Banyan

FOR all that was left to see, it did not matter who came from Natori or Kesennuma, Minamisanriku or Rikuzentakata, or any number of towns, cities and coves along Japan's north-eastern coast. The debris left in the wake of all the different lives looked the same everywhere.

Massive shards of wood jut in all directions, with small patches of colour sprouting like evil cabbages. Cars perch atop apartment blocks. Heavy machinery, crushed like tinfoil, sits half-submerged in mud. When the ocean came aground it tore apart everything in its path and carried it deep inland. Then it turned, and the soupy detritus was sucked out to the sea—leaving only a uniform residue of crushed pieces.

The physical destruction is easy to see; other damage is less apparent. The survivors are grateful to be alive. But each face reveals a tragedy. Within 30 minutes of the first, giant earthquake of March 11th, a tsunami had washed away entire communities. Of the survivors, most have little left but their stories.

Auntie

A woman is poking at the debris with a stick, trying to move aside large pieces of plywood. She is wearing trainers, a backpack and a heavy winter jacket—with a kitchen apron over it. "I'm looking for my auntie," she cries. "She must be down here."

Since the day after the tsunami destroyed her aunt's house in Rikuzentakata, Taiko Sasaki, 62, has been back every day to pick through the ruins. "Her house was here, but I can't see anything left of it," she says. Her aunt was 90. The president of a nearby building company had gone to help her escape, but he was also washed away. The aunt's husband, 94, has Alzheimer's. He was spared because he was at a community centre at the time. But now he can't understand what has happened to his wife.

"We never get tsunami here—that is what we have been told for hundreds of years," Sasaki-san explained. The neighbourhood is high up, about 4 kilometres from the sea. Not far away, a few houses sit unscathed, with perfectly manicured gardens. The floods carried away everything—houses, cars, bridges, railway track—and swirled it around before flushing it back down the valley and out to sea. Only the odd bits remain. Where once a house stood today there is nothing but the wreckage of some other place, come to rest from far away.

"We cannot do anything but cry." Sasaki-san sees a neighbour for the first time. They embrace, their eyes grow red and moist. They choke on their words. "My grandmother was washed away," her friend says softly. Local firefighters had tried to help Sasaki-san look for her aunt’s body, but they moved on. "I cannot wait," Sasaki-san says. "I am sure she's here."

Motherless

A pretty young woman chases after a toddler at an evacuation centre. It warms the heart to see a family together and safe. But the child is not hers. He belongs to her sister-in-law, who has been missing for days. Eight months pregnant with her second child, Yuka Kozuchi was among the last to leave her office, far down in the city of Rikuzentakata, when the tsunami warning sounded, said her colleagues.

At the age of one-and-a-half, Yuhi doesn't understand that his mother is gone, explains Ami Kozuchi, his aunt. "He just thinks that she's gone out somewhere for a while." The boy cries, then nestles into Kozuchi-san's neck, from shyness or fright. Moments later, he is smiling and waving at the man with the pen and notepad.

We are at the message board of an evacuation centre, which until March 11th had been the local junior high school. People can write and respond to notes left on one wall. On the opposite wall are lists of people who have registered at evacuation centres, and lists of the confirmed dead. The missing, the people scanning the lists know, are probably dead.

At least her brother, the child's father, is still alive, says Kozuchi-san. Yuhi will live with him. Their homes were destroyed, so they are sleeping in the giant auditorium at the evacuation centre. And the father? "I'm sure he's having a hard time, but he's not showing it," she says.

Ashamed

"You experience a tsunami once in your life—that is for sure. Some may experience it twice. That is what we say." Tsuyoshi Kinno is 74 and serves as the head of the neighbourhood association of Takata, a residential district in Rikuzentakata. A hawk circles overhead as he speaks.

"We built a seawall and were told that we were totally fine, that we were safe." The wall was 6 metres tall, he says. (Some residents say it was 8 metres. No one seems to know for sure.) The water, when it came, must have been at least 17 or 18 metres high, says Kinno-san—up to the third floor of the four-storey town hall, where he had been with the mayor when the earthquake struck.

"I am ashamed to say that my family all survived. I cannot feel glad. It is a shame to say that they are all safe. I am embarrassed to say it. Most people lost someone."

When the tsunami warning sounded, the mayor immediately began managing the evacuation. "He was a hero, directing people what to do without looking after at his own family." His wife perished.

"Everything just washed away," says Kinno-san. The people of Rikuzentakata, he says, know as a rule that a big tsunami comes every 50 years. The last one was in 1960. "So we were mentally prepared for something soon."

Alive

Hiromaru Sasazaki was at his fishing-tackle shop by the beach in Rikuzentakata when the the tsunami warning sounded. Many people didn't react. A tsunami warning after a smaller earthquake, only two days earlier, had turned up waves only 60 centimetres high. Now, the alarm gave warning of 3-metre waves—well below height of the seawall, Sasazaki-san explains from his wheelchair at a hospital in Ofunato, a city one cove over.

He decided to go home to his wife in Takata; it is off-season for fishing, and there's not much to do. By the time he entered their flat, his wife was gone. He heard a woman's panicked scream and saw a wall of water crash into the building. The tsunami cleanly decapitated the structure, sweeping off its second storey, including Sasazaki-san’s flat. The whole apartment began drifting away. Below him, the water tore up the floorboards and trapped his foot, as if in a claw of timber.

Water rushed in. His shoe fell off, and this freed his leg. But the limb was useless: the muscle had detached. He clambered to the roof. While drifting, he waved frantically for help to a passing helicopter. It swooped down close. Sasazaki-san expected a winch, but it never came. It was a television chopper. It hovered for a moment and then flew away.

After about 30 minutes of drifting along the current, seeing cars, furniture and burning homes pass him by, he knew that he was moving towards the ocean, and farther from shore. He recognised his last chance. He leaped into the muddy, icy water and tried to swim to land. With each stroke, his hands and arms struck the jagged wood strewn through the water, while his injured leg dragged along behind. Gradually, he made it.

