Three months after Japan’s March 11 quake and tsunami disaster, frustration is growing as the nuclear crisis shows no sign of abating and nearly 100,000 evacuees remain holed up in crowded shelters.
Rebuilding the mud-caked and debris-strewn wastelands of the coastal Tohoku region, an area now covered in some 25 million tons of rubble, will take up to a decade and cost hundreds of billions of dollars, say experts.
Yet as Japan struggles with its worst post-war crisis, a plunge back into recession and a growing debt mountain, its political leadership is in turmoil, with its fifth premier in five years expected to resign soon.
Bills to finance reconstruction are being held hostage by the conservative opposition, which demands that centre-left Prime Minister Naoto Kan quit first, accusing him of bungling Japan’s post-disaster management.
The death toll from the quake – the world’s fourth largest tectonic event since 1900 and Japan’s biggest since records started 130 years ago – reached 15,401 yesterday, with 8,146 people reported missing, presumed dead.
More than 90,000 people still live in over 2,400 shelters – most of them jobless and miserable as they spend their days eating donated meals, watching TV and sleeping on tatami mats behind cardboard partitions.
“We are so disappointed with the politicians playing their power games without thinking about us,” said Tomie Shiga, a 59-year-old housewife turned radiation refugee who spent months in a Fukushima prefecture shelter.
“Nothing has moved forward since the accident,” she said. “We have fled the area, but we’re still feeling the fear of radiation even here. My dream is to return home, but we have no idea when that will happen.”
The wild card in the disaster, and the factor perpetuating the suffering of thousands, remains the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant, which emergency crew hope to bring into stable “cold shutdown” between October and January.
The worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl a quarter-century ago has shocked the world, with Germany and Switzerland deciding to abandon atomic power and Japan signalling a major shift towards renewable energy.
More than 80,000 residents from a 20-kilometre zone around the plant have been evacuated, and their picturesque rural home area declared a no-go zone, populated by starving livestock and abandoned pets.
The government has started to clear residents from other radiation hotspots nearby – but many people, especially parents, farther afield are scared.
Among the government’s most controversial decisions has been to raise the radiation limit, including for children, from one to 20 millisievert per year, the standard for nuclear industry workers in many other countries.
Parents at some Fukushima town schools, frustrated with government inaction, have started removing the top soil from school yards and kindergarten playgrounds, and many now only allow their children to play indoors. While high radiation is known to cause cancers and genetic damage, especially in children, medical experts are divided about the health dangers of elevated but relatively low levels of radiation over extended periods.
When the nuclear evacuees will be able to return home remains an open question, one the government says it will address around the end of the year.
Jan Beranek, a radiation expert with environmental group Greenpeace, said he believes that in the worst-hit areas it will be “a matter of years or even a few decades, as we have seen in Chernobyl”.
The nuclear accident has dominated the headlines, but the crisis is also far from over for tens of thousands beyond the fallout zone.
Since the monster quake, survivors have been unnerved by more than 500 aftershocks of magnitude five or greater, although seismic charts show the number and intensity of the tremors gradually levelling off. There has been anger that help has been slow to come, and that most evacuees are still waiting for temporary housing, which they have been promised by mid-August, when Japanese remember departed souls at the Obon festival.
The gargantuan task of rebuilding the shattered communities, businesses, fishing ports and salt-logged rice farms will take up to 10 years, said the head of the Reconstruction Design Council, Makoto Iokibe, last month.
The bill for the disaster, excluding the nuclear crisis, will likely range from $168 to $216 billion over the next decade, the Japan Research Institute has estimated.