Thousand Days

In Japanese language, “thousand days” sometimes means forever. Shogi, Japanese version of chess, has a rule of “thousand days move,” in which a move and its countermove are reiterated four consecutive times in a same way, then the game is suspended.

Japan counted one thousand days from occurrence of the Great East Japan Earthquake on Wednesday. Due to the delay of reconstruction efforts by politicians and bureaucrats, huge number of sufferers are still living away from their own home. People living with radioactive materials exhausted from the First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant are still worried about impacts on health, especially on kids’ growth. While persons responsible for the consequence want to forget about all of the burdens Japan owed, it is the people that are challenged by the necessity of memorize the disaster.

As far as the government knows on November 14^th, the quake killed 15,883 people and 2,651 are still missed. The number of people who lost their houses or who live away from their houses with high radiation level is 277,609. This is not the number which a peaceful nation would possess.

The biggest problem is delay of building houses for them. As a result of failure of bureaucrats to respond to an unprecedented disaster, local governments are still looking for places to build “reconstruction houses.” Even how the sufferers are shivering with coldness in temporary houses, national government is highly reluctant to ease regulation on local government.

A city in Iwate spent months to get an approval for developing a forest on a hill to make it residential area for the people who lost their houses by tsunami. Before Ministry of Land, Industry, Transport and Tourism allow the activity of development, Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries required the city to submit papers to change the purpose of land use, because the ministry had injected subsidy for forestry cultivation long years ago. Staffs of the city office spent a long time for the paperwork.

Another problem comes from contamination in Fukushima. It is obvious that some places close to the broken nuclear plant are no longer available for residence. However, the government has still announced which place is unavailable. Because of that, people out of the towns cannot decide whether they would return to their home or abandon it. For what purpose the government has been spending time? It was not for deliberation about people’s life, but the life of Tokyo Electric Power Company. This is the true nature of this cold-blooded government.

For reconstruction, the Japanese need to change mind from “economy first” to “value first.” In different meaning from traditional nationalism, they need to remind of importance of restoring their own value, including kindness to others, adoration of nature and modesty about their power.