TOKYO/KYOTO – An earthquake 9.0 on the Richter scale, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, aftershocks, avalanches, chemical plant explosions, flooding, volcanic eruptions, food shortages, rolling blackouts, bird flu breakouts, snowstorms: it’s as though the 8 million Shinto gods, those legendary guardians of nature, had released their combined wrath to avenge who knows what environmental sins.
With more than 4,300 people confirmed dead, 13,000 registered as missing and almost 350,000 survivors in refugee centres, I’m struggling to take in the endless stream of apocalyptic images. As Japan teeters on the edge of a full-out nuclear catastrophe, all I can do is follow the news helplessly and try my best to remain calm.
Last Friday’s quake hit while I was at my workplace, a clinic in the western suburb of Tokyo called Hachioji, over 300 kilometres from the epicentre. When the floor started to churn like a ship’s hull in a hurricane, I leaped away from my computer and sheltered under the conference table in the middle of the room, as I had learned to do in disaster-response training.
Crouching on the carpeted floor, I watched a crack running along a corner of the room open and close, open and close, like a gnawing mouth, as the walls were pried apart by underground pressure. With all the roads jammed and the train lines closed, there was no way to return to my downtown Tokyo apartment. I bedded down in the clinic sick ward and felt the nauseating undulations .The tremors came every few minutes all night.
The morning after the quake, it was a perfect spring day despite the fact that cool late-winter weather had been lasting unseasonably long. The blue sky stretching above the snow-capped form of Mount Takao felt like a small respite but might have been cosmic mockery for those suffering too much to appreciate it.
Watching footage of whole cities tossed on tsunami waves like insubstantial bits of flotsam, I had an urge to head out and help in the disaster zones – but then news hit about the blowup at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, and my rescuer aspirations dissolved into fear of fallout.
Tokyo is 250 kilometres from the damaged plants. Despite official claims that there is no risk to the human body, it seems all too likely that dangerous radioactive materials are drifting our way. I started to follow television news with the devotion of a soap opera fanatic.
The coverage by Japanese mass media is inconsistent to the point of surrealism. One official says it’s impossible for the cooling water to leave the nuclear core exposed another tells us a few hours later that this has in fact happened. When clouds of smoke from an explosion at one reactor appear suddenly in live footage, the specialist interviewed at that moment is tongue-tied (probably struggling to find the right diversion). Suddenly, the news shifts to a story about the Japanese stand-up comedian Sandwichy Man, juxtaposing dire importance with light entertainment.
It’s at about this time that someone in the government must have realized they needed an official who could distract the public full-time and Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano made his debut in the crisis.
Edano now appears at press conferences where he gives ambiguous information about efforts to tame the reactors and responds to all questions with the same statement: “We’re gathering and analyzing the data right now and will clarify everything once we finish our assessment.”
The effect of this circus of sophistry is to make me and many other viewers fear for our lives. The only reason we can imagine that Tokyo Electric and the government are evading questions is to stem panic over a situation that’s much worse than they’re letting on.
After reading in the New York Times on Tuesday that the Tokyo Metropolitan Government detected radiation above Tokyo 20 times the normal level – a piece of crucial information the Japanese mass media seem to have glossed over – I decide, like many others, that it’s time for escape. I call my boss to tell him I’m taking indefinite leave, pack my bags, withdraw 100,000 yen (about $800 Canadian) and take the train with my girlfriend to Kyoto, 600 kilometres away from ground zero in Fukushima.
In my hotel room, I’m just beginning to let go of the stress, knowing there’s a fair distance now between me and the bubbling nuclear cores, when another quake hits, this time over 6 on the Richter scale. Once again I’m on the outer edge of the seismic shock. The main impact is in Shizuoka, an area between Tokyo and Kyoto that we’d just passed through on the train.
Perhaps not even the 8 million deities know what to expect next.
HELP JAPAN
Here’s where to send funds to help earthquake and tsunami-afflicted areas of Japan:
CANADIAN RED CROSS
Click on redcross.ca to contribute wireless users can text ASIA to 30333 to donate $5.
HUMANITARIAN COALITION
Donate to CARE Canada, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam-Québec and Save the Children Canada at together.ca.
DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS
Contribute to medical field operations at msf.ca.
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