Aftermath of disaster

Japan is going to live with the aftermath of a quake for a very long time to come.

Japan is going to live with the aftermath of a quake — that is now believed to have killed at least 10,000 people — for a very long time to come. The full impact on the economy will not be known for some time, with the yen falling against the dollar; Japanese shares plunging; and some firms forced to suspend production. Far worse, however, is the toll taken by the disaster on the people caught up in it. In apocalyptic scenes reminiscent of Japan following the end of World War II — when the US conducted the atomic bombing of its cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effects of which Japan is still suffering from — people search through the remains of towns for family members who have vanished. Like their stricken inhabitants, entire settlements have been wiped off the map, two million households lack power in the freezing winter of the north and over a million households have no running water. Despite a huge international aid effort and the mobilisation of all available resources by the Japanese government, broken road and rail links have impeded efforts to deliver blankets, food and other supplies to victims.

To add to the horror of a situation created by the fifth worst quake of this century, is the continuing struggle to prevent a meltdown at a nuclear complex based in the northern quake zone. Fears of a major disaster forced experts to inject sea water into the core of one of three reactors in a desperate bid to lower temperatures. Some radiation leakage has been reported, but the Japanese government has been trying to allay fears that a major disaster is in the making, stating that levels of radiation in the air are so far low.

But even without this potential catastrophe, it will take the country a very long time to recover. The people who have lost family members may never get over the trauma and the process of rebuilding lives may take far longer than the mammoth task of restoring destroyed infrastructure or offering victims a return, to some degree, of normalcy in a situation where they have suddenly found everything in their lives destroyed, within a few terrible minutes.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 15^th, 2011.