At the base of a steep hill, he started crawling with his torn and bloody hands and elbows, weighed down by an immobile leg. He climbed through thorny brush and dense thickets of bamboo. At the top he found Takata Junior High School, now an evacuation centre. After a few hours, the medics eventually got around to him. From a window on the ground floor, he saw his wife Noko, who was searching for him. He shouted. She saw him and rushed in.

Residue

There are no bodies visible in the debris. This is odd. There is everything else in it. Car tyres, plastic bags, pillows, upside-down buses and smashed boats, children's toys, an entire roof. But no bodies. "There is no biohazard, there is no radiation, there is no asbestos," barked an Australian relief worker, visibly shaken after a reconnaissance mission into Minamisanriku. "The wave just came through and wiped the joint clean." The fishing village may have lost more than half its population of 17,000.  The officer estimated the water to have been as high as 30 metres.

A 43-member German search-and-rescue team, with three sniffer dogs, arrived within 24 hours of the earthquake. After days of searching in Minamisanriku, they did not find a single living person. Their work was interrupted by occasional aftershocks and new tsunami alerts that forced them to evacuate temporarily. The group returned to Germany four days after they arrived. By that time it was too late to find survivors, said a team leader. And they lacked radiation protection, should the leaky nuclear power plant at Fukushima make it necessary.

There are two large bluffs in Rikuzentakata which form a gully of sorts. The tsunami's flotsam tore through it, and then got sucked back down again. The bluffs acted like a funnel and sieve. The result is an astonishing wall of jetsam, about 15 metres tall.

The leitmotif of the disaster is cars. Modern Japan almost defines itself by its car industry. The tsunami transformed cars into a kind of surreal jest. They were everywhere, but not where they should be.

In Rikuzentakata, one was buried three-quarters deep in a flooded rice paddy. A small white car was jammed into the undercarriage of a large lorry, whose top was torn off. This jumble lay sprawled upside down on a four-metre high pile of broken wood planks. In Takata, another white car had been hurled into the roof of a house that was, improbably, still standing—it had simply settled there when the floodwaters receded, like Noah's Ark. At first the freakishly scattered cars were shocking. Their image corrupts reality, like a Salvador Dalí painting. After a while, the impact dulls.

Restarting

From on high, over the worst-hit places, the wasted acres look like landfills; dump sites. There is almost no indication that these were once cities, save for a handful of buildings left standing, as if scattered at random. The roads are only made apparent once Japan's self-defence forces have cleared the way; before they arrive, it is simply a blanket of wreckage.

At relief centres, no one complains outwardly, though they are suffering from a critical shortage of supplies. And no one acts bothered by the radiation said to be spewing from burning nuclear reactors to the south. These are survivors. They have retained the gift of life, while so many others were swept away. And they are people of the coast: they are accustomed to fearsome natural disasters—as they often remind their visitors.

Everything is orderly and polite. People take off their shoes in many of the relief centres, as is the custom. An unmissable dimension is the age of evacuees. Women hobble about on walking frames. Silver-headed men sit around kerosene heaters. It is one thing to prepare relief operations to meet the needs of septuagenarians; quite another for the cohort in their 90s. Meanwhile the children remain playful: they do not understand.

A rumour making its way is that outsiders have come to rummage through the disaster zone for loot. Coastal people, they explain, keep most of their savings in cash, at home, rather than in a bank. So the place may be teeming with yen, goes the thinking. But the anxious whispers cannot be true. Soldiers, police and aid workers are everywhere, making it impossible for any group to really pick through the rubble.

The Japanese government counts a death when they see the body, and it considers people to be missing only when their names have been reported. But in some cases entire families were washed away; who is left to report them? In places like Ofunato, evacuation areas on higher ground were themselves blasted by the torrents. Now, men in blue coveralls, white helmets and face masks roam the wreckage. They poke at it with long sticks, looking for bodies. But most are still buried too deep to be found.

A SURGE in the radiation levels surrounding the reactors at the Dai-ichi nuclear power plant at Fukushima on Wednesday morning forced authorities to withdraw workers from the site of Japan’s escalating nuclear catastrophe. A skeleton crew of 50, these are the staff who had been left behind to shut down the plants’ still-operating reactors, before their cores submit to a chaotic deterioration. Till Tuesday there had been another 750 working with them. After being called away, the remaining 50 returned to their desperate tasks only one hour later, as the intensity of radiation at their workstations subsided somewhat. Their brief absence gave the appearance that the unfolding disaster, which they have been struggling to manage, may have slipped completely beyond their control.

At the time of the workers’ withdrawal, some part or parts of the plant were emitting 10 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation per hour. In an American nuclear plant, workers are allowed to be exposed to no more than 50mSv in a year. At 10mSv per hour, any given worker would have exceeded that yearly maximum within a single shift. By 11.30am however the level dropped dramatically, and mysteriously, to about 6mSv per hour and the workers were back to the job. The exact cause of the increased rate of emission—even its specific location—is unknown; it may have been due to a leak from radioactive substances stored at the No. 2 reactor, but there were any number of other possible sources among the plant’s six reactors.

An unrelenting series of fires and explosions of pent-up hydrogen gas have complicated the situation at the Dai-ichi reactor immensely. Babbage summarises the series of internal disasters and MIT is producing a running and highly readable commentary.

Hours earlier this morning a plume of white smoke (or possibly steam) was seen rising off one of the plant’s reactors. The government’s chief spokesman, the cabinet secretary Yukio Edano, told a televised press conference that the smoke was due to a fire at the site’s No. 3 reactor (pictured above, to the left; there was also a fire at No. 4, on the right) and that there was a real danger that the reactor’s containment vessel had been damaged. Mr Edano said there was however no present need to expand Fukushima’s evacuation area. The smoke itself subsided without explanation. People who remain within a radius of 20 kilometres of the site have been ordered to leave and those living between 20-30km away instructed to stay indoors, so as to avoid radioactive contamination. About 140,000 people are thought to be living in this zone. As an additional measure, everyone who was within 3 kilometres of Fukushima’s other nuclear power plant, Dai-ni—which has been shut down completely and without leaking—were asked today to leave the area.

