Waves

My precious Angels, Hitomi and I lit a candle each this afternoon at the Temple to remember such a tragic loss of life one year ago today when the tsunami stuck our North Eastern coast.
I was across the ocean at the time in Los Angeles and Hitomi was shopping for her Mother up in Adachi. My children also remember the shake and they recall vividly all the students marching out into the school yard where they'd be safe from any masonry falling into the rooms.
As a nation we are still rebuilding but the damage was widespread and extensive with whole towns simply disappearing amongst the decimated country-side. Many survivors in the areas worst affected are still without homes and so many of them live on with the grief and loss of loved ones. Twenty thousand people were lost to us on that day and in the following darkness.

At 14:46 today the nation stopped and bowed their heads in silence and quiet prayer for one minute. After one minute of total silence, his Imperial Majesty, the Emperor who led the respectful silence from the national theater, raised his head and noted that still we as a nation continued to pray on in silence. One minute was not enough.
It is saddening to see pictures from the area today that show that the recovery is slow and the good people there try as best they can to live life with much of what they knew simply gone. In financial terms alone the government states that reconstruction will cost 23 trillion yen over 10 years (approx. 280 million US dollars). Much of the twenty five million tons of rubble across 350 square miles has been cleared away but still empty and broken foundations of buildings and homes that once stood proudly remain as ghosts of the past to haunt today. The places where once stood stores and homes that make a town and a community are empty now with the spring winds taking what little warmth remained.

Past the quake and the killer tsunami came the nuclear disaster and the Self Defense Forces were called in to assist. Oh how poorly prepared we were for this! The then Prime Minister Naoto Kan stormed into the Tokyo Electric Power building and gave an order that the civilian workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plan put their lives on the line, insisting that the world wide view of our “viability as a nation” was at stake. It was a demand delivered perhaps unwittingly but quite bluntly stated that they should be prepared to die for our country.
Massive plans were drawn up to evacuate large parts of Tokyo but thankfully were never required.

We have long prided ourselves on being a society that provides safety and security in all aspects of life. It's been our trademark overseas and it has enjoyed popular appeal at home. But it also gave us a pacifistic and an avoidance approach to our security. This ostriches head in the sand and reluctance has been an aversion to facing the potential threat of nuclear emergencies.

Our officials and politicians have long emphasized safety but only in small doses and in the process may have inadvertently sacrificed the security of our nation. Any drills for a nuclear emergency were carefully designed to avoid giving anyone an impression that an accident could really happen or that a meltdown could occur and local authorities were discouraged from taking action to anticipate the compounded risks that would be involved in the event of an earthquake and why we ask?

Because they didn't want to stir up unnecessary anxiety when such contingencies simply are unthinkable! 

Unfortunately this avoidance became a total unpreparedness. Even a national program to develop robots for use in nuclear emergencies was terminated in its infancy because it was considered that it would worry people into thinking that such a danger was possible. We, the world leaders in robotics and electronics had nothing to go into the danger area except frail human beings. People who I have no doubt would willingly sacrifice themselves to save others who had been ordered into the radiation soaked areas to try to bring control and order.

We now know our government lied to us and the then leader, Prime Minister Naoto Kan stood and took the blame and he resigned his position. But the truth is that it was not one man alone, it was all of them with an incomprehensible mindset that allowed such a potential hazard to become worse by not having the realistic sense of propriety and say - we shall have these systems in place should the unthinkable ever happen. They not only failed us and endangered us all but they lied to us about how safe we were. A technological pride in a Utopian sense but held aloft upon stilts of frail beliefs was what we had.

Over 80,000 people were moved because of the nuclear disaster and still they cannot return to the homes they knew. Some say it will be forty more years before the areas close to the plant will be safe again.

The debates go on still about what to do with the radioactive waste and the contaminated water. Where do we put it? In the first days it went into the sea as an emergency crisis but this is not something we can do today. The thought of the day is that 51 of our 53 reactors are now off-line and the people are in uproar and saying 'no' when the companies state they are ready to bring them back on-line.

I personally believe in Nuclear energy but I no longer have faith in the way they have been operated with such disregard to potential fail-safe systems.

It is with an almost sense of shame that I say I do not trust my own government and I am not alone. 

But we will never give up, we dream and with that hope we go forward.

Then and now pictures are all courtesy of AFP Pictures.
As is my header photo:

A beautiful young woman lovingly tended the plants in her garden. Unknown to her, a scant few seconds before, the tsunami had raced into the harbor below her and capsized the boat that her husband worked on and left it smashed into the ruins of bay side structures. Then the wave continued on into the town and took her and her house and took them over two kilometers intro the countryside. It seemed to take hours as she was hit by debris in the water but she had one thought and one thought alone - to get to her baby who was still in the house. Fearfully she saw that her house was relentlessly being pulled further away as she struggled valiantly to keep her head above the water.
Finally the current lessened and the water receded a little leaving the broken house halfway up a hill behind tons of rubble and broken trees. She made her way up the hill as fast as she could not even aware one of her legs was broken in two places and with her bare hands started scraping through the devastation digging frantically and calling out to her baby that she was coming.
A passing patrol of Self defense forces saw her hours later, he fingers bleeding and broken still calling out to her baby and still pulling rocks that during normal times would be too heavy to budge. They moved in quickly and efficiently with levers, shovels and picks and after a couple of hours made headway into the chaos and brought out the crying but unhurt four month old from the mess of the house to a grateful mother.
They were reunited with her husband and the baby’s father two days later.
This is just one story of the countless thousands that we hear that bring hope to us all as we go on.