LOST After an
Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Meltdown Catastrophe
“This city has to survive. It’s beautiful. People have to come back.
They’ll come back one day. They have to. It’s a beautiful city. I was just at
the stadium. There needs to be children here. There is no life without
risks.” [1]
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People who have been following Japan’s reaction
to its nuclear crisis have had many moments of dumbfounded, slack-jawed
amazement as they hear of plans to move people back into the disaster zone,
clean up the enormous levels of radioactive fallout and restore life as it was
before–all while three nuclear reactor fuel cores lie in a melted heap and tons
more of spent fuel lies in a precarious, exposed state.
This situation is enough to make a person feel
like she has awoken in an episode of the sci-fi drama LOST (2004-2010). In that story, the traumatized victims walked
dazed and confused in an island paradise that had been uncannily transformed by
various technological interventions imposed by previous human intruders. They were
slow to figure out that their lives were over, as they obviously must have been
after their airplane crash. Several times over the seasons the lead character,
Jack, was knocked unconscious and had to awaken each time and make sense of his
surroundings while befuddled by each knock on the head. In fact, this was the
defining aspect of his character. He was always slow to figure things out,
always striving to deny reality, and thus knocking himself out for a lost cause
and making poor decisions. He would have fit right in during the nuclear
disaster aftermath on “the island” that is Honshu.
The Japanese government, and many of the
residents of Fukushima who are going along with its plans, seem to be in the
same state of traumatized denial. They are like a bloodied driver emerging from
a car accident who is oblivious to what has happened. He stumbles around and
stammers about being late for work and needing to go, becoming all the more
confused by the perplexed reactions on people’s faces. For the first months,
the trauma victims of Japan and Fukushima lived in denial about what had
happened, aided in their delusions by the global nuclear industry, as well as
by cynical financial interests and government officials who want to save the
economy and the tax base. The pressure came from overseas as well, as the
United States and other nuclearized nations needed Japan to continue with its
nuclear program in order to sustain the international nuclear program.
The plans so far have all been about cleaning up
and restoring the contaminated communities, regardless of how hopeless,
expensive and dangerous this will be. These citizens ignore inconvenient facts,
such as the fact that the young, educated and wealthy are not coming back, which
assures that these communities will be populated only by the elderly. They are abetted
by cynical exploiters in the bureaucracy who want to spend the nation’s
finances on such an ill-advised “revitalization” that is most concerned with
saving the corporations that build nuclear plants or sell electricity from
them.
While there is much evidence that adults may be
able to live in low level radiation with an “acceptable” risk of being
affected, the risks for embryos are much higher. The people who are in a rush
to rebuild communities in Fukushima haven’t stopped to ponder the futility of
resettling in towns where the soil is condemned and procreation involves an
unacceptable risk of birth defects and lifelong harm to health.
One can go on at length with a comparison of how
the people of Japan are like the lost souls in LOST. The cleanup workers at the
Daiichi plant resemble the bewildered workmen and the survivors who were
enslaved into a legacy of 1970s technology and experimentation gone terribly
wrong. They are down in the metaphorical hatch desperately pressing a button to
save their world, or maybe just performing a fool’s errand, but they don’t dare
stop pressing that button. They carry out compartmentalized tasks without
knowing who is in charge, who to trust, or what the master plan is, if there
ever was one. The survivors fight among each other about whether to leave or
stay, while they simultaneously fight and form alliances with “others” and
“other others” who come from afar with mysterious agendas. There are weird
health effects and malevolent, intangible forces. Like radiation, the
mysterious force on the island can heal or kill, but most crucially, it puts a
stop to procreation by killing all pregnant women. There is a 19th century
shipwreck in the middle of the jungle named the Black Rock, which,
incidentally, is what Dene elders in northern Canada warned their people to
stay away from. Their black rock is the black ore which the outsiders found was rich in uranium.
