Aftermath of the 11 March Disaster

The Time Magazine of 2 May has listed the World's Most Influential People, and there are two from Japan out of the 100. Both are there in connection with the "March 11" disaster. Dr.Kanno Takeshi is one of them. He is here because of his insight into the danger of tsunami, and his quick decision to evacuate as many of the in-patients as possible to the uppermost floor of his hospital, though he could not save all of them. He 'risked his life for others' and was the last to be lifted by a helicopter. Many more stories will be written of the dedication and courage like his after things have returned to normalcy.
But it is much too early to talk of the 'aftermath'. Since the "March 11" we have experienced about 2,000 after-quakes in Eastern Japan alone, and they are only those that have been felt by the human bodies. True, this is a country of quakes. But the normal figure for all of Japan is roughly 1,500 in a year. They have become a little less frequent in the past week or so, but we are far from certain if the moment of major quakes is over for now.
And look at what the tsunami has done to the coastal regions in Eastern Japan. As of 27 April, a month and a half on, more than 14,000 have died and more than 11,000 are still missing. Many fishing ports which have been playing an important role in our economy have been washed away, together with innumerable fishing boats estimated to be around 20,000. They belong not only to the region but are from all over the country, as the sea there is a very fertile fishing ground, one of the world's three major ones, where the cold current from the north meets the warm current from the south. Moreover some of the larger fishing boats have gone very far, to the most remote corners of the world, and are expected to return sooner rather than later to the ports without wharfs, storehouses and even the ice-making factories.
Fishing is only one example. The population of the region is getting less, and aging. There are few vibrant urban areas which can be the centres for rescue activities with their storing and housing and transport facilities. The administrative network is there, but some of the offices have been damaged, and, experts say, the machinery itself has been already weakened by the merger of towns and villages into bigger cities in recent years, with the bureaucracy less in touch with the ground reality.
This is the season for the transplanting of rice, but many rice fields are under mud, with salt in it. The super-express trains have been restored, but the they run in the interior part of the region. The reconstruction of the coastal traffic is almost left untouched, giving a great damage to the tourist industry which has boasted of a beautiful coastal view.
What has attracted our attention is that a number of factories which have been supplying parts to various industries, such as automobiles, have been damaged, and this has triggered a stoppage of the parent industries, accounting for the sharp decrease in the export surplus for March. An economic system which appeared to be very efficient has proved to be vulnerable.
In the midst of all this, and the nuclear plant accident, the OECD has said that Japan should raise its consumption tax from the present 5%. It is a startlingly unscientific message. 5% may be low, but did they also compare the cost of education, of medical care, of housing? Did they know that our income tax is not progressive? Did they know that our bank deposit generates practically no interest, or that employment opportunities have gone, and more so because of "March 11"? Raising the rate would be fatal. Of the Governors of the three Prefectures hardest hit, who were present at a conference on reconstruction, 23 April, only one supported the idea of more taxation. They know better.

Piccaso's 'Guernica'

