviving on aid handouts. The emergency cash promised by the government is yet to arrive.

Take Minamisanriku, the town whose devastating fate was pictured on the front page of The Mail on Sunday. There has been no miracle here. Today, it remains a nightmare of twisted metal and fragments of First World comfort. The raging 98ft wave caused annihilation. Harmony has long disappeared from Ishinomaki, too. The port town, 30 miles from Sendai, took the full force of the tsunami. It is a ghost town shrouded in the stench of rotting fish.


There is no doubt that 'wa' helped Japan to deal with its monumental problems; but it also means that victims suffer in silence. In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, orderly queues snaked for miles for food, water and fuel. There was no looting and raping, which often accompanies natural disasters elsewhere.

Now, though, victims break down when I meet them. Mother-of-two Mrs Hiroake has lived with her family on two mats in an evacuation shelter in Ishinomaki since the tsunami hit.


Trauma: Mrs Hiroake has lived with her family on two mats in an Ishinomaki evacuation centre since the disaster

'We are living in a limbo with no privacy,' she says. 'Our lives stopped. People here are suffering mentally.'

The 254 billion yen (£1.94 billion) raised by the Japanese Red Cross for tsunami victims (including £10.5 million donated from Britain) is taking an astonishingly long time to reach the people who need it most. Just 37 billion yen has been distributed so far.

Pensions and welfare payments, too, have dried up. Mr Konno, a diabetic, can't understand why his monthly benefits of 15,000 yen (£114) stopped the moment he moved to a shelter.

Another victim, a 78-year-old widow, Mrs Utako Saito, sleeps in a tent she has pitched in her wrecked wooden cottage. She has not received her pension for three months.

With unemployment running at 90 per cent, the needy are starting to revolt. One third of families are refusing to move to temporary housing, opting to remain in shelters to hang on to their precious food benefits. Sixty per cent of the 28,000 temporary homes remain unoccupied. A staggering 90,000 people remain in shelters.

'The government don't want people to get too comfortable here, so they don't allow evacuees electricity inside the shelter,' says a volunteer from the Catholic charity Caritas.

However, the worst affected may prove to be those who lost nothing in the way of homes or relatives. They may have no running water, no money, no employment. But when compensation is finally awarded, they will be entitled to nothing.

The large hill-top home of Chieko Miura, 62, just north of Minamisanriku, became a shelter for 30 locals.

'Eventually we managed to get rice balls from the government, but there was nothing for my family because we were not “victims”,' Mrs Miura, who still looks after 12 evacuees, recalls.


'This government can be very cold-hearted. Do they want us to abandon the people we are helping?'

Tears are streaming down her face as she says this, and she apologises. Survivors have been eating little more than biscuits and dried food.

'Should we take the home with no food or stay in the shelter and eat?' says Mrs Miaki, 46, a sea-urchin fisherman, at Yariki Bay, north of Sendai.



Uncomfortable: Tatekoshi Elementary School in Natori, Sendai, Japan - one of hundreds of shelters where people who lost homes in the tsunami are living

According to Kei Watabe, who distributes food, people are not starving, 'but they are not getting enough food from the government. Japan is not the Third World. This is not Africa. The Japanese government are the first to send aid overseas, but when it comes to their own people they are blind.'

If these tsunami victims have been deprived of food, the rest of Japan has been starved of information. The Japanese are now struggling to comprehend how their government could mislead them about the nuclear meltdown that followed the tsunami.

When the Fukushima nuclear plant exploded on March 12, and again two days later, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the plant's operator, the government and the media, reassured the nation, and the world, that everything was under control.

It was not until May 12 that officials conceded that there had been a meltdown at not one, but three reactors. Even the timing of the announcement was cynical. It happened as inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were about to arrive.

TEPCO was able to control information through the age-old system of Press Clubs, where the government provides information to selected media.


But The Mail on Sunday spoke to sources inside the Japanese nuclear industry who knew that radiation readings spiked 155 miles south of Fukushima, immediately after the first explosion. They were told by officials to keep the findings quiet.

A survey by Fuji Television Network last month found that 81 per cent of the public no longer trusts any government information about radiation.

Food shopping has also become a problem. Shops have started mixing vegetables from different prefectures as customers are now selecting food based on where it is grown.

In an attempt to reassure the nation, the Japanese Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, visted Fukushima last month where he cheerfully ate locally grown cherries and tomatoes in front of the news cameras. As he spoke, bulldozers were removing the top soil from Fukushima school playgrounds due to high radiation levels.


Michael Penn, president of the Shingetsu News Agency, says: 'The media and the government share a cultural inclination to keep the people calm. But this time the government have badly misunderstood the public's needs.'

It is not the first time that the government and bureaucrats have neglected public safety. In the early Nineties around 1,800 people developed AIDS after being infected with untreated blood products. Most victims were dead before the Ministry of Health admitted negligence.

According to a well-known Japanese documentary maker, TEPCO paid for the creation of a blacklist of actors and musicians who are against the nuclear industry.

When one actor, Taro Yamamoto, joined an anti-nuclear protest, he lost his part in a popular soap opera. Yamamoto's 'crime' was to say that schoolchildren in Fukushima should not be subjected to the same annual radiation dose (20 microsieverts per year) as nuclear power workers in Europe.

One hundred days after the biggest earthquake in Japanese history, life is certainly not back to normal. One refugee told me: 'My biggest worry is that the people here will be forgotten as the media focus on the nuclear crisis.'

And 'wa', the harmony, is disappearing as people feel that their government has failed them.

 

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Near the coast at Miyagi prefecture

 

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