ENTERTAINMENT:
The Nature of Things looks at Japan’s response to the devastation
JAPAN’S DEVASTATION, UP CLOSE
THE NATURE OF THINGS: JOURNEY TO THE DISASTER ZONE
When: Thursday, 8 p. m. Where: CBC
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 ( 133 feet) high, travelled up to 10 kilometres inland in the Sendai region of Japan, causing several nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi 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
I couldn’t help but be very proud of these people, their stoicism and discipline. Sendai is the size of Vancouver … But the people who stayed, in the thousands, didn’t break down windows to get blankets or food. They just sat there and waited. Contrast that to New Orleans after Katrina, or even [ Vancouver] after the Stanley Cup riots. When you look at Katrina, you realize it’s every man for himself.
DAVID SUZUKI
HOST, THE NATURE OF THINGS
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 and reflects on the nuclear meltdown’s causes and possible aftermath. 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 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.
Suzuki was moved, too, though, by the stoicism and acceptance of the Japanese people in the midst of so much destruction and personal pain. Postwar Japan is not the feudal, inwardlooking society it once was, Suzuki notes. It’s evolved into a society of high- energy consumption and modern conveniences, driven by cutting- edge technology. The traditional strength of the Japanese character — orderliness, stoicism and discipline in the face of loss and great personal tragedy — is also one of that society’s greatest weaknesses, Suzuki believes. There is a general acceptance of life as it is, and a reluctance to stand up and demand change. Suzuki found himself wondering where Japan will go in the years to come. He decided the only way he could learn more was to visit the areas most devastated by the destruction, in person, on his own.
“I couldn’t help but be very proud of these people, their stoicism and discipline. Sendai is the size of Vancouver ... A lot of people decided to walk home, even though it may have been 10 or 20 kilometres, in the snow. But the people who stayed, in the thousands, didn’t break down windows to get blankets or food. They just sat there and waited. Contrast that to New Orleans after Katrina, or even [ Vancouver] after the Stanley Cup riots. When you look at Katrina, you realize it’s every man for himself.” That stoicism is two- edged, though. “For me, it’s maddening that this great strength of the Japanese people is also its great weakness. There’s no one rising up. This whole idea of conformity is a very important part of their culture. It’s what makes Japan work. But it’s also what holds it back. Here was this massive crisis, this huge earthquake followed by this huge tsunami followed by a nuclear meltdown, and there’s no one really up there, just screaming, ‘ What the hell’s going on?’ Because they’re all so highly disciplined and conforming.”
Suzuki learned, though, during the course of making the program, that people in Japan are starting to ask those questions. Quietly.
“We discovered in the film that there are all kinds of little things percolating at the grassroots. People are pointing out the insanity of having this complex nuclear program to boil water — that’s all a nuclear plant does; it boils water to make steam to drive turbines — when they’re sitting on top of one of the world’s biggest reserves of geothermal energy. You have this complex technology in one of the most seismically active countries on the planet. And yet, this a country which has more than ten thousand hot springs to make steam. Something does not compute.” Suzuki is guardedly optimistic. “I pose that question at the end,” he said. “Japan is a highly industrialized, highly educated, wealthy nation. They stand at a critical moment when this triple crisis that shook them is forcing them to re- evaluate the way they live. Now they could take the superficial way, which is, ‘ Let’s get everything back up and running; we need the economy going; we need industry; we’ve got to get these nuclear reactors back online.’ Or they can say, ‘ Look, this is crazy. We are a country that could have plenty of energy. It’s right in the ground, in the form of geothermal energy. We have energy in the oceans. We should go to a complex mix of locally driven, diverse sources of energy — multiple sources, smallscale, community- driven.’ They have a huge opportunity to do that.
“And if Japan does do that, I absolutely believe they would lead the way of thinking for industrialized countries the world over. If Japan can make that transition, then surely Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and these other countries would follow suit. It would be huge.”