Mayor of Minami Soma

Dr.Kanno belongs to Miyagi Prefecture, and is not involved in the nuclear accident. The other Japanese taken up by the Time, however, is very much in the accident. He is 55-year old Mr.Sakurai Katsunobu, the Mayor of Minami Soma city lying north of the now notorious first Fukushima nuclear plant. With the help of YouTube he said that '"With the paltry information given by the government and TEPCO(the electric company), we are left isolated...and are being forced into starvation"'. And 'His plea resonated across the world, leading many to ask how a country so celebrated for efficiency had failed its most vulnerable citizens'. Elsewhere Mr.Sakurai says that out of the usual population of 70,000 of his city only 40-45,000 are there now, and of the children of the school-going age only 30%. In his view the local residents themselves should be put in a position to think how to reconstruct their region and to carry it out. Only then they will feel joy and pride of the work, thus recovering their heart severely damaged by the triple disaster, including the quake and the tsunami and the nuclear plant.
Unlike the first two, the nuclear accident is a man-made disaster. The company, and for that matter the government also, has ruled out a situation where the plant is deprived by the above-mentioned first two of the supply of electricity both from inside and outside for a long time. The cooling mechanism has also been damaged.
It is not clear yet what has been damaged by the quake and what by the tsunami. It is apparent that they have not got with them a manual to cope with this kind of emergency. In short they have not invested in the safety, and this in spite of repeated warnings referred to earlier.
So Fukushima is now placed on the same Level 7 in the gravity of the situation as the Chernobyl explosion of 1986. But what is worse here is that while there was only one reactor at Chernobyl, or for that matter at the Three Mile Island accident, at the first Fukushima three out of six reactors are causing trouble.
The TEPCO has made public a road-map according to which a decision will be taken at the end of six to nine months from now if the evacuees can go home, if the homes have not been damaged, and how soon. It is difficult to know how many evacuees are there as the result of the nuclear accident, but the number from the triple disaster combined at the moment is still 126,000 as of 1 May. What is making the evacuation matter worse is that the government has decided to move about 10,000 persons from the several communities lying northwest of the 20-km radius. It is obvious that the radioactive fallout does not depend on the concentric circles, and the decision has come rather late.
We depend 25% or so of our energy on the nuclear reactors, but this is a remarkable though painful opportunity to rethink on it. Probably no other country is more unfit to depend so much on nuclear energy. Many if not all of our fifty-plus reactors are built on quake-prone regions. Or rather no part of the country is quake-free. Has anybody already said that we have dropped our own nuclear bomb upon us?