May 10, 2011
Updates on TEPCO Compensations
A few days ago the Japanese government sources reported that the total amount of compensation required would be 4 trillion yen ($48.7 billion) and that TEPCO would be expected to cover about half of that. What this means for ordinary people is that they would likely to be expected to pay higher electricity bills and their tax burden will increase.
At the end of April, TEPCO was expected to start paying provisional compensation to eligible households within a 30 KM zone (those affected by evacuation & stay-indoor orders). The number of households to be compensated is expected to exceed 50,000.
(http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201104150139.html)
Other updates on the progress of workers in the nuclear plant can be also found at www.asahi.com and other sources.
Japan just had a long holiday week during which many volunteers from all over Japan gathered in disaster stricken areas to help clean-up and serve victims, as Midori wrote on an email to me a couple days ago. Approximately 56,000 people have been able to return to their homes or move to temporary housing since the Easter Sunday. There are still about 74,000 evacuees in shelters because of the evacuation order and severe damages in certain areas. (This number, 74,000, is a size of a city that is a bit smaller than Luxembourg City of Luxembourg in Europe or Palmerstone North of New Zealand, and a slightly larger than Chilliwack in British Colombia, Canada, just to put this in perspectives.) From today, May 10, people will be allowed to visit their homes located within 20 KM zone, but outside the 3 KM radius from the plant, with a two hour permit according to the government’s regulated schedule.
We are now entering the third month since the earthquake and tsunami hit Fukushima on March 11. This is a very critical moment in the course of disaster relief operation as the initial couple months of rapid response will be soon wrapped up. It is a time of identifying and strengthening local capacity to envision and plan long term, sustainable solutions for rebuilding communities beyond the relief situation. Massive disasters like March 11 earthquake and tsunami, and the man-made disaster of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant explosion and radiation demand a whole new societal vision. It is not about simply going back to the same old, as if we could turn the clock back to what it was before March 11.
While waiting in evacuation shelters, farmers are now missing crop cycles for this year, which means they will have little to harvest at the end of a long hard year of suffering when the brutal winter comes in five to six months from now. Land contamination by radioactive particles such as caesium will take at least 30 years to restore as I recall the nuclear plant expert, Mr. Suzuki’s comment when we met in Yamato last month. With majority of young population leaving the region, the whole socio-economic outlook of Fukushima will dramatically change. (the above picture was taken in Iwaki)
“Please go out for shopping! Spend money! It will be therapeutic for you. We need to help recover the economy as quickly as possible. Buy and buy more! That’s what consumers can do to help in the time of disasters like this.”Midori and I watched a TV talk show one evening during our time in Fukushima and it was the show host’s plea for people of Japan to help recover from the economic loss of the disasters. We felt helpless in what we were hearing and seeing in the bipolarity of modern capitalist economic life: On one end there is this national agenda driven economic growth by the government and by greedy and selfish interests of large corporations, and on the other end, passive individualistic consumerism. Is it really the only thing that ordinary people can do? Consume and buy as much as they can and pay taxes and utilities bills as much as they can? As a theologian whose class I am sitting in this week back in my work puts it, today’s political economic realities looks like a "Reverse Robin Hood": to get the poor to pay for what the rich and the powerful are doing. Rebuilding of communities in Fukushima at a local or regional level seems to be more challenging than ever in the polarized economic realities of life today.
A vision for local communities for local economic action:
This is what is missing right now. Some of the local churches in Fukushima are now connecting with one another locally to address these long term issues together. Networks and partnerships are being formed globally as well among the body of Christ in different nations to build communities of Easter Hope in Fukushima. While I was there we met with local business leaders and a local politician in Koriyama city. The FVI team is continuing their visits and their work among these churches and pastors in Iwaki and Koriyama to help local churches to envision a different economic reality for Fukushima that will be uplifting people of Fukushima, strengthening their communities, and restoring the land they call home and they produce their food from. (The details are not yet ready to be widely shared yet, sorry.) We are now searching for answers from models of local communities around the globe who are further along the journey of building communities when faced with ecological and economic challenges with rapid demographical declines.
Some Christians think this kind of practical action should not distract a local church from its primary goal of saving souls for heaven. If God cares about his creation and about his people here on earth, what else should be the concerns of the local church?