Sight of those plumes at Dai-ichi was especially frightening. The prospect of airborne particulate matter floating away from Fukushima is of immediate concern to many of the millions of people who are watching Mr Edano’s statements. Meanwhile panic itself has become the thing to watch for in Tokyo. Radiation levels in the capital did multiply tenfold during the past day, though they remain far below any dangerous level and almost immeasurably lower than at the burning plant. Since then, mercifully, the prevailing winds along Japan’s stricken north-eastern coastline have turned towards the Pacific, diminishing the risk that could at some point be posed by radioactive particles escaping from the compromised plant at Fukushima, 260 kilometres away.

In Tokyo different communities are responding in different ways. A fresh earthquake on a different fault line, with its epicentre off Shizuoka, near Tokyo, had a magnitude of 6.0—enough to terrify people living in most of the planet’s seismic zones, if not the Japanese—and did nothing to settle nerves. But it was with nuclear anxieties in mind that France’s prime minister released a statement on Wednesday urging French nationals in Tokyo to consider leaving immediately, for the south of Japan if not from the country itself. Austria moved its embassy to Osaka, to the south-west, as have a number of private international firms. The Western tabloid press has claimed to see a “mass exodus” from Tokyo, but apart from some expats there seem to be very few Tokyoites inclined to flee abroad. Indeed, in an impressive display of discipline, healthy-sized droves turned out for the annual tax-filing day on Tuesday. Panic-buying on the other hand has become a real concern. The government is calling on ordinary citizens not to hoard fuel or food, as shelves and inventories around the country go bare.

The sort of hour-by-hour fear and speculation that have surrounded the dynamic situation in Fukushima have obstructed the world’s view of the vast human toll already exacted by the disaster that began last Friday afternoon, March 11th. First the massive 9.0 earthquake and then the tsunami it launched: the effects of that initial disastrous day claimed at least 3,771 lives, according to today’s official estimate, and left another 7,843 people missing. Many of the missing are presumed to have been washed out to sea from low-lying coastal areas.

The distracting worry of a meltdown at Fukushima is having terrible consequences for hundreds of thousands or even millions of the people who live in Honshu island's northern extent, Tohoku. Massive disruptions to the country's petrol supplies have left communities in the north without access to food. Vehicles have run dry and, six days in, a huge part of population is starting to go hungry. Even where supermarkets and storehouses are well stocked, fuel is required to deliver goods the final mile they must travel to the people who need it most. This is felt most acutely in Fukushima's "exclusion zone", whose residents have been commanded to stay in their shelters—and where lorry-drivers are afraid or unable to reach them. 

Japan now has 80,000 rescue workers up and down the affected area, doing their best to rush aid to those who are stranded, hungry, thirsty and in need of emergency medical care. A late-winter snowfall is bringing misery of its own, with temperatures dropping and expected to stay below freezing overnight.

(Picture credit: FP PHOTO / HO / TEPCO via JIJI PRESS)

AT AN 11am news conference this morning in Tokyo, Naoto Kan, Japan’s prime minister, announced that elevated levels of nuclear radiation emanating from the Fukushima power plant pose a substantial risk to human life in the area. He urged people within 30 kilometres of the site to stay indoors. 

Early Tuesday morning an explosion damaged the No. 2 reactor at the Daiichi plant in Fukushima; this is at least the fourth time that an explosion has affected some part of the multi-reactor plant since the a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami struck on Friday afternoon. This time part of the reactor itself seems to have been damaged. Crew that were tending to the facility and trying to make repairs were evacuated. They had already punched a hole into the vessel around the second reactor, so as to reduce the risk of further hydrogen explosions—at the cost of releasing a greater flow of radioactive particles into the surrounding atmosphere.

The No. 2 reactor is not the only source of concern. A fire broke out at Daiichi’s No. 4 reactor at about 6 o'clock this morning, about half an hour before the blast discussed by Mr Kan. The radiation level around that reactor too is high and rising. Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, says that the No. 4 reactor was not in operation when the fire started. That suggests that meltdown itself is not a possibility in that reactor, but there is nuclear fuel housed inside. Engineers suspect the explosion was a hydrogen-powered blast, like the ones that preceded it. If that is the case, the nuclear fuel should not be ignited. With the building's shielding ruptured however, some degree of radiation leakage was inevitable.

The radiation level around the No. 3 reactor meanwhile has risen to 400 millisieverts (mSv): much higher than it had been when last reported and positively damaging to human health. Exposure to anything higher than 500 mSv, for however short a period, is recognised as being harmful.

This nuclear accident is already the world's worst since the explosions and meltdown at Chernobyl, in Soviet Ukraine, in 1986. As it escalates rapidly, attention is swinging from the victims and survivors of the catastrophic tsunami damage along the coast to the horrifying possibility of yet greater dangers posed by the compromised reactors. Untold thousands of people in northern Japan have died since Friday. Today panicky e-mails about radiation cascade across East Asia, offering fear and bogus medical advice. 

The French embassy put out a safety alert to its nationals living in Tokyo, noting that north-easterly winds from the area around Fukushima could bring low-level radioactive contamination to the capital, 250km away, within 10 hours. While the Japanese response has been by and large stoical, foreigners are clearly giving thought to flight. Air China has cancelled scheduled flights to Tokyo from Beijing and Shanghai. 

Mr Kan and his colleagues are trying to reassure the public that the fight to contain the radiation is still on. Their approach has seemed marked by composure and candour. Mr Kan complained that he had not received information directly from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) for more than one hour after he watched this morning's explosion on live television. Tepco has requested help at Fukushima from the American army.

Read yesterday's report

Read about the nuclear threat as it came into focus on Sunday and Saturday

(Picture credit: AFP PHOTO / DIGITAL GLOBE)

Its position on the Pacific Ocean's seismically active "Ring of Fire" has given Japan previous sad experience of dealing with earthquakes and their tragic aftermath. The 6.8-magnitude quake that struck Kobe in 1995 caused the loss of 6,400 lives. More disruptive still was the 7.9-magnitude earthquake that struck the Kanto plain on September 1st 1923. Though considerably weaker than Friday's tremor it proved particularly devastating, thanks mainly to the resultant firestorms that raged through Tokyo and Yokohama. The Economist's response to the event, published seven days later, is republished below.

