I Truly Feel for Japan

I feel so sorry for Japan. If you were writing a disaster novel, or the screenplay for one of those disaster movies, and you didn't care that you were just piling up disasters and didn’t worry about straining credibility—then you couldn't make up a more dire scenario than what has actually happened to Japan, with an earthquake, tsunami, and then meltdown of nuclear reactors.

Plus, some Japanese are old enough to have memories of World War II and the suffering that was wrought upon the people of Japan in that war: not just the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also—much less well known to the rest of the world—the fire-bombing of Tokyo, which leveled half the city, killed a disputed number of people (usually estimated at over 100,000, more than the direct death toll from the Hiroshima atomic bomb attacks, though I find different casualty estimates for the numbers of atomic bomb casualties, as well as for the Tokyo casualties), and left a million people homeless. Remember, it's not the everyday people who start a war, but it is they who suffer from it.

And, Japan has suffered other terrible earthquakes, including the Tokyo earthquake of 1923 and a more recent one in Kobe.

Not to mention that the survivors of the nuclear attacks in 1945 remember the terrible suffering and sickness and death from the effects of radiation rather than the direct bomb blasts. People were dying from radiation exposure for decades afterward. And now again—amidst the death and destruction from the quake and the tsunami, the Japanese now again must worry about the health effects of radiation exposure.

It's tempting to segue into some discussion of nuclear power, its pros and cons. One might say, simplistically, that it was very foolish to build nuclear plants in an earthquake-prone country. But remember that, first, Japan has few other energy resources. I understand that in California there are nuclear plants sitting right atop the San Andreas Fault. Also, right here in Illinois, we have many nuclear power plants that could be affected by the New Madrid Fault, near the southern tip of Illinois, which caused four of the biggest earthquakes ever in the U.S. So as I write this, I am sitting on almost the same type of hazard that the people of Japan were.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein