Time is Running Out

 

The new conservative government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is making a new push to try and resolve the decades-long dispute with North Korea over the fate of a dozen Japanese it claims were abducted by North Korean operatives in the 1970s and 1980s and may be still alive.

The issue was not pressed very hard by the previous Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) government until the last months of its administration, but it has been raised anew by the more conservative Abe government.

Japan has a cabinet-level ministry devoted entirely to the abduction issue. The current state minister, Keiji Furuya, recently said that Tokyo would not lift bilateral sanctions against North Korea or resume aid until the issue was resolved, even if the North should agree to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

Furuya was in the U.S. a few weeks ago trying to raise awareness of the matter among Americans through symposiums held in Washington and New York. He took with him several relatives of those kidnapped by the North to tell their personal stories.

It may be a good time to be raising the issue, Tokyo thinks, as public attention in the U.S. and elsewhere has been drawn to North Korea as a result of its earlier nuclear bomb test and extreme bellicose threats to launch missiles at everyone. Moreover, he North recently condemned an American citizen of Korean extraction to fifteen years in prison.

The issue involves the fate of more than a dozen Japanese who were snatched by North Korean agents and spirited away to the North, ostensibly to train more agents in Japanese language and manners for future espionage. Most of these disappearances took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it wasn’t until North Korean defectors began appearing in the late 1990s that Tokyo became aware of their true fate.

In 2002 former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi flew to Pyongyang for a summit meeting with Kim Jong-il. At that meeting Kim admitted that North Korea had kidnapped Japanese and apologized for it. . Leader Kim said that 12 people were kidnapped. Of these, five were returned to Japan; the other eight died. Case closed.

Tokyo disputes this. It claims 17 people were kidnapped (including five that Pyongyang says never entered the country), five were returned, and 12 remain unaccounted for. It is skeptical of Pyongyang’s assertions that they died in mysterious “traffic accidents” or committed suicide.

The families of the abductees have become celebrities. The parents of Megumi Yokota, who was snatched in 1977 when she was only 13, appear on television, at press conferences and are interviewed for their opinions on politics, nuclear weapons and North Korea (the latter not complimentary). Many conservative politicians, including Shinzo Abe himself, wear the little blue ribbon in their lapel to show solidarity, much as Americans used to wear bracelets with POW names.

It was Abe who created the cabinet post for the abduction issue during his first term as prime minister from 2006 to 2007. The post languished after him. His successor Yasuo Fukuda showed little interest in the matter, as did the first two DPJ premiers. During the DPJ government, seven individuals held the abductee portfolio or were given it as part of other duties.

The last DPJ premier showed more interest in the issue. Yoshihiko Noda met with the families and indicated a willingness to fly to Pyongyang if necessary to move things along. He also wore the little blue lapel ribbon. However, the momentum for the DPJ was lost in its big electoral debacle.

Minister Furuya is making preparations to meet with North Korean counterparts in Mongolia’s capital, which is a neutral place as Mongolia is not a party to the six-party talks aimed at ending the impasse. Pyongyang is reluctant to reopen the issue as it assumed that the elder Kim’s confession and apology more than a decade ago was sufficient.

In another recent development, it was reported that a senior advisor to the prime minister, Isao Ijima, had flown to Pyongyang on a still undisclosed mission. He was a top aide to Junichiro Koizumi when he made his famous 2002 visit to Pyongyang and summit meeting with the late Kim Jong-il.

It is no exaggeration to say that resolution of the kidnappings has become the most important foreign policy issue for Japan and the main obstacle to normalization of relations with North Korea. Over the years Tokyo has cut off all contacts and even minimal trade in such things as clams plus cracking down on remittances from Koreans living in Japan.

The abductions are a touchy matter for Washington, which would really like to see it disappear as it complicates the united front on what it considers the much larger question of disarming the North of its nuclear weapons armory. Former President George W. Bush found this out the hard way when he first met with Megumi’s parents and then removed North Korea from the list of nations sponsoring terrorism, which many Japanese considered a betrayal.