Alliances in LOST shift from day to day. Certain
people are deemed expendable for the greater purpose of achieving the opaque
goals of the competing groups. The original motivation for humans coming to the
island was to master the limitless energy supply hidden within it, but one
thing the inhabitants must do first is understand why humans cannot reproduce
on the island. Whatever the secret of the energy source is, the problem must be
resolved if humans are to have a future on the island. As the story proceeds,
the survivors learn that in the 1950s the American military brought a hydrogen
bomb to test on the island, but they were chased off, with their undetonated
bomb left behind to cause future problems. They also learn in the final
episodes that the island is a battleground between God and the Devil. God works
on the island to contain the Devil on it, to keep him from breaking free to
roam the world. He has his chosen representatives to intervene on his behalf and
guide others, but God himself cannot intervene for the humans he has given free
will. By the end of the tale, God is “very disappointed” in mankind. The
intrusions by outsiders, who have come in pursuit of the island’s energy supply,
have threatened to give the final victory to the Devil, now poised to finally
get off the island. What started off looking like science fiction is now a
religious parable as well.
In similar ways the people of Japan and the
workers at the Daiichi plant are pawns in a game between competing powers that
they cannot comprehend, in a battle with technology that has escaped human control.
They must look at their various levels of government, the IAEA, the WHO, and
corporations like TEPCO, Toshiba, Westinghouse, and Areva as a bewildering
parade of suspicious strangers arrived from over the horizon. The similarities
between “the island” and the island where Fukushima is located can be
stretched too far, but they illustrate how LOST was more than just the usual
light entertainment offered up on prime time television. It had moments of
brilliance when, between advertisements for technological gadgets, it subverted
the institutions that produce entertainment, depicting humanity’s tortured relationship
with its technology.
LOST also managed to reflect the horrible
direction of American foreign policy at the time in a way that mainstream
television news wouldn’t. When the cunning Benjamin Linus, leader of “the
Others” in the island’s multi-sided civil war, liked to declare, “We’re the
good guys,” the allusion to President Bush’s use of the same phrase was clear
to all. In several episodes, the characters resort to terror and torture to
manipulate the behavior of their enemies. The debates held among them were a
reflection of what was happening for real in American society.
Another analogy with LOST is in the way the
survivors split over having false hope and blind faith or making rational
choices to cut losses. An article in the New York Times in
December, 2011 illustrated how the Japanese are slowly waking up the extent of
the catastrophe that has fallen on them.
Critics of the revitalization effort were
growing more vocal. They believed it “… could end up as perhaps the
biggest of Japan’s white-elephant public works projects–and yet another example
of post-disaster Japan reverting to the wasteful ways that have crippled
economic growth for two decades.” [2] The trial cleanups had stalled
because there was no place to put the removed soil, and even after “decontamination,”
more radioactive particles blow down from the forests and hillsides. Levels
remain above international safety standards for long-term habitation.
The director of the Radioisotope Center at
the University of Tokyo, Tatsuhiko Kodama, said, “I believe it is possible
to save Fukushima, but many evacuated residents must accept that it won’t
happen in their lifetimes.” Thousands of buildings have to be scrubbed and
people will have to wait while “… the topsoil from an area the size of
Connecticut is replaced. Even forested mountains will probably need to be
decontaminated, which might necessitate clear-cutting and literally scraping
them clean.”
Japanese officials said that they don’t
have the luxury of evacuating a wider area as was done in Chernobyl because the
area covers 3% of the land mass of Japan. A reasonable question to ask here is “Only
3%?” If that’s all, people could easily move to the remaining 97%. Japan is a
densely populated country, but its rural areas have been depopulated in recent decades.
There is a lot of unused real estate, in big cities and rural areas, and room
for the affected 2% of the population to move elsewhere. Besides, the decision
to evacuate should be decided by the level of contamination, not the
availability of land. If land really is so scarce, the logical next question is
whether Japan can continue with the risks of nuclear energy.
Pride was on display in one quote in the NYT article that showed what will
probably prove to be a fatal arrogance in the Japanese mindset. One man seems
to suggest that those backward and impoverished Ukrainians and Russians were just
not up to the task of dealing with Chernobyl. “We are different from
Chernobyl,” said Toshitsuna Watanabe, 64, the mayor of Okuma, one of the towns
that was evacuated. “We are determined to go back. Japan has the will and the
technology to do this.”