We bid farewell to Bilbao and came down to Madrid, the last leg of our journey. The Talgo train left Bilbao, and reached Madrid(Chamartin), on time. It seems to have made it up when we were nearing Madrid by making 245 km/h. I had never travelled that fast by land.
Our visit to Madrid was focused on some museums. First it was the Queen Sophia Museum(Museo Reina Sofia), opposite Madrid(Atocha) station, where Picasso's 'Guernica' was housed. It was in Room 206.06. It was alone there, but enough, it is a huge painting. People were visiting the room, and I was happy to be with them there. This was my second encounter, hopefully not the last. This time I thought that it was all cries and pain and sorrow. But I wanted to know what the lamp and the light, both in the upper-middle part, are about. An introduction in several pages was hanging at the door. Six books were listed in there as a bibliography, and I saw three of them were published in this century. Research is going on still. In the adjoining room there were 26 paintings by Piccaso more or less related to 'Geurnica'. A short documentary film titled 'Espana 1936' was being shown in still another room.
The Prado is so well-known that I will not speak about it. I will briefly dwell on Museo Naval. I make it a point to visit Naval/Maritime museums wherever I go. I regret we do not have many of this sort in Japan. We spent a couple of hours in this well-designed museum on our last day, and got attracted by a number of items. Let me talk about one thing that impressed me most. It is a group of charts(cartographic works), that shed light on how the Spanish maritime empire flourished in the early modern periods. One would not be surprised to see the maps showing the intensity of trade between Spain herself and Cuba or Dominica. But what about the maps showing that the coming and going between Mexico or Peru on one hand and the far-away Philippines on the other was equally intense. Japanese historians have discussed how the Pacific was utilized as of the mid-19th century. This was in connection with the arrival of the US fleet to put pressure on Japan to open up. It came not via the Pacific but via the Indian Ocean, as there was no established sea route across the Pacific, in this case the north Pacific. I would like to know if the question of the maritime trade between the Spanish possessions across the Pacific was sufficiently brought into the discussion.

In A Little Spanish Town...

s is well known, when the Germans intervened in the Spanish Civil War and bombed, among others, a small town in the Spanish Basque called Gernika on 26 April 1937, Pablo Picasso drew up one of his masterpieces "Guernica" for the Paris Expo later in that year. I had an opportunity of seeing it at New York in 1976 where it was in exile when Spain was under Franco's dictatorial regime. It was my dream to visit the town itself since then, and now the opportunity presented itself. It was just one hour's travel from Bilbao.
Gernika, or correctly Gernika-Lumo, is a small town, to be covered in a few minutes' walk from one end to another, and we could easily find the Gernika Peace Museum, our main target. It is a small museum, but very well organized. On the first floor, you will feel as if you were really being bombed with sounds and lights against a narration. You are also led to step on thick transparent glasses on the floor below which you will see the debris of the bombing. The bombing started in the evening. It destroyed most of the buildings in the town except those on the hillside. It was a Monday, the day of the weekly market.
On the upper floor you are introduced to a number of programmes for peace which are being tested at various places on earth. In this sense the Museum is looking beyond Gernika and the Spanish Civil War. On the basement you will find a number of photographs on all the walls, of the concentration camps Franco's regime built all over the country. It was a long period covering almost four decades, when innumerable number of people who wanted to have democracy in Spain suffered. As we were told at the Museum on Gernika, 'Nobody gave them back the happy, open town they had once known'.
At the same time one cannot help wondering whether this long-time existence of a repressive regime in Spain had not influenced the twenty-odd Latin American countries.
The Museum can be contacted by museoa@gernika-lumo.net
Gernika has initiated a series of indiscriminate bombing, like Chongqing, Dresden, many others, and ultimately Hiroshima. Or was it the end? At the same time one is astonished to know that Chernobyl occurred on the same 26 April, 49 years later.
Outside the museum we went to see the life-size copy in ceramics of Picasso's original painting. We also saw a small stone bridge called Renteria Bridge across a river on the outskirts of the town, which was the main target of the bombing to block the way the citizens and refugees could flee from the inferno, but the bridge stood it. One should stand like this really.