It complicates negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program. In the past Tokyo has refused to pay its share of promised heavy oil shipments claiming that Pyongyang is dragging its feet on resolving the kidnappings. That in turn gave the North an excuse to claim that parties to the six-party talks were reneging on their commitments.

But for Japanese it is more than just an abstract geopolitical issue. It tugs at the heart strings. Who cannot feel the indignity of 13-year school girl old kidnapped on a public street returning home from school badminton practice or the years in which her parents were totally ignorant of her true fate. “It was like she disappeared in a puff of smoke,” her mother once said.

And there is a new urgency as the abductees that are still living are obviously not getting any younger. The oldest, Yutaka Kume, taken in 1977 when he was 51, would now be approaching 90. The youngest, Megumi, would be 50 if she were still living (Pyongyang says she committed suicide when she was about 30). Time is running out.

 

 

 

The Pueblo and Benghazi

Comparisons have been made, especially by conservatives, that the terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi last September was another Watergate. In fact, the Pueblo Incident in 1968 best defines what happened in that Libyan city.

The capture of the USS Pueblo by North Korean patrol boats received relatively little attention in the U.S. at the time and was quickly forgotten. This despite the fact that it was the first time a US Navy ship had surrendered in 150 years, and despite the fact that one sailor was killed and 82 other crew members imprisoned and tortured for nearly one year.

The USS Pueblo was a navy intelligence surveillance ship captured by North Korean warships in international waters off the coast near Wonsan. The 82 members of the crew were taken from the ship and held captive for 11 months then released after Washington “apologized” for the intrusion into Korean waters, an apology it repudiated just as soon as the last captive set foot in South Korea.

Today the attack would probably be labeled a “terrorist attack,” even though it was perpetrated by elements of North Korea’s regular military.

The ship was kept in Wonsan harbor until 1999 when it was towed around the Korean peninsula (unmolested by US or South Korean navies) and ended up as a floating museum in Pyongyang. Washington officially considers the Pueblo a captive ship and low-ranking negotiations continue to take place for its repatriation.

Almost all of the charges that have been laid, fairly or unfairly, against the Obama administration for the loss of four American lives, including the ambassador, can be seen in the Pueblo Incident:

Complacency  The navy sent the Pueblo off the coast of North Korea unprotected even though it was practically defenseless. It had over-confidently assumed that the unstated agreement with the Soviet Union that neither would molest each other’s spy ships if they stayed carefully in international waters also applied with North Korea.

The Board of Inquiry that was held after the crew was released made that point explicitly: The major factor in the capture was the “sudden collapse of a premise that had been assumed at every level of responsibility and upon which every other aspect of the mission had been based – freedom of the high seas.”

This fatal misreading of North Korea’s respect for the niceties of international law can be gauged from the fact that Pyongyang sent commandoes into Seoul to assassinate President Park Chung-hee just two days before they captured the Pueblo (the current South Korean President’s mother was killed in the attack).

Although packed with highly sensitive surveillance and communications gear, the Pueblo was ill-equipped to destroy classified materials quickly. They had only axes and sledgehammers to destroy metal safes and other heavy gear. The one death was a sailor machined-gunned while trying to throw weighted bags of classified material overboard.

Tardy Response  By the time higher Pacific command realized the Pueblo was in serious trouble, it was too late to provide effective help. Probably the closest air force unit was the 347^th Tactical Fighter Wing based at Yokota AFB in Japan and Osan AFB just south of Seoul.

That outfit was then standing nuclear alert at Osan, meaning it was prepared to take off at a moment’s notice to deliver a tactical nuclear bomb. By the time they were alerted, it was too late to off-load the nukes and upload the conventional ordinance. No US Navy ships were in the vicinity.

One senior officer, the then commander of naval force s Japan and a rear admiral, was eventually reprimanded for failing to properly plan for effective backup support in the eventuality that an essentially unarmed American ship would come under attack.

Cover Up  In the aftermath of the attack on the Pueblo the Johnson administration claimed that the classified gear captured from the Pueblo was “not vital”. This was disingenuous. According to later intelligence reports, plane-loads of classified gear were in the air heading toward Moscow within hours of the Pueblo’s capture.

