When an earthquake hit the Japanese town of Niigata in October 2004, Yo Yasuhara, an elderly monk, wrote these words:
It’s cold and wet/camping outdoors/aftershocks multiplying the misery
The poem, originally written in Japanese, so stirred survivors that it was carved in a memorial stone. Today, one month after the Great Tohoku …
From the earliest days of Japan’s triple disaster, the residents forced to flee their homes in the evacuation zone around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have not had a lot of information to work with. Many only found out that they were supposed to leave by grace of the internet or the evening news, and when they …
As more details emerge from inside the evacuation zone in Fukushima, it’s becoming more and more evident that workers at the Daiichi power plant, feted as heroes since the early days of Japan’s nuclear crisis, will be bearing their burden for years to come.
Tepco gave its workers the option not to go to Fukushima days after …
This article was written by Tim Padgett with Aaron Nelsen in Santiago
During President Obama’s visit to Chile this week, he and President Sebastián Piñera were supposed to have ceremoniously signed a nuclear energy cooperation agreement. Instead, the pact, under which Chile would gain U.S. nuclear technology and training, was …
The 300-year-old Daiou temple is the last thing left standing in its neighborhood of Minami Sanriku, perched over a tangled sea of what were once greenhouses, cars, houses and lives. A delicate bronze Buddha statue, just feet away from a trailer that has been tossed on its side, observes the destruction from behind a barrier of trees …
Lieutenant Junior Grade James Powell tells me to hold my hands out in front of my waist and waves a detector a few inches above them. “So where are you from?” he asks casually. Eyeing the digital numbers flickering on the counter, I answer. He tells me to turn around and lift my left foot so he can scan the sole of my sneaker for …
It was an offer Chiharu Marsh couldn’t refuse. Just eight weeks pregnant, the 28-year-old from Yokosuka had two days to decide whether to take the U.S. military up on its offer to fly her to America for a month, or to stay in Japan with her family and friends. As the wife of a U.S. service member at the Misawa Air Base, Marsh is one of …
Given the enormity of human suffering and risk of an atomic catastrophe in Japan, it seems almost indecent to be offering up commentary out of safe, comfy Europe. But despite the understandably shocked and fearful reaction to a possible reactor melt down at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power station, it’s probably worth questioning even …
Captain Yokoyama knows all about nuclear hazards. The Hiroshima native’s great-uncles and great-aunts were killed by the American atomic bomb that leveled the Japanese city at the end of the World War II. Yet here he was in the town of Natori, little more than 50 km from the site of the Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was damaged by …
The specter of a full-blown nuclear disaster loomed over Japan on Tuesday morning after the third reactor explosion in four days occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant just after 6AM. By noon, employees were scrambling to contain a fire in another reactor, and reports were trickling in that radiation had been detected in …
Tomeo Suguwara leans into the hill, carrying a large, empty straw basket. Behind him, a few houses are left where a neighborhood used to be. For the third day in a row, the farmer has been feeding a calf he found wandering around the detritus of people’s kitchens and bedrooms after the tsunami swept through this village in Kesennuma. …
Japanese is one of those languages that is full of untranslatable words that define a unique culture. Gaman is one of them. It means something like the art of endurance, with a good dose of stoicism and resiliency mixed in. Gaman is what Japan in the wake of the killer earthquake and tsunami has displayed in abundance.
To riff on …
When Koji Haga looked toward the shore and saw the massive earthquake shuddering through his village of Akaushi on March 11, he knew what would come next. After all, every school child in the area is taught that roughly every 50 years, a seismic seizure triggers a giant wave that engulfs this tightknit fishing community. It had been a …
