Rebuilding blocks

Many victims of Japans earthquake and tsunami will never see their homes rebuilt
Aug 6th 2011 | from the print edition

FOR the frequent visitor since the catastrophe, the progress looks remarkable. Much of the tenacious sludge that inundated the area has been scrubbed painstakingly away. In some obliterated towns, shops are open and stocked and have electricity. Roads are cleared, lined by man-made hills of rubble. Wrecked cars, crumpled like empty beer cans, are neatly stacked. On higher ground, smart colonies of shoeboxshaped prefabricated temporary housing are springing up. But for someone coming to the desolation for the first time, what still astounds is the sheer scale of the devastation wrought by the tsunami on March 11th; that, and the enormous obstacles in the way of rebuilding whole villages and towns. Take the former port of Onagawa, which nestled in a cove at the foot of the Oshika peninsula, near the city of Ishinomaki in Miyagi prefecture. It was an attractive little place, and prosperous from whaling, fishing, fish-processing and the benefits of having a nuclear power plant just 16km (10 miles) up the coast. Of its 10,000 inhabitants, the local government says 830 were left dead or missing. Almost all that remains of the town is a modern hospital, on a hill some 60 metres above the port. As the tsunami approached, people drove to the car park there to watchin terrified awe, but in presumed safety. Then the water swept up the valley

and the hill behind themand back down through the ground floor of the hospital, dragging patients, and the cars and people in front, out to sea. As everywhere along the coast, there are now mountains of debris. The prefectural government says that two-fifths has been cleared in Miyagi, and that in total there was the equivalent of 23 years of general waste. It looks much more than that. There is nowhere for it to go, so the rubble is either staying put or, like the people, moving into temporary holding areas. There it will one day be sifted and recycled or discarded. During the earthquake, the ground level dropped by a metre, while the tsunami destroyed Onagawas sea wall. At high tide each day much of the town is now underwater. The hospital reception posts the times of high tide, to save visitors from being stranded. So before rebuilding houses, shops and factories, the sea wall will have to be restored and heightened, and the ground raised. Higher sites have to be found inland for people to live. Nobutaka Azumi, Onagawas mayor, at work on a Sunday in impressive temporary offices put up since the disaster, states the obvious when he says rebuilding will be very expensive. He does not know whether the money will be available. That uncertainty is mirrored everywhere in the afflicted Tohoku region. On July 29th the government of Naoto Kan, the prime minister, announced a plan to spend 19 trillion ($220 billion) on rebuilding over the next five years. It was endorsing a report published in June by a Reconstruction Design Council that it had appointed. The document, Towards Reconstruction: Hope beyond the Disaster, is a sensible set of guidelines for deciding what should be rebuilt and where. But it implies countless individual decisions, each involving contentious choices. Just before the governments announcement, Jun Iio of the council told an Economist conference in Tokyo that reconstruction will be in full spate in five years and complete in ten. Tempering that optimism were his three reasons, besides the sheer magnitude of the task and a likely tussle for the power to allocate reconstruction funds, why reconstruction will be so difficult. One is Japans ageing, shrinking population. In Tohoku the outflow of young people has been accelerated by the disaster, which destroyed local industries. This is a chance to rebuild for Japans new demographic structure. But planning for that adds an additional layer of complexity. Second is the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. The government has sought a reckoning, by sacking officials in charge of nuclear safety. But the stricken reactors have yet to be stabilised and decommissioned, and the surrounding area decontaminated. More generally, Japan will have to adopt a new energy policy in the face of popular hostility to nuclear power. Onagawas plant was high enough above sea level to survive the tsunami without enormous damage. Indeed, the facility provided shelter for some of the homeless, and is said to have been the first place to

receive food supplies after the tsunami. But the nuclear plant is still shut down, and locals have mixed feelings about it restarting. Mr Iio also cited Japans twin problems of slow economic growth and a vast fiscal deficit. The governments announcement on July 29th had been expected to include a temporary tax increase to pay for reconstruction. With gross public debt at 200% of GDP, the fear is that the government will be unable to go on borrowing for ever. Yet no tax rise was announced. Many in Mr Kans own party, as well as the opposition, reject any tax increase. Partly this is out of fear it would push Japan back into recession. But the issue has also become embroiled in a political battle to get rid of Mr Kanwho promised in June to stand down yet still clings on. So Japans poisonous national politics are the third reason for gloom about the speed of reconstruction. For whom the phone tolls For Kuniko Yoshida, a resolutely cheerful old lady in an evacuation centre in a school gymnasium in Kesennuma, north of Onagawa, the delay is already irksome. She lost everything on March 11th. Now, sitting on a mat in her two square metres of floor space walled by cardboard boxes, she is waiting for a promised call to tell her if she has been allocated an escape from the gym, into temporary housing. When her telephone rings, friends from around the centre prick up their ears. It is a false alarm: her sister calling for news. The excitement is understandable. Mrs Yoshidas temporary next home may well be her last.