Among the material allegedly captured by the North Koreans and shared with their Soviet allies were code books. It is also reported that the Soviets gained about three to five years in the race for advanced communications technology because of the Pueblo’s capture.

Political Fallout  There was, in fact, very little. The reason could likely be the date of the incident: January 23, 1968. Within two weeks, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam would breakout and would dominate the nation’s headlines for weeks. In March President Johnson declined to run for re-election, but that had more to do with the Vietnam War than the Pueblo.

Congress didn’t get around to holding any kind of hearings until 1989, when the incident was a comfortable 20 years in the past. It also delved into the shooting down of the American EC121 spy plane with even greater loss of life in 1969.

Accountability  When the 82 captured sailors were released in December, 1968, they were initially treated as heroes, but soon forgotten. A navy Board of Inquiry held in January, 1969, recommended bringing court-martial charges against the Pueblo’s captain, Commander Lloyd Bucher.  After all, he had surrendered his ship.

But the charges against Bucher and two other officers were soon dismissed. The convening admiral said that the crew members had suffered enough and that Bucher had behaved admirably during captivity. “There is enough blame to go around for everybody,” he said.  Probably much the same thing can be said about the Benghazi attack.

Todd Crowell is a longtime foreign correspondent in Asia now based in Tokyo and formerly a member of the 347^th Fighter-Bomber wing.

Behind the Mask

 

In his first four months in office Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has not made a false move – until now. He and his government waded knee-deep into historical revisionism and right-wing ultra-nationalism, bringing down the first real criticism of his new Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since it won a landslide election in December.

In late April, when Asians pay respects to the dead, four members of the cabinet led by Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso and more than 150 members of parliament made a pilgrimage to the Yasukuni Shrine in downtown Tokyo.  It honors the spirits Japanese war dead, but also includes those of 14 Class-A war criminals condemned and executed for plotting to invade neighboring countries.

Abe was not among them, but his statements in defense of their visit were perhaps more belicose than they had to be. “My ministers will not yield to any kind of intimidation.” He told parliament defiantly. It is natural, he said, to express respect to those who have died for their county. He donated a tree as a personal offering.

The visits were condemned not just from South Korea and China, as one might expect, but also from opinion leaders in the United State and abroad. Both the Washington Post and New York Times denounced the visits, especially as they came at a sensitive time when relations with between Japan and its neighbors are strained and North Korea is making threats.

Washington made no official protest itself, but can hardly be pleased with this sudden shift toward Japanese nationalism. Its desires to bring Seoul and Tokyo closer together to form a united front against North Korea provocations are constantly undercut by these unnecessary and provocative pilgrimages to the shrine.

The last time the Yasukuni roiled relations with neighbors was during the long (by Japanese standards) administration of Junichiro Koizumi, who made annual visits to the shrine in his official capacity. Ironically it was his successor, Abe, who restored relations and good will with China by declining to visit the shrine, something he now says he deeply regrets.

The Yasukuni Shrine has long been connected with state Shinto and an ultranationalist and inflammatory interpretation of Japan’s actions in World War II as being a wholly selfless effort to liberate Asia of European colonialism. Needless to say, other countries occupied by Japan don’t see things that way.

During the first months of his administration, Abe successfully suppressed what the Financial Times called in an editorial his hidden “inner nationalism.” His plan was to concentrate laser-like on economic revival building up popularity, well aware that his unpopular focus on history and the constitution had undercut his government and led to his resignation after only one year in office in 2007.

It may be that his government’s continuing popularity as expressed in public opinion polls that show that more than 70 percent of Japanese approve of his initial moves to revive the economy, called “abenomics”  may be going to his head and that he, to again quote the Financial Times, “let the mask slip.”

The general election for half of the House of Councillors, the upper house of Japan’s bicameral parliament scheduled for July, was also said to exert some restraint, as Abe is very keen on winning. But the government seems to believe more and more that the election is in the bag. The recent landslide election of the LDP candidate in a upper house bye election on April 28 seems to support that notion.

On that same day, the government held what was billed as first “National Sovereignty Day.” The date was said to commemorate the 61^st anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco in 1952, which restored Japan sovereignty and ended the American Occupation (save for Okinawa which was returned only in 1972.)

