Tsunami scars linger a decade after meltdown
TOKYO — The images still hold the power to shock.
Dazed survivors walk beneath huge sea tankers deposited amid an expanse of rubble and twisted iron that was once a busy downtown, the ships toppled onto their sides like children’s toys. Grieving survivors pick through the flattened debris where their homes used to be. Deserted farms stand in the shadow of the Fukushima nuclear plant, where a catastrophic meltdown still reverberates.
These arresting images were captured in 2011 after a massive wall of water leveled part of Japan’s northeastern coast, washing away cars, homes, office buildings and thousands of people.
Ten years later, journalists have returned to document the communities that were ripped apart by what’s simply referred to here as the Great East Japan Earthquake. The urge to rebuild in a land that has been wracked by a millennia of disaster — volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, earthquakes, war and famine — is powerful, and there are areas where there’s little or no trace of the devastation of 2011.
But this triple disaster in the Tohoku region of Japan — earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown — has been unlike any Japan has faced before, and the challenges of returning to what was normal a decade ago have been immense. Half a million were forced from their homes; tens of thousands have not returned, emptying towns that were already struggling to keep their young people from leaving for Tokyo and the other megacities. Radiation fears linger. Government incompetence, petty squabbling and bureaucratic wrangling have delayed building efforts.
In one way, it’s the simplest thing in the world to describe. The removal of tons of rubble here, the absence of toppled tankers there. The repaved roads where there had been cracked and buckled piles of asphalt before. The gleaming new buildings that now rise above cleared dirt patches.