Suzuki revisits disaster in Japan Brown in ring?
Nuclear repercussions examined
David Suzuki should have been asleep, but he wasn’t, when word first broke of the 9.0-magnitude earthquake 70 kilometres east of Tohoku’s Oshika Peninsula, off the coast of Japan.
“It was the damnedest thing,” Suzuki recalled. “I woke up — it must have been four in the morning or something. I never turn on the TV. But for some reason, I just turned it on; I couldn’t go to sleep.”
The earthquake that struck Japan at 2:46 p.m. local time on March 11, 2011 — since dubbed 3/11 — was just a harbinger of things to come. In the minutes and hours that followed, a powerful tsunami, with waves up to 40 metres high, travelled up to 10 kilometres inland in the Sendai region of Japan, causing several nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power complex in the coastal towns of Okuma and Futaba. More than 13,000 people died. Most were drowned. Nearly half a million people were uprooted from their homes, including 100,000 children, according to the U.K. charity, Save the Children. Many of those children were temporarily separated from their families, because the earthquake struck during the school day.
“Up came this shot of this . . . this wave sweeping in toward a village, and I couldn’t believe it,” Suzuki recalled of those first moments watching TV early on a Friday morning. “It looked like it was moving so slowly, from a helicopter, and then you realize, ‘Oh my God, those are cars, those tiny little specks.’ And every time you saw it moving, it was travelling a city block. Then you realize, ‘Oh my God, it’s really moving.’ It was horrifying — and yet riveting. You’re just glued to what’s happening.”
For Suzuki, the Tohuku earthquake struck a personal chord. His grandparents emigrated to Canada from Japan in the early 1900s. Suzuki and his sisters were born second-generation Canadians. English was their first language, French their second, but Suzuki has retained a strong interest in his ancestral home. This week, in the Nature of Things program, “Journey to the Disaster Zone: Japan 3/11,” Suzuki visits Sendai in person, and reflects on the nuclear meltdown’s causes and possible aftermath, both in the immediate and in the long term. Earthquakes are an act of nature, as are tsunamis. Humankind’s embrace of nuclear energy, on the other hand — on top of a fault line, no less, in a region of the world so renowned for its seismic activity that it’s been dubbed the Ring of Fire — is a conscious decision, and one, Suzuki believes, that had entirely foreseeable consequences.
Suzuki has long believed that there is no such thing as “foolproof” technology. The Fukushima nuclear meltdown was simply further proof. “Nature will always out-fool our best notions,” Suzuki believes.
Chris Brown has been challenged to a no-holds barred fight for charity by wrestler CM
Punk.
The pair have become embroiled in a war of words after the grappler said he wanted to “curb stomp that turd” for assaulting his ex-girlfriend Rihanna in February 2009.
Brown hasn’t accepted.