Speaking in the presence of the Emperor and Empress, Abe said “the next task for us is to revise the Constitution” That goal called attention to another conservative obsession, revising the constitution that was written by Americans during the Occupation. It seemed to have lot to do with the elevation of the date, April 28, which previously had no special meaning to most Japanese.

Amending or abolishing the constitution in favor of a new one has been a hobby horse of Japanese conservatives, including Abe for years. They say that it is humiliating to be governed under a document written mainly by foreign occupiers. The extreme nationalist Shintaro Ishihara says he would have ditched the whole thing as soon as Japan was free to do so.

Ishihara is not a fringe figure. He is the co-leader of the Japan Restoration Party, which with 51 seats is the third largest bloc in the lower house of parliament. The other co-leader, Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, shares his feelings about changing the charter.

Abe has already had meeting with leaders of this party and the two could easily put together the two-thirds majority needed to change the document (whether the two thirds could be mustered in the upper house even after an electoral victory is debatable.) Their first move will be to change that rule to allow a simple majority enough to approve amendments subject to a national plebiscite.

Although most attention is focused on repealing or altering the famous “no war” Article 9, the LDP’s proposed alternative charter, made public a year ago even before the general election, goes much further in replacing what it terms foreign universal values with more traditional Japanese values, as they view them.

Many will be watching what the new government does in August, the traditional time, linked to Japan’s surrender on August 15,  when Japanese leaders make official visits to the Yasukuni shrine if in fact they are going to make them. Whether they make the visits may depend on how the Japanese public reacts to this recent testing of the political waters.

 At the moment there are no current public opinion polls to test the public reaction (though much commentary on Sunday talks shows was negative). One thing is fairly certain. The Abe administration will be more strongly influenced by local opinion than that of its neighbors.

Baroness Hong Kong

As the swinging 70s gave way to the more anxious 1980s, people in Hong Kong became increasingly apprehensive about a fast-approaching, though once comfortably distant, date – 1997, the expiry date for the vast (by Hong Kong definition) hinterland acquired in 1898 on a 99-year lease and still known as the “New” Territories.

Many businessmen were growing anxious about the uncertain impact of this impending change would have on business basics: would land leases be extended beyond that date (virtually all land in Hong Kong then as now is “crown” land and parceled out on long-term leases?) Would contracts be honored? More to the point: What did China intend to do with Hong Kong?

It was against this background that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made her famous first visit to Beijing in September, 1982, to begin negotiating the future of the British colony with the Chinese Communist government of Deng Xiaoping. The meeting did not go that well.

Thatcher went to Beijing hoping to persuade China’s leaders that continuing British administration of the territory was necessary for the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong. The chaos of the Cultural Revolution, which essentially ended only with Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, was still a vivid memory, China’s revolutionary opening and reforms only just beginning.

She knew relatively little about China or Hong Kong, although she was undoubtedly briefed that China did not recognize as valid the 19^th century treaties that had ceded Hong Kong island and the tip of Kowloon peninsula to Britain “in perpetuity” after the Opium Wars. She must also have known that   Hong Kong could not continue as a viable entity without the New Territories.

The prime minister,  however, seemed to think she had a duty to at least try to uphold the validity of 19^th century treaties, that she claimed were still valid under any consideration of international law. The issue came down to sovereignty. Would Britain keep it beyond 1997, or would they have to surrender the entire territory?

For his part, Deng Xiaoping was unmovable on the notion that China would resume full sovereignty. Anything less would make him complicit in the treasonous territorial giveaways of the late Qing Dynasty. Otherwise, he was willing to grant generous concessions guaranteeing Hong Kong’s way of life and liberties post-1997 under his famous but never before tried one-nation, two systems formulation.

Much has been made in retrospectives following Mrs. Thatcher’s recent death of how the “Iron Lady” had met her match in Deng. This is unfortunate. To be sure Deng, a former revolutionary war commander, was a tough hombre. But in truth Thatcher had a weak hand, which she was smart enough to understand. As the British would say, continued colonial administration of Hong Kong was just not on.