THE EARTHQUAKE IN JAPAN.

WORDS very inadequately express the emotions aroused by such a tragedy as that which has occurred this week in Japan. Of all natural phenomena, there are none more awe-inspiring than disturbances of the earth's surface through the working of unseen forces within. Our instinctive confidence in Mother Earth is shaken when man for a moment finds himself face to face with the elemental forces of the universe. Imaginations dulled to the records of slaughter and destruction laboriously achieved by years of manmade war are staggered by the suddenness and magnitude of the toll exacted in a single afternoon by an "act of God.'' In the presence of such a disaster, which so forcefully recalls us to the consciousness of our common humanity, we offer in all humility of spirit our profound and respectful sympathy to the stricken people of Japan.

It is still too soon to form any accurate idea either as to the loss of life or to the material damage done, and though it is probable that the earlier estimates were exaggerated, the figures are undoubtedly very large indeed. It is, for example, possible that the material damage amounts to as much as the cost of the Russo-Japanese War, which exceeded 200 millions sterling. But it is very wide of the mark to suggest, as one distinguished Japanese visitor in England has done, that the damage will amount to 1,000 millions sterling, or hastily to assume, as some of our less-balanced Press commentators, that Japan will no longer be a first-class Power. The total wealth of Japan was estimated by Sir Josiah Stamp in 1914 at roughly 2,400 millions sterling, of which 1,100 millions represented land, 300 millions represented buildings, 150 millions represented furniture, and 500 millions the value of mines, industries, and businesses of all kinds. The index number of wholesale prices is at present almost exactly double that of the year before the war, and allowing for an increase in population and wealth, the present valuation of Japan's wealth would be between 5,000 and 6,000 millions. The value of land will hardly be affected by the disaster at all. The chief damage is, of course, to buildings. The area over which shocks have been experienced apparently includes 10 to 12 per cent. of the population, but since the capital city is involved, it includes more than 10 per cent. in value of the buildings of Japan. The buildings of Japan to-day might perhaps be valued at 1,000 millions at present prices; even if the destruction had been universal and complete throughout this area—which, of course is not the case—the figure could not exceed 200 millions. Actually, it is certain to be very much less, for many important buildings in Tokyo are reported safe, and government and other work is being resumed in them. So far as industrial and commercial property is concerned, the proportion in peril is certainly smaller than in the case of buildings, for the greater part of Japan's industry is centred at Osaka (the Manchester of Japan) and other cities outside the stricken area.

When we come to the question of loss of life, the highest figures so far mentioned are half a million, and, as we have indicated, there is reason to hope fairly confidently that the final figure may prove to be very much less than this. In order to get a sense of proportion, we may recall that the Japanese population is about 56 millions, and that it has latterly been increasing at about 1.3 per cent. (about 700,000) a year. The casualties presumably include an average proportion of men, women, and children; and though the deaths have occurred among that section of the population which is best educated, and contains a specially high proportion of skilled artisans, the commercial classes and others who have contributed most to the advancement of Japan, it cannot be seriously supposed that the actual loss of life will affect her labour situation except temporarily, and in certain local directions, or modify her industrial potentialities. Moreover, when it is remembered how rapidly Japan has risen to her present position among the nations, it may be confidently assumed that her losses in personnel and in material goods, colossal though they be, will very quickly be made good.

But, while we have mentioned these considerations in order to check some of the wilder assumptions as to the effect of the disaster, the consequences will be of very great importance. It will be convenient to refer to them under three heads, namely: (1) The immediate commercial losses and their reactions; (2) the possibility of repercussion on the world's trade situation in general; and (3) the considerations involved in the rebuilding of the capital of Japan.

So far as the immediate commercial effects are concerned, it has to be remembered that for some little time past Japan has not been in an altogether flourishing condition. As late as a month ago our Japanese correspondent reported a renewal of runs upon the banks in Japan and a series of failures. Indeed, since 1921 the condition of credit has not been satisfactory, and it is to be feared that a number of Japanese firms may be unable to carry on. It is probable that a moratorium, at all events for a short period in respect of trade credits, will be proclaimed. But this is only a way of postponing the difficulty, and anxiety will for some time be felt by British traders who have debtors in Japan as to their position. The difficulties will be produced by the actual loss of goods in circulation or in stock, by the collapse of credit based on real property, and by the actual cessation of economic activities in the devastated area. To some extent European firms will be involved directly in these three forms of damage, and to a greater extent indirectly through the cessation of business with Japanese correspondents. No estimate of these effects can yet be made; but so far as British or other interests are involved, the only thing that may be said is that the fact that Japan's trade has been rather under a cloud means that the reactions in these respects will be less serious than would normally be the case.

As to the repercussion on the trade of the world generally, there are obviously circumstances in which so serious a blow to one of the great trading nations might set up a series of trade crises and precipitate world depression. But, again, the universal stagnation of trade, and the fact that speculation has for this reason been recently restrained within extremely narrow limits, means that commerce generally is not so vulnerable, as is sometimes the case, to a shock to credit. Indeed, looking at the matter from a purely narrow national standpoint, it is conceivable that the momentary withdrawal of Japan from world competition may cause buying by India and China in other markets, and that Great Britain may momentarily benefit from a cause which in the long run will reduce, and not increase, the trade of the world.

The rebuilding of Tokyo will, of course, afford some compensation to the otherwise depressing effects of the disaster. A substantial proportion of the requirements for this purpose will be needed from overseas, which will involve the placing of loans abroad, presumably in London and New York. Some of the sums raised in this way may even be required for purchasing food if it should appear that very large stocks of these requirements have perished or been spoiled, and that internal Japanese resources are insufficient or cannot quickly be mobilised by the Government for the relief measures that will be necessary.

