Even in Japan, reconstruction is going slow

MANILA, Philippines - Four years after the magnitude 9 earthquake hit the eastern coast of Japan and resulted in a killer tsunami that wiped out large swathes of coastal cities and towns in three prefectures, thousands of people continue to live in small and uncomfortable temporary shelters.

The shelters could get untenable in the Tohoku region where the three prefectures are located because of the cruel winters.

The makeshift houses are built on higher areas deemed much safer than the seaside where residents lived prior to the March 11, 2011 natural disaster.

In these seaside areas, the Japanese national government and concerned city and municipal governments are working to build seawalls up to 8.7 meters tall to protect the towns and cities from future tsunamis. And with a slow-growing population and elderly sector regularly hit by catastrophe, the construction of the seawalls is going even slower.

The massive seawall construction program covers some 400 kilometers of coastal lands through Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima prefectures in Tohoku. The other prefectures in the region are Akita, Aomori and Yamagata.

The three prefectures bore the brunt of the Great East Japan earthquake on March 11, 2011, causing the killer tsunami and a meltdown in the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima City.

The more than 1.1 million families whose homes were washed away by the tsunami have been relocated to the temporary shelters hurriedly built by the city and municipal governments months after the disaster.

Many residents of these shelters have to resign themselves to a life in cramped box-like structures for some more years.

Even the government realizes this, and is now building a new batch of temporary shelters after decay and rot set in on the ones built four years ago.

Kazuma Goto, 67, one of the elders in the coastal town of Minamisanriku in Miyagi prefecture, voiced out the hardships of evacuees.

Goto has also criticized the government’s priority in constructing seawalls instead of extending assistance to residents to build permanent homes or more decent shelters.

“The first thing they did was to clean up the debris from the disaster. But even when the debris was cleared and new land was prepared, they were not allowed to use such land to construct houses,” Goto told an audience of 16 foreign journalists recently brought by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to the disaster hit areas.

“Now construction work is going on there to build a new seawall. They say that it would be 8.7 to 8.8 meters high. And the tsunami that hit this area was 23 meters high. What can an 8.7-meter wall do to stop a 23-meter tsunami?” Goto said.

Goto brought the delegation of journalists to a temporary shelter community built by the government at the Togura High School compound atop a hill with a view of Shizugawa Bay.

“As you can see, the schoolyard, there’s a difference in color, some parts are dark, some parts are whitish. The black part of this yard and the place where the houses are standing used to be the schoolyard. And there was a baseball net standing somewhere in here,” Goto said.

“Now there are 60 households in this yard. In these temporary houses, on average, about three persons live,” Goto said.

“One dining kitchen plus one room is given to a single person household. And households with two persons up to four are given one dining kitchen and two rooms. This is just a temporary house, therefore the walls are very thin,” Goto said.

“I heard that you visited Kobe (city in Hyogo prefecture). These houses were designed to accommodate people who were hit by the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (in January 1995) and they copied the design,” Goto said.

“However, as you know, Hyogo is much warmer than here. So the first winter, what we experienced was really bad,” Goto said.

“People were not able to sleep even if you have heaters and thick beddings,” Goto said.

However, Goto said that after that bitter 2011 winter, the government addressed the problem when residents raised a complaint about the thin walled shelters.

“Do you know the difference between temporary houses and ordinary houses? The basic difference is the structure’s foundation. Ordinary houses usually have a strong foundation so it will last for many years. Temporary houses just have wooden foundations,” Goto said.

“Japan is quite a rainy country. After four years, the foundation of the temporary houses is rotting,” Goto said.

Goto pointed out that many of the survivors of the earthquake-tsunami were elderly. Some of these ageing Japanese rely on sons and daughters whose homes were also destroyed along with their livelihood.

The earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 16,000 people with more than 3,600 missing, almost 6,000 injured, destroyed 1,158,707 houses, with total losses placed at Y16 to Y25 trillion.

In Fukushima, devastation was made worse by a 15-meter tsunami that destroyed the power supply and cooling system of the Daiichi power plant, causing a meltdown which forced more than 100,000 people from their homes due to radiation.

Host city Sendai was one of the hardest hit, the airport suffering extreme damage that closed it for more than a month, stalling the transport of emergency relief.