It took two more years of difficult negotiations for the British to finally come around to this position. They were trying times. In October, 1983, when it appeared that negotiations might collapse, the Hong Kong dollar began to plunge in value. That led to the pegging of the currency at 7.8 to the U.S. dollar, a peg that continues to this day.

In 1984 London formally agreed to surrender sovereignty over the entire territory, which Thatcher confirmed in a letter to Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang. Later she made her second trip to Beijing to formally sign the Joint Declaration at a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People.

Thatcher had been out of office for seven years when the actual transition ceremony took place at midnight June 30, 1997, so she didn’t have to sit on the dais and watch the Union flag lowered for the last time. That role fell to newly minted Prime Minister Tony Blair. She was probably happy to be out of it.

In 2007 Thatcher gave an interview that expressed “regret” that she could not have persuaded China to accept continued British rule. But there is no shame in playing a leading part in what was one of the most enlightened yet practical acts of diplomacy in modern times. It gave Hong Kong people far more autonomy over their affairs than any of the so-called “autonomous regions” in China proper.

Most of the commentary on Thatcher’s death both in Hong Kong and China was laudatory. “We have no reason not to show our respect to this woman who signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration,” wrote the Global Times, an affiliate of the official government organ the China Daily.

Actually, the British political figure that Beijing truly hated was the last governor Christopher Patten (appointed by Thatcher’s successor John Major). He took a confrontational attitude tone with Beijing which hit back with such endearing terms as “sinner of a thousand years”. It will be interesting to see how the Chinese press handles his death, if it acknowledges it at all.

As Hong Kong and China look back on the nearly sixteen years since Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty, both find their worst fears unrealized but so too their best hopes. Many Hong Kongers, though recognizing that their basic liberties are intact, are still disappointed that the territory is only partially democratic with only vague promises if more to come later.

For its part, Beijing is happy that the territory has not become, as it had feared, a base to subvert the communist rule on the mainland. But it is a source of disappointment that their punctilious observation of the terms of the Joint Declaration has not earned them much love. Hong Kong people still think of themselves as Hong Kongers first and Chinese (as in citizens of the People’s Republic of China) second.

Indeed, tensions between Hong Kong people and mainland Chinese visitors have been rising in recent years as newly rich Chinese jack up property prices and hog space in maternity wards to give birth to “anchor babies”. Of late, protestors have taken to displaying the old British colonial flag. It is meant mostly to irritate Beijing, not nostalgia for colonial days. But one imagines that Thatcher would take a quiet satisfaction from the sight.

*Todd Crowell is the author of Farewell, My Colony: Last Days in the life of British Hong Kong

 

 

 

 

Abe's Juggernaut

 

Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt began his presidency in 1933 with an unprecedented burst of legislation and other government initiatives to try to stem the tide of the Great Depression, the “first hundred days” has been the benchmark for judging every new administration. Few if any have lived up to that demanding standard.

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is an entirely different kind of politician from the American model, facing an entirely different situation. Yet the start of his new government, which won a landslide majority in mid-December, has the much the same feel of the first frenzied 100 days, a benchmark that it passed on April 4.

In those 100 days Abe has not made one misstep. No cabinet member has resigned for making a gaffe or for even a minor scandal. It is about this time that the cabinet’s approval ratings begin to start the long decline into the teens leading to the boss’s resignation. The Abe cabinet’s ratings are actually climbing – 65 percent approval in the Asahi poll; 72 percent in the Yomiuri. It all seems very un-Japanese.

Abe knows the drill from personal experience, as he was the first of the recent spate of one-year prime ministers, serving from September, 2006, until he resigned in September 2007. At the time of his resignation, he was suffering from deep disapproval ratings, which translated into a major defeat for his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in that year’s House of Councillors election.

So it was a surprise when his party decided to give him a second chance, and it is evident that he used his several years in the political wilderness to reflect both on his own mistakes as premier but also, as an opposition member of parliament, the mistakes made by the predecessor government. He is said to carry around a booklet with notes on his mistakes as a reminder.

