Japan marks grim anniversary
Losses fresh, lessons harsh year after earthquake, tsunami
RIKUZENTAKATA, Japan — For 70-year-old Toshiko Murakami, memories of the terrifying earthquake and tsunami that destroyed much of her seaside town and swept away her sister brought fresh tears Sunday, exactly a year after the disaster.
“My sister is still missing so I can’t find peace within myself,” she said before attending a ceremony in a tent in Rikuzentaka marking the anniversary of the March 11, 2011, disaster that killed more than 19,000 people and started the world’s worst nuclear crisis in a quarter century.
Across Japan, people paused at 2:46 p.m. — the moment the magnitude-9.0 quake struck a year ago — for moments of silence, prayer and reflection about the losses suffered and tasks ahead.
Japan must rebuild dozens of ravaged coastal communities, shut down the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and decontaminate radiated land so it is inhabitable again.
These are enormous burdens on a country already straining under the weight of an aging, shrinking population, bulging national debt
and an economy that’s been stagnant for two decades.
Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda reminded the Japanese people that they have overcome many disasters and difficulties in the past and pledged to rebuild the nation so it will be “reborn as an even better place.”
“Our predecessors who brought prosperity to Japan have repeatedly risen up from crises, every time becoming stronger,” Noda said at a ceremony at the National Theater attended by the emperor and empress.
Later, he said at a news conference that he hoped to see the disaster-hit areas fully rebuilt when “babies born on the day of the disasters turn 10 years old.”
The earthquake was the strongest recorded in Japan’s history, and set off a tsunami that swelled to more than 65 feet in some spots along the northeastern coast, destroying tens of thousands of homes and causing widespread destruction.
All told, some 325,000 people are still in temporary housing. While much of the debris along the tsunami-ravaged coast has been gathered into piles, only 6 percent of the 22.5 million tons of debris left by the water has been disposed of through incineration.
Very little rebuilding has begun. Many towns are still finalizing reconstruction plans, some of which involve moving residential areas to higher, safer ground — ambitious, costly projects. Bureaucratic delays in coordination between the central government and local officials also have slowed rebuilding efforts.
“The government’s activities haven’t progressed as fast as we had hoped,” Yasuchika Hasegawa, head of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives and chief executive officer of Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., said Saturday at a symposium organized by the lobby group in Sendai, north of Tokyo. “The recovery agency was only fully established last month, 11 months after the disaster. I feel the recovery will be a very long, time-consuming process.”
In Rikuzentakata, which lost 1,691 residents out of its pre-quake population of 24,246, a siren sounded at 2:46 p.m. and a Buddhist priest in a purple robe rang a bell at a temple overlooking a barren area where houses once stood.
At the same moment in the seaside town of Onagawa, people facing the ocean pressed their hands together in silent prayer.
Memorial services continued into the night. In Ishinomaki, survivors lit some 2,000 candles to mourn for the victims.
The memories of last March 11 are still raw for Naomi Fujino, a 42-year-old Rikuzentakata resident who lost her father in the tsunami. She escaped with her mother to a nearby hill, where they watched the enormous wave wash away their home. They waited all night, but her father never came as he had promised. Two months later, his body was found.
“I wanted to save people, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even help my father. I cannot keep crying,” Fujino said. “What can I do but keep on going?”
In Tokyo, anti-nuclear demonstrators waving banners, beating drums and shouting slogans marched to the headquarters of Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant.
As dusk fell, protesters holding candlelit lanterns linked arms to form a human chain nearly all the way around the parliament building.
Public opposition to nuclear power has grown in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the worst since the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986. The tsunami knocked out the plant’s cooling systems, causing meltdowns at three reactors and spewing radiation into the air.
Only two of Japan’s 54 reactors are now running while those shut down for regular inspections undergo special tests to check their ability to withstand similar disasters. They could all go offline by the end of April if none is restarted.
The Japanese government has pledged to reduce reliance on nuclear power, which supplied about 30 percent of the nation’s energy before the disaster, but said it needs to restart some nuclear plants during the transition period.
Emperor Akihito, 78, who recently underwent heart-bypass surgery, voiced concern in a speech at the national memorial ceremony about the difficulty of decontaminating land around the plant. Workers are using shovels, high-powered water guns and chemicals that absorb radiation, but it is a huge, costly project fraught with uncertainty.
The Environment Ministry expects it will generate at least 130 million cubic yards of contaminated soil, enough to fill 80 domed baseball stadiums.
“We shall not let our memory of the disasters fade, pay attention to disaster prevention and continue our effort to make this land an even safer place to live,” Akihito said.
In December, the government declared that the crippled Fukushima plant, 160 miles north of Tokyo, was basically stable and that radiation has subsided significantly. But the plant’s chief acknowledged recently that it remains in a fragile state, and makeshift equipment — some mended with tape — is keeping crucial systems running.
Enormous risks and challenges lie ahead at the plant, including locating and removing melted nuclear fuel from the inside of the reactors and disposing spent fuel rods. Completely decommissioning the plant could take 40 years.
The population of Fukushima prefecture may already have fallen to 1.92 million from 2.02 million before the disaster, and could halve in the next 30 years, Hironori Saito, vice chairman for the Fukushima Economic Research Institute, said at the symposium in Sendai on Saturday.
“This nuclear accident has had a tremendous impact on agriculture, fisheries and tourism businesses,” Saito said. “The big issue is how Fukushima’s population will change. More than 160,000 people are unable to go back to their hometowns.”
Less than half of eligible households have applied for compensation from Tokyo Electric because forms are too difficult to understand, according to a survey by the government-backed Nuclear Damage Liability Facilitation Fund.
Meanwhile, radiation fears are also hampering tsunamihit regions outside Fukushima. Residents around the country are blocking the transportation and disposal of debris in their prefectures because of potential contamination, preventing progress on reconstruction, the Japan Association of Corporate Executives said in a statement.
In Ishinomaki city, the 6 million tons of debris is equivalent to about 120 years of its processing capacity.
The government plans to ask every prefecture, with the exception of three in the disaster-hit Tohoku region, to accept debris from the tsunami, Noda said Saturday.
Noda has acknowledged failures in the government’s response to the disaster, including being too slow in relaying key information and believing too much in “a myth of safety” about nuclear power.
One year after the disaster, the nation’s top two political parties, the ruling Democratic Party of Japan and the Liberal Democratic Party, have record-low approval ratings, poll data from broadcaster NHK show.
In a statement from Vienna marking the anniversary, the International Atomic Energy Agency called the Fukushima accident “a jolt to the nuclear industry, regulators and governments.”
Although it was triggered by a natural disaster, the accident highlighted “existing weaknesses” in regulatory oversight, accident management and defense against natural hazards, the agency said.
For Tamiko Oshimizu, the day brought a sense of closure.
Shown on TV wearing protective coveralls and a surgical mask to protect against radiation as she joined a small group of evacuees entering the 12-mile no-go zone around the Fukushima plant, she placed a bouquet at the site of her aunt and uncle’s former house in Namie.
“You must have been so scared,” Oshimizu said, referring to her relatives, who perished in the tsunami. “Until today I was not able to accept the reality. But today I’m going to face it and move on.” Information for this article was contributed by Miki Toda, Malcolm Foster, Mari Yamaguchi and George Jahn of The Associated Press; by Stuart Biggs, Kanoko Matsuyama, Yuji Okada, Scilla Alecci, Tsuyoshi Inajima, Julie Masuda, Teo Chian Wei, Emi Urabe, John Brinsley and Takashi Hirokawa of Bloomberg News; and by Hiroko Tabuchi of The
New York Times.