Video: In areas hit hard by an earthquake then tsunami, the search goes on for any survivors. But the new fear in places like Sendai, Japan, is radiation from troubles at nuclear power plants nearby. (March 16)
ISHINOMAKI, JAPAN — With city hall under water, phones dead and his superiors tending to their own private agonies, Chikara Abe faced a bureaucrat’s nightmare: “Everything is in chaos. I don’t get any orders,” said the local government official.
Fed up with waiting for instructions, Abe offered his services to a group of teachers who have stepped in to help fill a void left by the breakdown of one of the world’s most capable and usually omnipresent government bureaucracies.
Since a 9.0-magnitude quake Friday, Japan’s machinery of state has been swamped by a cascade of crises: a tsunami that wiped towns and village off the map; an out-of-control nuclear power plant that has put the entire country on edge; and shortages of food, power and gasoline that have left the northern part of one of Asia’s richest nations with the miseries of the world’s paupers.
Authorities have hardly been idle. But in places such as Ishinomaki , a town on Japan’s northeast coast now half-submerged in water, many are asking what happened to the country’s much-vaunted flair for organization.
Unlike victims of earthquakes in Haiti, Indonesia or China, those suffering in Japan expect their government to work and can’t understand why a country as affluent as theirs can’t keep gasoline, the lifeblood of a modern economy, flowing and why towns across the northeast have been plunged into frigid darkness for five days.
“I never expected anything like this in modern Japan. It is like fiction,” said Yutaka Iwasawa, a 25-year-old forklift operator. With the first floor of his house under water, he and his family huddle on the second floor. They go to bed as soon as the sun goes down because it is too cold and damp to do anything else.
The military, which has mobilized 100,000 troops for relief work, delivers water in stricken areas, hunts for bodies and has flown risky missions to dump water on a nuclear power plant belching radioactive smoke. In Ishinomaki, soldiers operate from a baseball stadium on dry land.
But the state, overwhelmed by problems, has abdicated some of its most basic duties, some say. “The government is not doing anything. They are not present here,” said Akase Hiroyuki, the principal of Ishinomaki’s Nakazato Primary School. Along with 20 of his teaching staff, he runs a shelter for 1,200 people left homeless and hungry by the tsunami. Classrooms serve as dormitories, and the school’s gymnasium has become a food-distribution center.
When Emperor Akihito made a rare television address on Wednesday, his soothing words were not heard in Ishinomaki: No one has watched TV since power failed Friday.
Foreign governments and charities have pledged money and sent a few rescue teams to Japan, but fear of exposure to radiation and uncertainty over what they can accomplish has limited their role. A German medical aid group pulled out after barely 24 hours in Japan.
China has trumpeted the work of a 15-man rescue team it sent Sunday to assist its former archenemy and current rival. The U.S. Marine Corps made its own highly publicized but minuscule contribution Wednesday: It delivered a few pallets of bottled water.
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