Of course, his government’s most far-reaching100-days initiative was his plan to bring the Japanese economy out of the doldrums, dubbed “Abenomics” even before the new government took office. He pushed for the early resignation of the Governor of the Bank of Japan and had installed his own nominee, Haruhiko Kuroda to head the central bank.

Kuroda has lost no time seeking to implement Abe’s inflationary monetary policy through aggressive buying of government bonds, essentially doubling its holdings in two years and doubling the amount of money in circulation. “This is monetary easing in an entirely new dimension,” Kuroda said at a press conference after announcing the bank’s decision on April 4. The bank is aiming for a 2 percent rate of inflation.

These plans of course, are not without critics, who wonder whether the injection of this much money into the economy will spark a corresponding increase in demand, leading to higher growth and more jobs. True or not, the decision feels like – indeed, it is – bold action, which sits well with the population used to the more timorous efforts of previous governments.

The concern over increasing demand is one reason for the second pillar of Abenomics, namely .more spending on public works and structural reformation. Neither h as really got rolling as yet, leaving some to worry whether the government is placing too much attention on monetary policy, to the exclusion of other tools. The spending is said to have opposition in the Ministry of Finance, which wants to return to deficit reduction as soon as possible..

Success depends a lot on bending the civil service to the will of the politicians. Ending “bureaucrat-led politics” was a main theme of the previous government, but it went about it in a clumsy way that alienated key civil servants needed to implement its programs. The Abe government has shown more finesse in managing the bureaucracy, partly by co-opting important bureaucrats into policy making.

Structural reform seems is more distant. The last real effort to reform the bureaucracy was former premier Junichiro Koizumi’s plan to privatize the postal service, a plan that died on the vine. There is, however,  a good chance for major restructuring of the electric power system, breaking the monopolies that Japan’s ten utilities have over individual rate payers.

Such a reform, recently endorsed by the cabinet, has momentum because of the unpopular rate hikes that utilities need to cover the costs of importing fossil fuels to replace the power from the 48 nuclear reactors that are shut down. More money is needed to comply with stricter safety measures to be promulgated this summer so that some of the plants can return on line.

Nor has Abe neglected foreign policy. His administration kicked off with an unprecedented diplomatic blitz that took high-level LDP leaders, including Abe himself, to visit half a dozen Asian countries. Abe has maintained the pace by visiting the United States, Mongolia, and soon a trip to Moscow.

It is widely predicted that he and President Vladimir Puten will reach an agreement resolving the long-standing territorial dispute over the southern Kuril islands, known to Japan as the “Northern Territories.” The proposal on the table would essentially divide the four disputed islands between the two countries.

If Abe is able to come back with such an agreement, it would be a triumph and a major boost for his party in the run-up to the July election for half of the House of Coincillors, the upper house of Japan’s bicameral parliament. Considering that Abe resigned his first government after a poor showing in the 2007 election, any major success this time would certainly be sweet. “I cannot die without winning,” Abe has said.

One of the lessons Abe learned from his first tour as PM, was to put domestic, economic issues ahead of his conservative hobby horses, such as amending the American-written constitution and watering down its pacifistic provisions. He has shown considerable self-restraint during the first 100 days from pushing these ideological issues, but he had not abandoned them.

Once the upper house election is out of the way, he may pivot back to these issues feeling that having satisfied the public’s main economic concerns with his initial initiatives, that the public will give him some slack when it comes to his more ideological priorities.

 

'We Want Our Lives Back'

Weeds poke up through the main street of Iitate village in Fukushima prefecture, a once thriving dairy farming community. The local agricultural cooperative office is padlocked; traffic lights are darkened, as there is very little traffic aside from the occasional truck traversing Highway 389.

The post office is closed, and there are no deliveries for the simple reason that there are no customers left to deliver mail to. All of the villages 6,800 residents were evacuated in the aftermath of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami that precipitated multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station.

Iitate was too far inland to suffer the effects of the disastrous tsunami that wiped out whole villages along the coastline, but it was perfectly positioned, 25 miles north west of the power plant, to absorb the full impact of the radioactive fallout.

