Low Attention to Disaster

People try to memorize an important event or person by reminding of it on the same day every year. The Japanese sometimes does it not only annually, but also monthly.

It is the day just two years and four months after Great East Japan Earthquake and disastrous accident in the First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant today. It has fallen on campaign period of election of the House of Councillors this month. Knowing that refugees of the disaster suffer from delay of reconstruction effort, political parties are mostly ignoring the real need of them, which is when they will be back home. It is morally incorrect for the nation to leave the sufferers behind economic issues, constitution amendment or energy supplies.

The Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, at the campaign kick-off speech in Fukushima city, emphasized the importance of reconstruction policies. “There will be no revival of Japan without reconstruction in Fukushima,” told him. Didn’t we hear it somewhere else? Yes, that was the phrase former PM Yoshihiko Noda often used. People remember that terminology as something an unable leader would like to say. Actually, Abe invites enormous disappointment in the minds of people in Fukushima by showing his willingness of resuming nuclear reactors in the power plants in all over Japan without any guarantee of ceasing crisis in the First Fukushima.

There are around 310 thousand Fukushima people who cannot get back home. The contaminated land was categorized as three kinds of area: open to everybody, cannot stay overnight, and unlivable for certain years. The problem the government owes is nobody says when the residents in unlivable area will be, or will not be, able to return home. Those residents are actually pessimistic about the future of their hometowns, expecting a decision that their towns may not be available eternally.

However, politics and bureaucrats do not deliver clear words about the future of unlivable area, because doing it brings responsibility for the compensation. Bureaucrats in Kasumigaseki are highly reluctant to put further resource into the reconstruction, in spite of they had vested people contingency tax for reconstruction for twenty-five years.

It is obvious that the executive branch is waiting for sufferers to give their all rights up in desperation. They may do it as long as those people are alive. That is why the opposite parties are responsible for urging current administration to accelerate the process of rebuilding cities in Tohoku area. Ignorance is sometimes the most violent way to harm devastated people.