March 19, 2011
By MICHAEL WINES
KESENNUMA, Japan — A week after the tsunami obliterated most of this northern Japanese city’s seafront and not a little of its inland, the first handful of shopkeepers and their employees were outdoors shoveling mud and hauling wreckage from their businesses, signs of rebirth after this region’s worst catastrophe in memory.
Kunio Imakawa, a 75-year-old barber, was not among them.
Mr. Imakawa and his wife, Shizuko, lost his three-chair barber shop, their second-floor apartment and all their belongings in the tsunami. Rebuilding would mean starting from scratch. And he said that simple math, calculated in yen and in years, showed it was not worth the effort.
“Young people would think, ‘Maybe there’s another way,’ ” he said last week as he sprawled with 1,600 other refugees in a chilly local sports arena. “But I’m too old. My legs have problems.
“It’s too late to start over.”
And as this rural corner of northeastern Japan tries to start over, his spent resilience is a telling indicator of the difficulties ahead. Well before disaster struck, this region was an economic and social laggard, leaching people and money to Japan’s rich urban south, sustained — even as opportunity moved elsewhere — by government largess and an unspoken alliance with the nuclear-power industry.
Now a week of calamity threatens to upend those compacts, with unpredictable consequences.
“The young people left these rural communities long ago for jobs in Sendai, in Tokyo and in Osaka,” said Daniel P. Aldrich, a Purdue University professor who is an expert not only on the region’s economy, but also on the aftereffects of natural disasters like the tsunami.
“These are declining areas. With an exogenous shock like this, I think it’s possible that a lot of these communities will just fold up and disappear.”
Some have been hollowing out, albeit slowly, for a long time. Japan’s population as a whole is shrinking and graying, but the Japanese prefectures hardest hit by the tsunami — Miyagi, Fukushima and Iwate — often outpace the national trends, and their workers’ average incomes are shrinking as well.
Kesennuma’s home prefecture, Miyagi, claims one comparatively prosperous hotspot: its capital, Sendai, a million-person city that boasts some technology firms and a far younger population. But even Sendai has prospered at the expense of the surrounding countryside, which is significantly poorer and older.
Less than 19 percent of Sendai residents are older than 64, below the 22 percent national average. In contrast, over-64 citizens officially make up nearly 27 percent of Kesennuma’s population, and city officials say the total is closer to 30 percent.
People — especially young people — are leaving for the same reason as migrants everywhere: they see fewer opportunities here than in Japan’s bigger, flashier cities. For centuries, inland residents farmed and coastal residents fished. Over the years, farming declined in importance, and village fishermen have increasingly been routed by huge and more efficient factory ships.
“It’s a declining industry. That was so before the tsunami,” said Satsuki Takahashi, a University of Tokyo cultural anthropologist who has long studied the coastal villages in the tsunami area.
Unable to compete, but saddled with debt from purchases of boats and equipment, many fishermen troll in small boats near the coast, catching just enough to pay their bills.
“It’s usually the case that the first son has to stay with the home,” Ms. Takahashi said. “Those who can leave town are the second and third sons or daughters. Many of them do.”
Like governments everywhere, Tokyo has tried to manage the region’s decline. For pensioners — retired fishermen, and folks like Mr. Imakawa who serve them — there is a generous tax break for people who operate even marginal businesses from their homes. Japan’s small towns are filled with first-floor shops below second-floor apartments.
For job-hungry workers, Mr. Aldrich says, the government took another tack: it promoted the construction of nuclear power plants along the coast. Two reactor complexes were built in Fukushima Prefecture; one in Miyagi, near Sendai.
“There’s really no economic engine in these communities,” said Mr. Aldrich, whose 2010 book “Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West” details the government’s strategy for locating reactors in struggling areas. “These facilities bring $20 million or more to depopulating, dying towns. Many people saw these power plants as economic lifelines at a time when their towns are dying.”
And they were, until an earthquake and tsunami changed the economic equation last week.
Now at least one of the Fukushima complexes appears destined never to reopen. Part of the prefecture could remain off limits for years because of radiation. The future of similar plants could be thrown into doubt, along with the jobs and supporting businesses that sprung up around the nuclear industry.
At the same time, the tsunami wiped out thousands of businesses and tens of thousands of homes, many of them owned by retirees who lack the spirit or money to rebuild. And Mr. Aldrich — also the author of a long-term study of the societal impact of major disasters like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans — says the dislocation caused by the tsunami threatens to permanently rend the social fabric that keeps many coastal villages afloat in hard times.
Whether disproportionately elderly coastal towns will be resilient enough to absorb such blows is an open question. Whether Japan’s central government, already facing unprecedented debt, can afford to take on a colossal reconstruction of marginally economic areas is another. And then there is a third question: whether, in political terms, it can afford not to.
“We faced exactly the same question after Katrina,” said John Campbell, an expert on aging at the University of Michigan and visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo. “There was a big discussion about whether we should rebuild the Ninth Ward, since it was below sea level, and so on. In terms of economic rationality, it didn’t make any sense, really. But on the other hand, it’s where these people lived, and there were emotional reasons to do it.
“These villages may not have the same sentimental attachment. Nonetheless, there’s an emotional argument that’s going to be made, and I think it will be a potent one.”
Moshe Komata contributed research.
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