Dear readers,

Enter the group-blog. From today Banyan, the blog you see before you, is written by a multitude of The Economist’s writers in Asia. Gone is “Banyan’s notebook”, the blog that once belonged solely to the columnist who writes the Banyan page in our weekly newspaper. But Banyan the blogger lives on, joined now by a larger company.

A sister blog, Asia view it was called, has merged with Banyan to cover the whole of the continent, as we define it. Henceforth the byline matters, unusually so in our case. What is written “by Banyan” is written by everyone’s favourite Asia columnist; what is written by the otherwise initialled is written by other staff writers from The Economist based in Asia, or by one of a number of stringers who work with us. Post facto, we have imported most of a year's worth of writing from the now-defunct Asia view.

The title Banyan should suit this blog as well as it does the column. Though this thing will write with different voices and from different places—as if by magic, with multiple yet simultaneous datelines—it should in one way more closely resemble the Ficus religiosa for which it is named. Aerial roots, dropping down from branches here and there in a widening radius, each striving to buttress a sprawling life at the centre. Also, traditionally a good place to gather for a chat.

Banyan the column will continue to be written by the same, eponymous author. Banyan, the blog, welcomes all.

(Picture credits: Wikimedia Commons)

THE risk of a nuclear accident at a huge power plant in disaster-strewn north-eastern Japan has risen for a second day on March 13th. This time it involves a type of fuel known as Mox (mixed-oxide) that is considered highly experimental. The government, which is under huge pressure to deal with the tragedy created by Friday’s earthquake, is also struggling to prevent panic over the potential meltdown of a second nuclear reactor. With what looked like tears in his eyes, Naoto Kan, the prime minister, said today that Japan was facing its worst crisis since the second world war and he urged its citizens to pull together.

As if that were not enough, Japan’s seismologists say there is a high risk of more big aftershocks in the coming days. In the areas worst hit by the quake, hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes, and food and blankets are scarce.

It is currently estimated that at least 2,000 are dead and missing after Friday’s earthquake unleashed a vicious tsunami that swept Japan’s northern Pacific coast. But that figure does not take into account 10,000 who the government acknowledged on March 13th are unaccounted for in one coastal area of Miyagi prefecture, called Minamisanriku. Aerial shots from television crews show a large community that existed there has now virtually disappeared under tidal water. Elsewhere in Miyagi and Iwate prefecture, hundreds more bodies have been dumped by the tsunami, news reports say, and some 450,000 people have been made homeless.

Mr Kan almost doubled the number of Special Defence Force troops he had ordered to the area, to 100,000. But relief efforts were hampered by destroyed roads and bridges, waterlogged airports and other disrupted lines of communication. An American aircraft carrier and emergency services from other countries joined the rescue effort, which underscores how bad the situation must be. The assumed death toll, which has already doubled in 24 hours, may rise much further yet. It would not be a surprise if it exceeds the 6,500 or so killed in the 1995 Kobe earthquake.

However hard it is to come to grips with the enormous devastation, another crisis is playing out in real time: the risk of a Three-Mile-Island-style radiation leakage at a nuclear-power plant in Fukushima prefecture, 250 miles north of Tokyo. Overnight, the cooling system at the third reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant failed, and on March 13th Kyodo news agency cited the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), as saying that three metres of a Mox nuclear-fuel rod had been left above the water level. That raises the risk of a meltdown of the core reactor, which could lead to a nuclear catastrophe. Disconcertingly, Japanese anti-nuclear campaigners have fiercely opposed the introduction into Japan of Mox fuel, which is a mixture of plutonium oxide and uranium oxide, arguing, among other things, that plutonium is more unsafe than enriched uranium. The fuel was first used in the Fukushima plant last year. Five other reactors spread over two Fukushima plants have also experienced trouble with their cooling systems, and two (including the Mox one) have been doused with water—and possibly permanently crippled—to prevent overheating. 

Yukio Edano, the government’s chief spokesman, said that it was possible the core reactor had been “deformed” by its exposure above water, but he denied that it was a meltdown. However, he said there were further complications. It was not clear whether the water was rising to cool the reactor, despite an injection of sea water. Pressure is also building up within the reactor, but the release valve is malfunctioning, he said. Given the potential build-up of hydrogen, he issued a warning that there could be another explosion of the type that destroyed the outer building of the plant’s first reactor on March 12th. But he said there was no danger to the thick, steel-and-reinforced-concrete container that surrounds the reactor, and he is downplaying the risk of a dangerous leak of radiation.

Mr Edano, who like Mr Kan is dressed in blue overalls to give the uniform-loving Japanese a sense of workmanship, is deftly trying to reduce the risk of panic around the country. His staff are telling foreign correspondents to reassure foreigners living in Japan that there is no need to flee Tokyo (the American ambassador has put out a similar message). The task is made harder by imprecise information on the levels of radiation that have leaked out and the dangers to the several dozen people near the Fukushima power plant who have so far been diagnosed as suffering from radiation.

Reportedly, levels of radiation have temporarily exceeded 1,000 microsieverts, which is twice the legal upper limit; but in many cases they have been little worse than an X-ray. The government insists the radiation comes from its controlled release of pressure from the reactor container vessels, and is not dangerous to humans. It rejects assertion that the leaks are out of control. However, there is a general mistrust among many Japanese about the authorities’ willingness to admit to a serious radiation problem if it were to occur. It might, of course, accidentally play down the risk in its efforts to avoid panic. What’s more, Tepco, which provides most of the information on its Fukushima plant, has obfuscated shockingly in the past. Its reputation is unlikely to be burnished by the fact that residents of greater Tokyo and elsewhere, as well as businesses, were told to brace for extended power cuts in coming days. The government says power supply for such areas has fallen by a quarter, from 41 gigawatts to 31 gigawatts, because of the quake-induced disruption.

On top of those concerns, the Meteorological Agency, which on March 13th upgraded its assessment of the size of Friday’s earthquake from 8.8 to 9.0, has also warned than in the next three days, there is a 70% chance of another big quake. The huge movement of sub-sea earth at 2.46pm on Friday led to a quake at three different epicentres, along a 500km stretch of sea. This was why the quakes were felt so broadly, and why there have been such frequent aftershocks.

