Here
and
Now

opinions

Has Japan learned anything from 2011 disaster?

17 Comments

It has been five years since that day when the Pacific Ocean roared forth to demolish the quiet coastal communities of Tohoku and the lives within them. But I am still haunted by the memory of Satoshi Watanabe.

It was about a month after the tsunami when I found him, a 42-year-old man in sweatpants walking silently through the wasteland of mud and shattered debris that had once been the town of Otsuchi in Iwate. He was turning over broken pieces of concrete and splintered beams as if searching for something. And indeed he was, the body of his 2-month-old daughter, Mikoto.

Watanabe was standing near the same spot where he had last seen her and the rest of his family -- his wife, Shiho, 32, and two other daughters, aged 5 and 6 -- together in their living room on the afternoon of March 11, just moments before the wall of water crashed down upon their home. Only he survived. He found the rest of his family a week later, lying in a makeshift morgue. I don't know if he ever recovered Mikoto.

I wish we could tell Watanabe and the thousands of others like him, who bore such staggering losses with admirable fortitude and endurance, that we have learned the hard-earned lessons from the earthquake and tsunami, so that future families will not have to suffer the same pain. But on the fifth anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that killed almost 19,000 people, and caused history's second-worst nuclear accident, we are letting that chance to improve slip away.

Japan, which tried so earnestly to learn from its failures during the 1995 Kobe earthquake, appears to be turning a blind eye to the lessons of this disaster. It is restoring its nuclear plants without fully understanding the failures at Fukushima Daiichi. It is re-erecting homes at the same spots swept away by the towering waves unleashed by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake. And it is rebuilding its seawalls: a trillion yen's worth of new concrete fortifications, in some places five stories tall, along some 400 kilometers of Japan's northeastern coast.

If the tsunami taught us one thing, it was that even the grandest walls could not match the force of nature. Kamaishi's was nearly 2 km long, and tall enough to win entry in the Guinness World Records. Yet, it could not protect that city. And now Japan's taxpayers are spending 60 billion yen to build a new one.

Going back to the pre-disaster status quo is not a solution. It simply dooms us to repeat the past. But there are new lessons to be learned in the experiences of Tohoku, ones that point us away from concrete and toward smarter, softer solutions. One is the value of knowledge, like the school children who knew to evacuate to higher ground. Another is communal bonds, which led the people of Tohoku to save each other when the waves struck, and support each other in the difficult months and years that followed. This gave Tohoku a resilience that came "not from walls or money, but how well people get along," says Daniel Aldrich, a public policy expert at Northeastern University who is studying the disaster.

In Otsuchi, the town's seawall created a fatal complacency. Watanabe said it allowed him to forget about the ocean, less than a kilometer from his home. "Our seawall didn't work," Watanabe told me that cold day amid the ruins. "And now without it, I can now see how close the sea is. It's frighteningly close."

© KYODO

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.

17 Comments
Login to comment

If the past 5 years are any indication, no, Japan has not learned anything.

Nuclear groups are trying to skirt the new regulations, Abe is pushing hard for NPP to restart...

Money, construction teams and resources that otherwise could be used towards containing/controlling/fixing the problems and/or helping the people of Tohoku are otherwise being pissed away on the Olympics.

So, no.

8 ( +8 / -0 )

Darn, you beat me to it. But you hit the nail on the head

0 ( +0 / -0 )

Nope. Anyone surprised? Nope.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

The prose is emotional and deeply moving. The analysis is shallow and insubstantial.

So because one seawall failed and because one person reported saying the seawall made him ignore the sea, Japanese towns should never build any more seawalls again? How many thousands of high waves has this seawall blocked before the one tsunami that toppled it? Because some homes were hit by a tsunami, that ground should never be built on again? Because one nuclear power plant failed, Japanese companies should never use nuclear power again?

