Japan: Limping along, one year after the tsunami

The people are doing their best. “If only their politicians and bureaucrats were not so incompetent.”

Japan has not yet recovered, said the Hong Kong South China Morning Post in an editorial. It was a year ago this week that the country was hit by the “triple whammy” of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, a monster 128-foot tsunami, and a nuclear reactor meltdown. Entire cities were swept into the ocean. Nearly 20,000 lives were lost, and hundreds of thousands of people were made homeless. Nobody could expect a country to bounce back in just a year. Still, one could expect more than the Japanese government’s “chaotic, fumbling response.” Hundreds of thousands of evacuees are still living in shelters, and the wreckage of smashed and splintered houses, boats, trees, and cars still forms unsightly mountains of debris across the land. The people are doing their best to resume their lives. “If only their politicians and bureaucrats were not so incompetent.”

Ordinary citizens have stepped into the breach, said the Tokyo Mainichi Daily News. Volunteerism first began to flourish here 17 years ago, after the Great Hanshin Earthquake struck Kobe. Now, the Great East Japan Earthquake has mobilized the whole country in an “unprecedented” display of civic-mindedness. The Japanese aren’t waiting for the government to come to their rescue. Nonprofit groups have sprung up everywhere to haul off debris, collect and distribute clothing, and even create camps for children displaced from the disaster area. “With politics at a standstill, each and every one of us must take action and do what we can.”

There are some things, though, that only the government can do, said the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun. And it has made questionable decisions. “Too much attention has been focused on the ‘concrete,’ namely buildings and other structures,” and not enough on helping people to “rebuild their shattered lives.” Restoring the fishing industry should have been a priority, but bureaucrats wasted time dickering about which ministry should pay for what. In the meantime, devastated towns are becoming oases of “jobless and elderly people.” Anxiety is taking a heavy toll, said the Tokyo Yomiuri Shimbun. Unemployment benefits for those who lost their jobs in the disaster will soon run out, the number of people “addicted to heavy drinking or gambling” has shot up, and mental-health facilities are overstretched. This anguish “could likely be eased if authorities provided a clear picture of the future.”

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“I will no longer tolerate the politics of indecision,” said Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda in The Sydney Morning Herald. My country’s “propensity to delay difficult and weighty decisions” has been holding us back. The time has come for action. A new agency has been given fast-track authority to create special reconstruction zones, stimulating new investment. The nuclear plants at Fukushima and elsewhere are being decommissioned, and we will pour resources into new energy alternatives. “Our goal is not simply to reconstruct the Japan that existed before March 11, 2011, but to build a new Japan.”

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