Tsunami victims remembered in Japan

Japan marks disaster that killed thousands and left others a nuclear legacy

At 2:46 pm on Wednesday, the exact time an offshore earthquake struck the country 9 years ago, people in Japan stopped to pray and remember those who lost their lives in the magnitude nine earthquake that rocked the country, triggering a subsequent tsunami and meltdowns at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, 220 kilometers northeast of Tokyo.

The disaster, claimed the lives of 15,899 people and 2,529 remain missing. Tens of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes because of contamination.

Almost a decade later, several cities remain blocked off in the region and according to the nation's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, there are some 48,000 residents still taking shelter outside their hometown.

In his office in Tokyo, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held a scaled-down ceremony together with his ministers over concerns about the spread of the COVID-19.

"Nine years have passed since the earthquake, the recovery and reconstruction of the stricken area has been progressing steadily," Abe said at the ceremony, adding that as a railway line is scheduled to open on March 14 in the region and evacuation orders were canceled in several places, "the revival of industry and livelihoods" has entered "a new stage".

"The government will continue to provide uninterrupted support to rebuild the victims' lives and steadily improve the living environments in areas affected by the nuclear disaster," Abe said.

Echoing Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yoshihide Suga, lauded the recovery efforts under way in Japan's northeast, but acknowledged that challenges remained in providing psychological care and other services to evacuees.

Shuichi Okamoto, a man in his 70s, who has relatives died in the disaster, said: "I think the government is not doing enough. There are more efforts they could put and more things they could do."

Okamoto was among a group of people who gathered to commemorate the tragedy by laying flowers and praying in Hibiya Park, Tokyo.

"I think people who survived the disaster will never be healed," Okamoto said.

"They are still hurting."

Concerns and challenges

Despite many signs of recovery in Japan's northeast, including a "Fukushima disaster area tour" to eliminate people's stigma and fears about the region, concerns and challenges remain, the biggest of them being how to deal with some 1.2 million tons of still-radioactive water stored at Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The volume of the water, which is used to cool the molten fuel inside the damaged reactors, grows by 170 tons every day.

Tokyo Electric Power Co, the plant's operator, says it needs to free up space so as to continue work to decommission the facility. It is widely expected that the company will gradually release the water into the ocean following a government decision allowing it to do so, but the company remains vague on when the process will begin.

Local residents, especially fishers, are fighting against the plan because they think the water release would hurt the reputation of their already battered fisheries.

Katsumi Shozugawa, a radiology expert at the University of Tokyo, said in a recent television interview that their worries are reasonable because the long-term consequences of low-dose exposure in the food chain has not been fully investigated.

"Once the water is released into the environment, it will be very difficult to follow up and monitor its movement. So the accuracy of the data before any release is crucial and must be verified," Shozugawa said.