Prayers in Japan 11 years after the tsunami and nuclear disaster

Issued on: 03/11/2020 AD – 03:58 PM

TOKYO (AFP) – People in northeastern Japan prayed and searched for missing people on Friday, 11 years after the earthquake and tsunami that left 18,500 people dead or unaccounted for and caused a devastating nuclear explosion in Fukushima.

A minute’s silence will be held at 2:46 pm (0546 GMT), the moment a 9.0-magnitude earthquake – among the strongest ever recorded – struck northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011.

The undersea earthquake triggered tsunamis that devastated entire coastal communities and caused the world’s worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl accident.

There will be no state-funded national celebration this year to commemorate lives lost, because the government has ended annual rituals now more than a decade after the disaster.

Japanese television showed footage of people conducting an annual search for missing persons in the Nami district of Fukushima on the anniversary.

The bereaved families and more than 33,000 former residents still classified as evacuees, who were either ordered to leave or chose to leave due to radiation, will gather to remember the date.

In the tsunami-devastated Tohoku region, some gathered early in the morning along the coast for prayer.

But fisherman Sadao Kon, who lost his sister, brother-in-law and nephew in the tsunami, said he made a conscious effort to avoid celebrating the day.

“Not only did my relatives die, but I also saw many casualties while working as a (local) fire brigade captain,” he told national broadcaster NHK at a local fishing port.

“So I deliberately try not to think of that day in a special way. It’s a painful memory that I would have forgotten if I could,” the 68-year-old said.

Around the stricken Fukushima plant, large-scale disinfection operations were carried out, and this year five residents of Futaba, the last uninhabited city in the area, returned to live there on a trial basis.

About 12 percent of Fukushima has been declared unsafe, but restricted areas now cover only 2.4 percent of the prefecture, although the population in many towns is still much lower than before.

However, more than a decade later, challenges remain.

Plant operator TEPCO is facing opposition to a plan to release more than one million tons of water from the site, treating it to remove most of the radioactive elements, into the ocean.

The Japanese government says the release has been safe for several decades, but some neighboring countries and local fishing communities are concerned about residual pollution in the waters.

Lawsuits related to the disaster also continue, with six young men suing TEPCO in January over allegations they developed thyroid cancer from radiation exposure.

The United Nations said the disaster did not directly harm the health of the local population and that the higher rates of thyroid cancer in local children were likely due to more stringent diagnoses.

But the plaintiffs’ attorneys argue that none of their cancers were genetic.

Efforts to keep memories of the 2011 disaster alive also face an uphill battle in Japan, even as Russian attacks on nuclear power plants in Ukraine fuel fears of a new atomic disaster.

An opinion poll published by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper on Sunday showed that about 85 percent of respondents felt that public interest in disaster-hit areas was waning.

© 2022 AFP

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