There may be good reasons not to do any of those things, but one man's terrible tragedy is not a rational reason. In fact, it's quite exploitative to try and use his personal tragedy for the writer's own personal agenda. But I suppose if the writer is willing to treat the entire nation of Japan as a single gestalt consciousness that apparently learned nothing in the last 5 years, such concerns might not trouble them.

1 ( +4 / -3 )

The writer is correct the sea walls did NOTHING, to re build & expand that non sense, is NON SENSE & at a colossal cost!!

Japan clearly IS repeating the exact same mistakes, there is a lot of sheer lunacy happening right now & the govt has set its sights on a LOT MORE!!!!

1 ( +2 / -1 )

The writer is correct the sea walls did NOTHING

Really? http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-man-who-stopped-the-tsunami/

0 ( +0 / -0 )

The populace may have learned that nuclear power disasters are unlike any other and that nuclear power generation is not a safe end for Japan's energy needs. Abe and his ilk, on the other hand, have learned nothing. Abe hears only what he wants to hear and says what he his shallow mind dictates.

No, Japan does not need nuclear power. Japan should be seriously looking into alternative energy resources.

Meanwhile, the Fukushima recovery is as much a matter of faith as technology. Faith says a technology will be found to create robots that do not die from radiation. Wind, sun and sea power generation is a lot easier to have faith in. Meanwhile radiation continues to leak into the sea.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

I saw an interesting report on TV the other night about a seawall that collapsed in the face of the tsunami. Immediately after the disaster the accepted knowledge was the the seawall had failed to protect the town (can't remember the name of the town). But later analysis of the way the wall had collapsed, and footage of the wave coming in, showed that the wall had delayed the tsunami for about 6 minutes. Six minutes is a long time when you're scrambling up the side of a hill away from the coast. That's one of the walls that is being rebuilt.

2 ( +3 / -1 )

In a word no. And we are paying for it. Makes me so damn angry.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Really? http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-man-who-stopped-the-tsunami/

Yeah REALLY, they were for all intense & purposes a failure, except for a few unique cases, clearly a colossal waste of money, time & resources.

abe & the ldp is just FEEDING their machine is all at the countries & peoples expense, again!

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Yeah REALLY, they were for all intense & purposes a failure, except for a few unique cases, clearly a colossal waste of money, time & resources.

So they should look at the cases that were not unique, and figure out how/why they worked.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

People had better not live nearby beach/bay because of tsunami. People better not live nearby mountain because of landside/volcano. People better not live nearby river because of flood. People better not live on flat land where was river or lake because of liquefaction caused by quake. People had better not live in the middle of town because of fire/debris caused by quake. These should be remembered ever.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

katsu78MAR. 11, 2016 - 12:42PM JST The analysis is shallow and insubstantial. So because one seawall failed and because one person reported saying the seawall made him ignore the sea, Japanese towns should never build any more seawalls again? How many thousands of high waves has this seawall blocked before the one tsunami that toppled it? Because some homes were hit by a tsunami, that ground should never be built on again?

Not "some homes." Thousands of homes and commercial structures were destroyed because they were built no more than a few feet above sea level. Seawalls twice the size of those breached and destroyed would not have protected much of what was hit. That was the second time in 100 years that the Tohoku Pacific coast has been hit by a tsunami.

Because one nuclear power plant failed, Japanese companies should never use nuclear power again?

Correct. All of Japan's aging nuclear power plants are just as vulnerable as were the Daiichi reactors, some more so.

cleoMAR. 11, 2016 - 02:56PM JST But later analysis of the way the wall had collapsed, and footage of the wave coming in, showed that the wall had delayed the tsunami for about 6 minutes. Six minutes is a long time when you're scrambling up the side of a hill away from the coast. That's one of the walls that is being rebuilt.

This surely saved some lives but otherwise merely postponed the inevitable physical destruction.

