Han`s Rosling on History

The Reality in Tohoku is Worse

Tohoku, Japan

"The Reality in Tohoku is Worse."--stated Hiroko Takeshima recently after she got back from
Tohoku.

Takeshima went up north to volunteer during Golden Week.   She helped to clear debris from
one of the towns devastated by the Tsunami.   She hails from Tohoko but lives in Kanto now.

She related that things in Tohoku are not like they appear on the news.   You often don`t see the details on the 6 o`clock news.

For example one volunteer spent a day digging a car out from the rubble.   He retrieved the body hoping to give relief to the relatives.    The body was intact except the fingers had been cut off.    Her hand was hanging out the window of the vehicle.

Tsunami`s don`t usually cut off fingers.    But people do.

Someone had beaten them to the punch and taken the unfortunate lady`s rings.   Takeshima related that these are some of the stories you don`t hear on NHK.

For more stories about Living in Japan 


Cases of theft have actually increased in Fukushima Prefecture, up 207 cases after the earthquake and Tsunami.   Cases of other crime are down across the board, for example: violent crime, and rape.

A journalist I know reports police numbers have been bolstered in Tohoku due to increased looting and now more about this in Japanese:

福島、侵入盗４割増６９５件…原発周辺狙われる

読売新聞 6月10日(金)1時37分配信

今年５月までの３か月間に福島県内で発生した侵入盗被害が、昨年の同時期より約４割増の６９５件に上ったことが警察庁のまとめでわかった。   Read More

The Mayor who saved his town from the Tsunami

FUDAI —

In the rubble of Japan’s northeast coast, one small village stands as tall as ever after the tsunami. No homes were swept away. In fact, they barely got wet.
  
Fudai is the village that survived—thanks to a huge wall once deemed a mayor’s expensive folly and now vindicated as the community’s salvation.
  
The 3,000 residents living between mountains behind a cove owe their lives to a late leader who saw the devastation of an earlier tsunami and made it the priority of his four-decade tenure to defend his people from the next one.
  
His 15.5-meter floodgate between mountainsides took a dozen years to build and meant spending more than 3.56 billion yen.
  
“It cost a lot of money. But without it, Fudai would have disappeared,” said seaweed fisherman Satoshi Kaneko, 55, whose business has been ruined but who is happy to have his family and home intact.
  
The gate project was criticized as wasteful in the 1970s. But the gate and an equally high seawall behind the community’s adjacent fishing port protected Fudai from the waves that obliterated so many other towns.  Read More