Many businesses have decided to close, in part because of disrupted supply chains, but also because of the uncertainty over access to power. Toyota, Nissan, Honda and Suzuki will idle some or all factories. But the north-east is not Japan's industrial heartland, and factories in places like Kyoto, the centre of the country's high-end technology components, have not said they plan to close on Monday. Meanwhile, in a bid to shore up the financial system and ensure suitable liquidity, the Bank of Japan provided ¥55 billion in cash to 13 banks over the weekend, in case customers line up to get money on Monday morning. Though the economic cost of the crisis is hard to see—in large part because of uncertainty about the consequences of the overheating nuclear reactors—estimates place it above the ¥10 trillion (around $120 billion) damage of the Kobe earthquake in 1995.

Perhaps bracing for further weeks of uncertainty, Tokyo residents and others have been stocking up on petrol and provisions. Pot noodles are gone from the supermarket shelves, as are bread and tins of tuna. In a nation with the best lavatories in the world, another coveted item is the damp face towel, which apparently can be used as toilet tissue if water supply is interrupted for long periods. Such are the unsubstantiated rumours flying around Tokyo, anyway. 

Photo credit: EPA

THROUGHOUT Japan’s recent history of earthquakes, fires and tsunamis, none have matched the combined fury of those that battered the north of the country on March 11th, killing hundreds of people and leaving at least 1,000 unaccounted for. But on March 12th the Japanese faced another danger: a nuclear accident.

BENEATH the Japanese archipelago lies a mythical catfish, brutish and capricious. For most of the time, its head is pinned down by a granite keystone, held in place by the Shinto god of the earth. But occasionally, the god drops his guard. Then the fish thrashes, convulsing the earth. In mid-afternoon on March 11th a massive earthquake erupted, 24 kilometres (15 miles) down, off the north-east coast of Japan’s main island. A tsunami followed. Cars, ships and buildings were swept away. People in Tokyo 370 kilometres away poured out of buildings as high-rises swayed. An anxious roar went up in the shopping district of Omote-Sando as the first of the aftershocks struck. After wreaking damage along low-lying parts of the coast, the tsunami rolled across the Pacific, testing the Pacific-wide early-warning system set up after the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. Shares and the yen both fell.

This 8.9-magnitude quake has been described as the biggest on record in tremor-prone Japan. NHK, the national broadcaster, has uncertain reports on the number of dead and missing, but the combined totals are believed to be in the hundreds. The broadcaster says whole villages in parts of Japan's north-eastern Pacific coast were swept away by a tsunami reaching seven metres high. Images showed waves churning through hamlets in the flat farming communities near the sea, carrying ships, buses and houses far inland. In Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture, a ship with 100 people abroad was washed away. Their whereabouts are unknown. One giant wave washed through an airport in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi, leaving 1,300 people stranded on upper floors within.

Japanese are drilled from childhood to deal with quakes. Coping with the chaos of the real thing is another matter. Bullet-train services were immediately halted. A huge fire blazed at an oil refinery on Tokyo’s outskirts and at least 50 fires have been reported elsewhere, including at factories belonging to Nissan and Sumitomo Metal. In Japan the fires caused by earthquakes, rather than the quakes themselves, are usually the main killers. But modern industries bring other earthquake-related concerns. At about 10pm local time, Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, issued a nuclear emergency warning for the Fukushima First Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima prefecture. He said people within a 3km radius were being ordered to evacuate, while those living between 3km and 10km away were instructed to stay in their houses. He denied, though, that there was radioactive leakage.

The opposition Liberal Democratic Party, which has been doing its level best in recent weeks to topple the government of Naoto Kan, the prime minister, now says it will co-operate fully, including supporting special spending measures.

Tsunami warnings continue to be broadcast repeatedly on the television. Across Japan, millions braced for a miserable night of uncertainty. Electricity firms reported that in northern Japan, many homes were without power or phone lines; in the same area, snow is falling, and TV images showed people in evacuation shelters huddling in blankets. Tokyo got off relatively lightly, though most public transport ground to a halt, forcing commuters to walk often huge distances home. Shelves in the capital’s convenience stores were almost bare, with long lines of people attempting to buy snacks and drinks.

But it is worth bearing in mind that this is not the huge earthquake that seismologists say is long overdue in Tokyo. That is expected to ripple up from Shizuoka in the south. Tokyo sits above two faultlines and near another. Just south-west of the city, the Philippine Sea plate dives down under the Eurasian continental plate; right under the city, the Pacific plate dives under that.

Early estimates of damage from this earthquake are necessarily crude. The 6.8-magnitude Hanshin earthquake that struck Kobe in 1995 killed 6,400. The cost was put at Y10 trillion ($100 billion). Industrial production dipped only briefly. The stockmarket fell by 8% in the week following the quake, but rose later. Tohoku, the north-east region of Honshu island where today's quake struck hardest, accounts for 8% of the country’s GDP. The area is less densely populated than around Kobe, and less industrial. The quake, though very much larger, may prove less damaging, though horrific enough for all that.

See also our correspondents' account of the reaction to the earthquake in Tokyo.

THE taxi drivers at Timor-Leste’s international airport are a many-tongued chorus. Every one of them has at least four different languages with which to try talking you into paying double the normal fare. A useful reminder of the colonial history of one of the world’s youngest nations—as well as testament to the universal opportunism of young men looking to make a quick buck in a free-market economy.

Of course, Timor-Leste (formerly known as East Timor), will soon be bumped a peg down the league table of the world’s youngest nations by South Sudan, falling just behind Montenegro and Kosovo. It hardly matters. Timor-Leste is perfectly ready to pass the torch to an even-younger brother. The buzz of deals being done in Dili, the capital, and an ambience of strong animal spirits are at their highest since the country became an independent state, in 2002. The whispers had been about whether East Timor would be capable of surviving on its own. Till 1975 a Portuguese colony, Timor-Leste is little more than half an island—not one of the Indonesian archipelago’s largest—isolated and broken by decades of brutal conflict and neglectful rule by Jakarta. In 2006, factional fighting between the army and police killed dozens of people in Dili and left around 150,000 homeless. Their feuding was inflamed by civilians who had been armed and goaded to fight by rival political parties. The government collapsed and a political crisis followed, forcing UN peacekeepers come back in and restore order. The talk turned to whether Timor-Leste had become a failed state.

