tsunami

Gaffes Claim Another Japanese Minister. When Will They Ever Learn?

For a country whose language is shaded in infinite shades of gray, Japanese government ministers sure do make a lot of gaffes. Last Saturday, Japan’s new trade minister Yoshio Hachiro quit after visiting the tsunami-devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant zone and calling it a “town of death without a soul in sight,” …

Japan’s Unlikely Saviors: Elderly Willing to Toil in a Nuke No-Go Zone

In ancient Japan, or so the folktale goes, there used to be a mountain where old people were taken and abandoned once they reached 60 years of age. Although the practice of obasute was probably more rural legend than actual reality, it is a chilling reminder of the perils of old age in a nation where roughly one-quarter of Japanese are …

Fukushima: Can Japan’s Largest Power Company Survive Its Disaster?

The people running the show at Tokyo Electric Power Company, the embattled utility that is struggling to shut down its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, were probably not out enjoying the sunny, late spring Friday in Tokyo. It’s been a bad week for the Japan’s largest utility, even given the astoundingly bad couple of months …

Fukushima: Workers Re-Enter Reactor Building for First Time

One of the most unnerving things about the situation at the Fukushima nuclear power plant is that it just keeps going. As U.S. special forces prepared to raid a white house in Abbottabad, as Gaddafi’s forces and NATO remain mired in their deadly standoff, the workers at the stricken power plant have continued their Sisyphean task of …

Fukushima: Residents of Evacuation Zone Make Last Runs Home

Wasabi peas. It’s not the first thing one might think of salvaging from the wreck of a slightly irradiated house, but then again, they hadn’t been opened. Reiko Nakashima deposits the snacks on the bed of a mini truck next to plastic bags crammed full of clothes and other miscellany she’s spent the morning picking from the mud of …

With a Month to Leave, a Japanese Village Weighs Options

IITATEMURA — Spring got off to a something of a false start this year in Iitatemura. On Tuesday afternoon in the farming village in Fukushima prefecture, cherry blossom petals fell to the ground with flurries of snow. Roadside bursts of daffodils hung heavy under white slush, and fields of rice, flowers and strawberries, dusted in …

After Disaster, Sorrow in a Few Short Words

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 …

With No End to Crisis in Sight, Residents and Fishermen Are Fighting Back

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 …

Aboard the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan: The Navy Grapples with Japan’s Disaster

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 …

Rattled, U.S. Military Families Get Ready to Leave Japan

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 …

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3