Apocalypse on Japan

It sounded like the Last Judgment. A working group of Central Disaster Prevention Council on Monday released an estimation of damages by possible great earthquake in Nankai Trough, a deep ditch extended along offshore Japan. Although it supposed the worst case, the estimated damages would be too great for the nation to be resilient. The thing is how the Japanese respond to it.

Nankai Trough is the border between the Eurasia Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Frictions between those two plates had been producing a number of earthquakes with magnitude 8 occurred once in every 100 to 150 years. The estimation deliberately took the worst case with magnitude 9.1, which had not been recorded in the history.

The supposed number of victims in Nankai Trough Earthquake is 323 thousand, which is seventeen times higher than Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. The damage to Japanese economy would be ¥220 trillions, which amounts to 42% of gross domestic products of Japan. ¥170 trillions out of whole damages would be direct damages to houses and industrial facilities, while decline of productions and services was estimated to be ¥44 trillions. This scenario actually means the bankruptcy of Japan.

The estimation reminds of how the government of Japan has been concentrating its development on the shore of the Pacific Ocean. Big cities like Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya are located on the shoreline. A large amount of investments was dropped on those city areas, with the initiatives of politics, bureaucracies and business entities. Although some politicians had tried to shift the axis from Pacific coast to Japan Sea side, they were excluded from politics with money scandals.

The government is mainly responding to the estimates with strengthening infrastructure. Along with “homeland strengthening initiative” addressed by leading Liberal Democratic Party, the government invests on renewing roads and bridges, reinforcing buildings against earthquake, or stocking foods and fuels. The government has no idea of reducing the risks by downsizing big cities.

The counter actions of industries are relocating their facilities to safer places. Some are moving their factory to rural area and others have plans for setting facilities on hills to escape from tsunami. But as long as the government is investing on shoreline cities, dissemination of functions of big city would not be achieved. Although the lesson we learned from the great earthquake two years ago was that we must review our civilization, this ailing government cannot run anywhere but on railroads already laid.