The unspoken reason as to why the central government has dragged its feet over the last five years is that it, correctly, sees little meaning over the long run in resurrecting what were all dying towns in a gradually depopulating region of Japan. The harsh reality is that it's a waste of money. Of course, many of the survivors on these towns want life to go back to what it was, and maybe that's about all you can do for them. But the central government couldn't spend enough money to make these places other than what they were before 3/11.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Jeff HuffmanMAR. 12, 2016 - 05:33AM JST Not "some homes." Thousands of homes

"Some" is a perfectly accurate description of the number of homes hit compared to the number of homes in Japan which were not.

Seawalls twice the size of those breached and destroyed would not have protected much of what was hit.

Complete protection is not the purpose of a seawall. Like cleo said, a purpose of a seawall could be to delay destruction until people can get to safety.

This kind of thinking reminds me of the way many Americans respond to gun violence: "We can't prevent it in entirety, so we might as well not even try to do anything to reduce it." We all laugh at it as irrationally defeatist when Americans do it, but then turn around and accept it when people do it toward Japan.

That was the second time in 100 years that the Tohoku Pacific coast has been hit by a tsunami.

Sounds like pretty good odds for living there.

-4 ( +0 / -4 )

katsu78MAR. 12, 2016 - 06:37AM JST "Some" is a perfectly accurate description of the number of homes hit compared to the number of homes in Japan which were not.

1.2 million structures were damaged to some extent with nearly 130K destroyed. 1.2 million is not understood as just "some."

http://earthquake-report.com/2012/03/10/japan-366-days-after-the-quake-19000-lives-lost-1-2-million-buildings-damaged-574-billion/

As of September 11, six months after the earthquake, the number of houses considered to have been totally destroyed or half destroyed were 128,530 and 240,332, respectively. As can be seen in Fig. 5, the number of houses thought to have been totally destroyed in Miyagi Prefecture is conspicuously high in the breakdown according to prefectures.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038080612000947

Yes. Just "some" houses.

Again, while the sea walls certainly saved lives, they did little to reduce the physical impact of the tsunami. Most of those hit were destroyed and will cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to rebuild. Like the whole undertaking of rebuilding most of the communities exactly where they were, it's a wast of money.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

So they should look at the cases that were not unique, and figure out how/why they worked.

SURE, & IF they have merit, bud sadly that almost NEVER comes into the calculations now does it, BUT making ldp friends rich & wasting taxes while racking of obscene DEBT IS the norm here, for EVERYTHING.

I hate to sound cold & I certainly don't think only $$$ & costs are pertinent, far from it. But the sheer insanity taking place up & down the east coast is another massive disaster in the making clearly.

Japan should have taken a year or so to grieve, contemplate things, while basic cleanups took place as they DID (and very well imo!!).

Then HARD decisions needed to be made, where to re-build, how to rebuild & most importantly where NOT to re-build. Plans offered, residents given options to opt in or out with appropriate financial help either way for their NEW lives( the olds AINT coming back, sorry just isn't). This process should have been pretty much finalized 3yrs after, BUT its been a complete MESS for the most part..............the hard decisions aren't being made by the govt or the people affected.

The reality needs to set in, the past isn't returning, people will HAVE TO live elsewhere, some place should NOT be re-build.............

But instead things are dragging out, decisions are few & far between & the result is going to be a bunch of stupid seawalls that wont work, a bunch of infrastructure & building that no one will live in or use(except a few elderly for the most part).

And we will end with more white elephants than Japan has ever seen & we have seen a LOT!

Sorry for the rant but I just don't see much of Japan getting this stuff right or making much REAL progress for the people who have been displaced, fact is all need to compromise but we mostly see wheels spinning in the mud while govt cronies & yakuza types are robbing the country blind left right & centre!

0 ( +0 / -0 )

It is not just the disaster itself, but Japan's paralysed reaction to the disaster. For a country prone to natural disasters, it is always caught out by them.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

Login to leave a comment

Facebook users

Use your Facebook account to login or register with JapanToday. By doing so, you will also receive an email inviting you to receive our news alerts.

Facebook Connect

Login with your JapanToday account

User registration

Articles, Offers & Useful Resources

A mix of what's trending on our other sites