Immediately after the nuclear accident, Tokyo established a mandatory evacuation zone 20 km surrounding the stricken plant. But radiation is no respecter of circles that men draw on maps, and the radiation plume was blown by prevailing winds and channeled by natural valleys to fall on Iitate and on surrounding towns or parts of them.

Yet it wasn’t until late April, fully five weeks after the accident, that the central government ordered the evacuation of virtually all residents.  The villagers dispersed to neighboring towns and cities even farther away. The 3,000 dairy cows for which the village was famous were taken to the slaughter house shortly thereafter.

Despite the forced evacuation, Iitate is not entirely a ghost town. About 500 people commute from their evacuation homes into Iitate to work at several companies with offices there. They leave the village at the end of the day. The idea is that as they work indoors except when commuting, they are exposed to less radiation than they would have experienced spending the full day there.

The local nursing home, with 80 residents, was never evacuated, as it was felt that the trauma for the elderly residents of moving elsewhere was worse than exposure to the radiation. It was probably wise as more than 500 residents of hospitals and nursing homes in the 20- exclusion zone are said to have died after their removal, becoming, in a sense,  the only fatalities from the nuclear accident.

Mayor Norio Kanno keeps tabs on the evacuees, most of whom live in temporary housing within an hour’s commute of the village and says that they are increasingly  discouraged , anxious and depressed there being no prospects of returning anytime soon. The village once had about 1,500 households, with several generations living under one roof. Now that number has doubled as families have been broken and family members dispersed in different directions.

The ambient radiation in Iitate when it evacuated two years ago was about 22 millisieverts, accumulated over one year period. The average under normal conditions is about one millisievert from natural radiation. Although decontamination efforts are moving slowly, Kanno says that the levels have fallen to about 10-12 millisieverts over a year.

Decontamination moves in fits and starts. Workmen wipe down buildings with damp cloths and hose drainage systems with high-pressure water. They clear the top soil of school yards farms  and other businesses, although no decision has been made as yet where to safely store the growing mounds of bags filled with contaminated dirt.

It is an endless task as contaminates are blown back into the town and residences from the lush green forests that surround them. Yet the mayor says he can’t give up. “We have a duty to clean up and decontaminate this land.” It is hard for people to accept the idea that they might never be able to return to their ancestral homes.

What level does it need to fall before residents feel it is safe to come back? Kanno doesn’t know. Is it 5 millisieverts or one millisievert? “I tell people that if they hold out for one [millisievert] they may have to wait for years.” One of his surveys showed about 60 percent want to return home; another 30 percent will probably never return.

By necessity, Kanno has become something of an expert on living with radiation and the real impact of nuclear power accidents on civilian lives. Natural disasters, such as tornedoes, typhoons or even earthquakes tend to bring people together, he says; nuclear accidents tend to drive people apart.

“Every individual looks on radiation differently, so people have different anxieties and fears and reactions, often depending on age and gender. “A middle-aged man looks on radiation differently than a young mother,” he noted. Everyone tends to be skeptical of official assurances that certain dose levels are safe.

In the aftermath of a natural disaster, people emerge from their shelters, look around at the devastation then start to begin to repair the damage, even if they have to start from ground zero. “In our case, we’re just trying to get back to zero,” the mayor said.

At least the Iitate villagers have some hope that they can eventually return, even if it takes a few more years. Areas inside the 20 km mandatory evacuation zone may not be safe to inhabit for decades. Police man roadblocks coming into the exclusion zones, with residents allowed back in on very short visit s to retrieve personal items.

Efforts to obtain compensation from the Tokyo Electric Power Co., owner of the Fukushima reactors are still in the initial stages with very little money flowing into their pockets despite a national disaster relief fund has been established by the national government to meet these claims.
“Many of the refugees say they don’t want the money. ‘We just want to get our lives back’.”  Unfortunately says Kanno, “that is impossible”.

 

They Felt the Pain

Anyone who was in Japan on March 11, 2011, when the 9 pt. Richter Scale Earthquake struck, has a story to tell. As for myself, I was in a downtown travel agency, ironically making arrangements to leave Japan on a short trip, Making my way to the railroad station to find a way home, I saw one of those big screens repeating the word “Sendai” a large city 200 miles to the north.

