11 September 2011, Page: 32
As Japan prepares to mark six months since the March earthquake, tens of thousands remain in temporary housing, mourning loved ones, fearful of radiation and despairing over a marathon road to recovery. The wall of water unleashed by the record 9.0-magnitude March 11 earthquake left an indelible scar on Japan's north-eastern Pacific coast, killing 20,000 people and sparking the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl 25 years ago. Much rubble has been cleared, leaving vast, empty mud fields.Makeshift shelters at schools and public halls have closed after temporary housing was hastily constructed. But mental scars will take longer to heal. "People talk about recovery but there is no such thing here", said fisherman Take Tachibana, 66, still searching for his sister's body after the tsunami took his house, his boat and 600 lives in his town of Yamada. "It is too early to think of the future. I don't know what to do".
Rebuilding the rnuddy wastelands of the north-eastern Tohoku region is expected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars and take up to a decade. Are as close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station may be uninhabitable for longer. For many, faith in government has been eroded amid criticism over its response to the disaster and suspicions it underplayed the scale of the nuclear crisis, and as political infighting overshadows recovery efforts. Radiation fears are a daily fact of life after water, beef, vegetables, tea and seafood were contaminated by the Fukushima accident. "Since March 11, my life has changed completely", said Yuko Sugimoto, 56, from Namie, a village in the 20-kilometre no-go zone set up around the nuclear plant after it was crippled in the tsunami.
Sugimoto has been forced to give up plans to raise and sell organic vegetables. "All we have now is despair, stress and the worry that we will be discarded as time goes by", she said. Facing huge compensation costs, the plant operator, TEPCO, made initial payments of ¥1 million ($12,000) per family, but this has failed to soothe anger about lost homes, jobs and livelihoods and potential long-term health risks. Activists and scientists have called for a wider evacuation zone amid fears that it does not account for unpredictable radiation fallout patterns after the plant spewed radiation into the environment, including places more than 100 kilometres away. Some areas in the zone could be uninhabitable for decades.
Parents living nearby face a nightmare dilemma: evacuate their children or live with the fear that radiation will cause cancers. Tests have shown trace radioactive substances in urine samples of children in Fukushima. Japan's new Prime Minister, Yoshihiko Noda, pledged to speed up recovery efforts. There are plans to set up anew nuclear regulator to replace the existing Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, seen as culpable in TEPCO's failure to foresee the threat to the Fukushima plant from a giant tsunami.
The disaster also triggered a wave of anti-nuclear sentiment in the resource-poor nation. Most reactors are currently offline for safety tests. Noda and other officials have signalled Japan may eventually phase out nuclear power. Parliament passed a law to promote renewable energy such as wind, solar and geothermal last month. The government estimates that at least 70,000 people in the three tsunami-hit prefectures-Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate - lost their jobs due to the disaster but analysts say the figure is far higher.
While life is getting back to normal in cities such as Tokyo-where supermarkets were stripped of supplies in the disaster's early aftermath-areas such as Fukushima face along road to recovery. "People in other affected areas still have hope, which we don't have in Fukushima", said Sugimoto. The nuclear accident did not only open Pandora's box, it destroyed it and took away the hope left inside".
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