But the new country had a card up its sleeve: offshore oil and gas, mineral wealth just waiting to be cashed in. Today the country is rolling in filthy lucre. In 2002 Timor-Leste’s national budget was less than $20m; for 2011 it is more than $1 billion. The government of José “Xanana” Gusmão, an independence hero turned prime minister, is spending like mad. It has busied itself dishing out $450m for a national grid and power plant; other contracts for roads, bridges, farming equipment; improved pensions for the elderly and veterans; and spending on sundry other priorities that Mr Gusmão judges to be essential to growth and development. The spending spree is made possible by the East Timor Petroleum Fund, which held $7.2 billion as of March 1st and allows the government to draw a small percentage of it each year to fund its otherwise insignificant budget. Dili is a boom town, dotted with shops, internet cafés, restaurants, building-supply stores—not to mention the calming presence of UN vehicles and international police officers. An Australian-Timorese businessman is building a giant shopping mall on 15 hectares of land near the airport.

But not everyone is pleased. Opposition politicians, aid organisations and even the president, José Ramos-Horta, have all expressed alarm at the level of government spending and at the absence of oversight for contract-bidding and performance. They note too that 85% of the population lives in rural districts, and that the poverty rate tops 40%. Timor-Leste has the world’s third-highest rate of child malnutrition.

It also has one of the highest rates of population growth anywhere; only in sub-Saharan Africa and Afghanistan is its rate of fertility to be matched. For better or for worse, this will be a young population, for a long time. Yet 85% of its schoolteachers fail a test of basic competency. Critics of the government complain that spending should concentrate on the country’s human capital, by improving education and health care, and on improving agricultural irrigation, taking into consideration that the vast majority of Timor-Leste’s 1m people are subsistence farmers.

The debate on spending priorities is playing out on the floor of parliament, in the press, and even at village meetings. On a return to Dili after years away, it doesn’t seem to matter so much which side has it right. What matters more is that the levers of a functioning democracy—governance, political opposition, a free press, civil society, trade, infrastructure development and the like—are clearly moving in Timor-Leste. For all the creaking and grinding, this is working. The talk of ten or even five years ago—of a country that might just be impossible—shot wide of the mark, mercifully. Parliamentary and presidential elections are scheduled for 2012 and the withdrawal of the UN’s international police force is to follow. Mark it on the calendar as another opportunity for the Timorese to prove they’ve made the grade.

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)

RELEASED in 1984, “The Killing Fields” was an unforgettable glimpse into the ghastly hell of Cambodia under Pol Pot. For many moviegoers, it illuminated a largely unknown genocide that killed an estimated 1.7m people and ended only with Vietnam’s invasion in 1979. Even then another decade of civil war was to follow. The film won a slew of awards and lots of acclaim for its British director, Roland Joffe.

Pol Pot and the murderous Khmer Rouge are long gone, but the legacy of war lingers in Cambodia. Look no further than the ranks of amputees in towns and villages. Some are the victims of landmines, of which rival armies scattered at least 4m, along with other unexploded ordnance, during and after the Vietnam’s war of independence. The toll continues to rise. Last year, 71 people died and 215 were injured by leftover munitions, according to the Mines Advisory Group, a charity.

In recent years Cambodia has tried to turn this handicap to its advantage with a disabled volleyball league. The league has thrived, making heroes of its amputees, who also compete for their country on the international stage. This year’s World Cup for disabled volleyball will be held in Phnom Penh in July, for the second time in four years. North Korea and Egypt are among the contenders.

Mr Joffe wants to bring Cambodia’s sporting triumph to the big screen. Having plumbed its tragic depths, with his new film he would put a more cheerful spin the country’s story by concentrating on what happened after the fighting ended. He calls the project a “living postscript” to “The Killing Fields”, and laments that Cambodia “keeps getting forgotten” by the rest of the world. An uplifting movie about disabled athletes punching their way out of poverty might be just the ticket. Unlike “The Killing Fields”, which was mostly filmed in Thailand, the volleyball picture would be shot on Cambodia’s own playing fields—provided Mr Joffe can pull together the necessary financing.

These days, there is plenty of money sloshing around Cambodia, which averaged over 9% GDP growth between 2000-2007, before the world’s financial crisis struck. The economy is now revving again. Last year, Chinese investors promised to spend billions of dollars on power and agricultural projects. South Korean firms are also increasingly active. This means more potential sponsors for the disabled volleyball league. The 13 teams it fields currently all depend on corporate largesse for their kit, fields and salaries.

Chris Minko, a bluff Australian, runs the league on a tight budget. He says more teams are waiting in the wings, mostly in rural towns bereft of sponsors. He hopes that the release of a hit movie by Mr Joffe might bring a raft of new donations and help put the league on a firmer footing. It would also, naturally, shine a spotlight on Mr Minko, a longtime resident of Cambodia: his is one of the current script’s lead characters (“a cynical, 40-something alcoholic”).

As for Mr Joffe, a cinematic return to Cambodia, where he still does charity work occasionally, would mark a change of pace. His latest film, “There Be Dragons”, concerns the Spanish civil war and the founder of Opus Dei. Perhaps it is a sign of the times that his second Cambodian movie could be a more hopeful affair.

WILL the resignation of Seiji Maehara, Japan’s foreign minister, for accepting an illegal donation mark the beginning of the end of the government of Naoto Kan? By itself, the offence seems trifling. On March 6th Mr Maehara admitted that he had received 250,000 yen ($3,000) in donations over five years from a South Korean permanent resident of Japan. Mr Maehara claims not to have known about the money, and the South Korean in question, reportedly a 72-year-old restaurant owner who used to make him grilled beef as a child, says she didn’t know her donations were illegal. But the fact that he stepped down so quickly—over Mr Kan’s objections—shows just how weak the government is. Support for Mr Kan has plummeted in recent weeks; his party has started to split; smelling blood, the opposition has ganged up to block the 2011 budget. On top of all this, the loss of Mr Maehara, the government’s most charismatic politician (and the second of Mr Kan’s key ministers to quit this year) will be hard to survive.