I thought to myself: “If it is this bad here, Sendai must be devastated!”

In fact, Sendai, survived the earthquake and tsunami with relatively little damage. The same could not be said of the numerous  much smaller cities and villages hugging the Pacific Coast that were demolished by the quake, and more importantly the 13 meter-high wall of water that came crashing through shortly after.

Nearly two years after what the Japanese call the “triple disaster” of earthquake tsunami and the multiple nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, some of the stories are now being told in books, of which perhaps the best in English is Strong in the Rain (Palgrave, Macmillan, 205 pages) by two veteran Japan correspondents, Lucy Birmingham and David McNeill.

No definitive count has yet been made, or perhaps can ever be made, of the number of people who died on that day, many presumably swept away in the deluge. The general figure of about 20,000 is used. The tsunami was particularly hard on the elderly, who formed a large part of the population in this rather depressed part of Japan.

One intriguing figure in the book amidst that large number is 575, which is the number of elderly, infirm and ill people whose condition was too delicate to withstand the trauma of evacuation from hospitals or nursing homes that were located within the 20 km mandatory evacuation zone surrounding the nuclear plant. It is a useful figure to keep in mind when one hears that no deaths resulted from meltdowns.

The authors’ approach is anecdotal. They tell the story through individuals, such as Katsunobu Sakurai, the mayor of the town of Minomisoma, or David Chumreonlert, a Thai-American who was teaching English or Kai Watanabe an ordinary worker at the Fukushima nuclear plant, even Corp. Kevin Miller, a U.S. Marine who was among the many American servicemen mobilized to help.

The confused and chaotic response in the early days of the disaster is surprising considering how vulnerable Japan is to earthquakes and other natural disasters. The country has an extensive earthquake monitoring and prediction system, but nothing similar to the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The nuclear crisis was handled mostly on the fly from the prime minister’s office in Tokyo.

The most useful service was probably provided by the Self Defense Forces (Japan’s military). Early on Prime Minister Naoto Kan mobilized about 100,000 troops, nearly half of the total armed forces for duty in the stricken area, where they did the gruesome but necessary work of recovering the bodies as well as providing shelter and food for the many who had lost their homes.

The U.S. pitched in providing some 24,000 service men drawn from the bases around Japan in what was billed as Operation Tomodachi (friend in Japanese), and may have been the country’s largest disaster response. It was largely unheralded in the U.S. but not forgotten by the Japanese, whose respect for both the Japanese and US military was enhanced.

This part of Japan has a history of devastating tsunami stretching back as far as the 8^th Century. Yet the planning was haphazard at best. A few small towns were prescient to build breakwaters and sea walls that were tall and strong enough to withstand the force of the tsunami; many others were simply bowled over by the wall of water.

The authors recount the often wrenching decision that many foreigners living in Japan had to make in response to the crisis. Many embassies, though not the American, moved out of Tokyo or advised their citizens to leave the capital or Japan entirely. In all, about 30 foreign missions left Tokyo in the first two weeks of the disaster, setting up temporary operations out of hotel rooms in Osaka and Kobe. They would filter back into Tokyo as the fears of radiation receded and workmen seemed to be making progress in stabilizing the nuclear plants.

Those that left Japan earned the local sobriquet “flygin”, a play on gaijin the word for foreigner sometimes leaving their Japanese business associates or fellow teachers in the lurch. In their defense, many were hearing heartfelt pleas from family and relatives abroad, frightened by often sensational accounts of radiation heading to Tokyo, to get out of Japan immediately. Many found the pleas hard to resist.

Strong in the Rain is a relatively thin volume (fewer than 200 pages), more in the line of a first draft of history rather than a definitive account of what’s been called the worst disaster in Japan’s post-war history. And it is fairly comprehensive, covering the tsunami, the nuclear disaster, reactions in the rest of Japan and abroad, even funeral arrangements and an epilogue of where the story tellers are now.

Many mysteries are still buried in the ruble of the devastated coastline or deep in the bowels of the nuclear reactors, where technicians are still don’t know the exact condition and precise location of the melted cores. The authors have done a good job of collecting stories. There are many more to be told.