It is stunning that this senior citizen and
community leader made an unfounded claim about the nation’s technological
capacities and saw only his own need to return to his home, while he ignores
the interests of young people who wisely choose to stay away. The young are
expected to go along with the elders so that they can spend their old age on
their native, radioactive soil.
The article mentions the long roots of local
families in the land, and the sympathy they have gained throughout Japan, but
now “… quiet resistance has begun to grow, both among those who were
displaced and those who fear the country will need to sacrifice too much
without guarantees that a multi-billion-dollar cleanup will provide enough
protection. Soothing pronouncements by local governments and academics about
the eventual ability to live safely near the ruined plant can seem to be based
on little more than hope.”
In one town visited by the NYT writer,
there was an obvious split in opinion between the old and the young, especially
the young families with children. One old-timer said, “Smoking cigarettes
is more dangerous than radiation. We can make Okuma a model to the world
of how to restore a community after a nuclear accident,”–as if that would be
something to be proud of. One might argue that the best demonstration of what
happens after a nuclear accident of this scale is the establishment of an
evacuation zone that cannot be inhabited for 10,000 years. One does not want to
create a moral hazard or an impression that a nuclear disaster is a casual
thing that can be cleaned up easily.
To conclude, the article quoted
Professor Kodama saying, “… victory would be hollow, and
short-lived if young people did not return… Saving Fukushima requires not
just money and effort, but also faith. There is no point if only older
people go back.”
As time has passed, it has become more obvious
that young people are not going to go back. Rural communities struggle to
retain the younger generation even under normal conditions. In addition, not
only young people, but intelligent people, and people with any options to live
elsewhere, will not go back.
There was one memorable scene in an early
episode of LOST when Jack is desperately trying to save a patient who has been
killed during a surgery botched by his drunken father. He labors over the
patient long past the point when it has become obvious that she is gone. His
father stands behind him insisting repeatedly, “It’s over, Jack. Call it.” In
all other disasters, there comes a time to call it.
Yes, as Professor Kodama says, it’s a matter of
faith, and I am losing faith that the Japanese people have the collective
intelligence to save themselves and call it for what it is. Wake up, and give
up on this notion that the contaminated regions of Fukushima can be restored or
that this island nation can continue with its nuclear program. Accept the
reality of what happens when you lose control of a nuclear power plant. As a
foreigner watching on the sidelines, with a passport I can use to go live
somewhere else, that is a harsh judgment to make, but Japanese critics have
come to a similar conclusion. The long-time anti-nuclear critic Takashi Hirose
wrote after the disaster:
When
politicians come from abroad with the intention of helping, the result is no
more than a revolting solidarity among politicians and a string of falsehoods
tossed off to the media. If the Japanese people continue to believe this kind
of low-level news reporting and keep their mouths shut, the world will pass on
by and leave the country and its industry behind and isolated. If the people
don’t come to grips with the seriousness of the danger of the ongoing nuclear
disaster and show the decisiveness to put an end to the nation’s nuclear power
program immediately, the world will have no reason to believe in Japanese
intelligence. [3]
That was written in 2011. It’s over, Jack. When is someone going to call it?
Notes
[1] Thomas
Johnson (Director), The True Battle of Chernobyl, (M Way Films /
Discovery Communications, 2006), 16:00 ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBAT13Bt9Ic or http://www.mwayfilms.com/en/films/the-battle-of-chernobyl . These words were spoken by one of the elderly evacuees
from Pripyat on the day of departure. No one ever came back.
[2] Martin
Fackler, “Japan Split on Hope for Vast Radiation Cleanup,” New York Times, December 6, 2011.
[3] Takashi Hirose,
Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First
Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster (fukushima genpatsu merutodaun) (Asahi
Shimbun Publications, 2011). The English translation was published
independently and sold only as an e-book, with permission of the original
publisher.
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