Our Spanish Journey

We arrived in Spain on 14, and left on 24 March. The Alhambra Palace in Granada is probably the most well-known tourist spot, and we went to see it on the third day of our arrival. Although it was off-season, a huge number of people were there. Most of them we casually talked to expressed their warm sympathy to what happened, or what was on-going in Japan. We talked, for example, with Austrian ladies, who said their country was affected by Chernobyl, the fear of a nuclear accident. We discussed tsunami with Malaysian ladies. We will remember those conversations for a long time to come.
Alhambra, of course, was the last resort of the Muslim power in the Iberian Peninsula, and is considered to be the great monument of the intermingling of different cultures. I would like to put it here, however, that we were more impressed by Alcazares in Sevilla which we visited two days afterwards. Partly it was because it was not as extensive and so was manageable, so to speak, for tourists. To a great extent it was because of the beautiful weather. But the architecture, gardens, use of water, in short everything was nice to see as a great symbol of the interaction of cultures. They talk of 'the fact that the periods of harmony and coexistence are more common than the periods of conflict and war between Christians and Muslims'. Similarly in the great Cathedral next door, with its huge space inside of one hectare or so, the official explanation was 'as is with many Spanish Cathedrals' this one was also made as such on the basis of the main mosque of the city.
From Sevilla we went up to Bilbao in the extreme north by train and bus. It is the centre of the Spanish Basque, with signboards written in two languages, Spanish and Basque, although both are in Roman scripts. It is a beautiful city, well served by several means of public transport including bus, tram, and even the Metro. The Bilbao river flows through it, which would have taken us to the seaport of Bilbao facing the Bay of Biscay. But we had no time for that. Our purpose in coming to Bilbao was somewhere else.

Fukushima Nuclear Plant Today

After writing hurriedly on 13 March on the great Quake and tsunami which hit the whole of Eastern Japan two days earlier, I went on a travel out of the country from 14 to 28th. I am going to write about them in the next few blogs. But now what I noticed when I returned.
Almost the first impression was that everywhere it is darker with less light on than it had been before the Quake. Besides, 20-30% of the suburban trains have been curtailed in the Tokyo Metropolitan area. Many lifts(elevators) and escalators are not working. Those are not because of the damage by the Quake but of administratively planned or voluntary saving of electricity. Many voluntary action is to be seen working toward less energy consumption.
The hardest hit by the Quake and tsunami was the northeastern part of Honshu(Japan's main island) facing the Pacific Ocean. More than 11 thousand people have died and more than 16 thousand are missing. Miyagi Prefecture accounts for the largest of them, followed by Iwate, north of it, and Fukushima, south of it. The origin of the Quake(M9.0) also was located in the sea east of Miyagi. A number of small towns and clusters of houses were wiped out in these three Prefectures, and so were many fishing ports. Altogether 175,000 people are now refugees and are housed in about 2,000 places, mostly schools and other public buildings.
The power cut was due partly to the great damage done to the two Fukushima nuclear plants, but some other non-nuclear power houses in the region were also damaged.
The condition of the first Fukushima nuclear is particularly serious. Or rather it is not yet precisely known what the condition is with each of its six reactors and how seriously each has been damaged. What is known is the existence of highly contaminated water within four of those six buildings, and even outside them, and it must be dealt with as quickly as possible and with utmost care. Experts say that what is essential to avert emergency situation is to tightly wrap up these reactors while cooling them off. This alone would take weeks and months. Then only it would be possible to take on shutting them completely which would be a matter of decades.
One is driven almost to despair, and the workers on the spot are reported to be at their wit's end. But the silver lining here is that the radioactivity in the air and in the water tend to decrease. In Tokyo the tap water has been just proven to be safe even to the zero-year-old babies. I hope it is not for All Fools' Day.
It has been against the law of nature to build a nuclear plant where there is geologically a danger of a quake, but it was done ignoring advice to the contrary, some of which was offered in the Parliament. This is a god-given opportunity changing our entire energy policies, taking much greater care of renewable energies and aiming at making Japan a low-energy economy. At the same time there should be more dissemination of information from the government and the industry. They should stop using 'it is not immediately dangerous' kind of bureaucratic language. Though harassed by the long drawn economic difficulties, and hit by the Quake, tsunami and the nuclear debacle, ours are a creative people and will rise whenever they are shown the honest fact.
The current talk is how we would fill the gap between the supply and demand of electricity in the summer season of July, August and September, when air-conditioning is in great need. The people may endure the hot and humid summer. But how about the industrial foot spread in Eastern Japan, a large part of which is in danger of coming to an enforced standstill if deprived electricity even at intervals.