Let’s face it, the longevity of Mr Kan’s administration was looking tenuous even before Mr Maehara quit. The opposition is trying to push it into a corner over the budget by withholding its support for bills that would finance spending over the next 12 months. Its tactic is to wait a few months until the danger that the government will run out of money forces Mr Kan has to call a general election. The budget impasse might have come to a head already had not support for the opposition remained almost as weak as that of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Given the chronic gridlock in the political system, it is not surprising that voters should be losing faith in the lot of them.

But the loss of Mr Maehara makes Mr Kan’s life even more difficult than it was before. It robs his administration of arguably its most solid ideological backbone, and the person most Japanese think could be a future prime minister. (Indeed, some suspect Mr Maehara may have quit with an eye to returning in short order: to lead a future government.) As foreign minister, albeit a short-lived one, Mr Maehara had shored up Japan’s frayed security alliance with America and made it once again central to foreign policy. He was an outspoken advocate of Japan’s participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious free-trade group that is likely to include America. He has also taken on the vested interests impeding agricultural reform. Mr Kan has pledged to reach agreement within his government on both trade and farm reform by mid-2011. Without Mr Maehara or Yoshito Sengoku, the canny former chief cabinet secretary who quit in January, his chances of achieving that goal look slimmer by the day. Such a failure would weaken his credibility even further.

Opposition parties, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) foremost among them, will no doubt be gloating over Mr Maehara’s exit, which they precipitated by discovering and exposing his Korean benefactor’s wayward donations. As its sneaky tactics attest, the LDP still clings to a hope that it can crawl back to power at the DPJ’s expense. That’s unlikely though. Polls suggest that if there were a new election soon, no party would win large enough a majority in the lower house to govern effectively. There is optimistic talk of bashing together a grand coalition involving both the DPJ and the LDP to solve Japan’s long-term problems like debt, demography and deflation. But given the shabby and vitriolic way that all political parties are behaving at present, a grand conflagration looks more likely.

WHEN America faced the shutdown of its government in 1995, during a budgetary duel full of exaggerated theatrics, The Economist called it “Budget-bill kabuki”. Even as Washington might well reprise that routine on March 4th, this time the imported show is coming home.

A few hours before dawn on March 1st, Naoto Kan’s ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) passed a budget of sorts, despite an unprecedented revolt from 16 of its lawmakers, who abstained. But for the time being it is only a pale imitation of a budget; it sets out the 92 trillion yen ($1 trillion) the government plans to spend in the next fiscal year, but not the means of paying for it all. Winning support for the latter is so hard, Mr Kan has not yet tried.

This does not mean government will grind to a halt on April 1st. About 44% of spending is backed by taxes that can be renewed automatically. But the rest comes from borrowing, which needs approval either from a majority vote in the upper house, or a two-thirds majority in the lower house. The DPJ has neither, nor has it had any success in persuading the smaller opposition parties to vote with it. Opposition lawmakers are blasé: two whom I interviewed could hardly stop chuckling at Mr Kan’s predicament. They say that for several months into the next fiscal year the government can fund itself through existing tax revenues as well as by raising up to 20 trillion yen of short-term debt, which would avert an immediate budget crisis. In the meantime, they hope that Mr Kan’s popularity will sink so low as to force him into stepping down or annulling parliament as a condition for winning passage of the financing bills. They are preparing for such a showdown in the summer.

This is a dangerous game, however. It is not just government financing that is jeopardised by the political impasse; it is a DPJ child-benefit scheme that some families may be counting on; a long-overdue cut in corporate tax; as well as tax breaks for fishermen and farmers and tariff cuts on imported food and cigarettes. If the budget battle comes to look like it will further strain Japan’s fragile economic recovery, voters may blame the opposition’s intransigence as much as the ruling party’s ineptitude. 

To drive that message home, the DPJ has circulated to some of its opponents extracts from the 2003 autobiography of Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary, which recounts how the Republicans, in sabotaging the budget in 1995, ended up hurting themselves. Opposition politicians acknowledge that even as Mr Kan’s popularity fell to a measly 22% in a Nikkei poll this week, their parties did not reap the benefits. Nor was there widespread demand among those polled for Mr Kan to resign. Then on March 1st it became news when he notched up his 267th day in office: surpassing by a day that of Yukio Hatoyama, his predecessor. How weary voters have become of having leaders who fall like dominoes. 

Yoshimasa Hayashi of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) admits that the latest gridlock may be aggravating voters’ disdain for the mainstream  parties. But he shrugged this off as an occasional feature of Japanese politics, something which tends to pass.

A novel side effect is that some fringe parties seem to be benefiting at the expense of the big ones. Last month we wrote about a tax-cutting party in Nagoya, one of Japan’s largest cities, which we referred to as a Japanese “tea party” movement. (Mr Hayashi mischievously called it a “sake party”, probably in allusion to its leaders’ self-confessed fondness for drink.) On March 3rd the Kyodo news agency reported that a first-term DPJ lawmaker had quit the ruling party to join the Nagoya tax-cutting party, led by her former boss, Takashi Kawamura. DPJ members who remain close to the party’s scandal-tainted former boss, Ichiro Ozawa, preferring him to Naoto Kan, are also reportedly getting closer to Mr Kawamura and his group. Some believe they could bring about a split in the ruling party.   

Mr Kan’s forces are bitterly divided, which is one reason the opposition feels confident it can drive him into a corner. Never mind if polls suggest that no party would come out of an election a big winner. The irony is that the LDP and other opposition parties, such as New Komeito, quietly concur with many of Mr Kan’s ideas about fiscal reform and free trade. (We, too, think they are good ones.) But such is the crass self-interest of many Japanese politicians that the opposition would rather bring down this government than work with it towards meaningful reform. No wonder the public is disenchanted.

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)