One year after Japan tsunami: Roads repaired, but lives still disrupted

One year after the Japan tsunami, earthquake, and nuclear disaster, many roads are rebuilt and debris is cleaned up. But much remains in flux for residents of the hard-hit northeast coastal zone.?

When Takako Ouchi's elderly mother died last December, tradition dictated she be laid to rest in a cemetery near her home.

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But the cemetery, like her old house, lies in the shadow of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, rendered unreachable ? perhaps forever ? because of radiation. Instead, Ms. Ouchi has constructed a shrine to her mother in the bedroom of her new home, 40 miles away.

Her mother's final resting place remains in flux ? as does much of Ouchi's life. "I think about different plans every day, and it's driving me crazy," she says, sitting cross-legged on the floor at a low table in her living room. "I cannot see when this uncertainty will lift."

A year after the triple disaster ? earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown ? that slammed northeastern Japan, recovery has been painfully slow. Roads and railways have reopened, most debris has been cleared, and the gyms and schools that served as shelters in the first days of the crisis now ring once again with the voices of athletes and students.

But longer-term prospects for the region and its inhabitants are still hazy. Few of those who lost homes know where they will be living this time next year, or where the money they need to live on will come from. Recovery efforts have been hampered by the scale of the disaster and "a lack of leadership," says Masaru Kohno, a political analyst at Tokyo's Waseda University. "The authorities have not done what they needed to."

Decisive leadership has not been easy for a government constrained by an opposition-controlled upper house that has blocked many of its initiatives. But even when decisions have been made, they have often become bogged down in Japan's notorious bureaucracy. Only a fraction of the funds for reconstruction has been spent.

Though Ouchi says she does not know how long she will stay in the rented house she found last October, one thing she is sure of: Although her husband still works part time at the nuclear plant that went into meltdown following the tsunami last March, she will not be returning to live in Okuma, her village.

"I've seen a documentary about Chernobyl," she says. "Nobody lives there, and that was 25 years ago."

'we just live day to day'

Ouchi's situation is similar to those of the 78,000 people ordered out of an "exclusion zone" stretching 12 miles from the reactors. Nor is the future much clearer for the other 264,000 people displaced by the earthquake, tsunami, and wider concerns about radiation. Officials up and down the battered northeastern coast say that complications of finding safe land and sufficient funds mean it could be five years or more until they are rehoused.

"I can't think about being here for five years," exclaims Chikako Nishihara, a grandmotherly physiotherapist whom the authorities have squeezed with her husband into a tiny prefabricated housing unit in the city of Iwaki. "We just live day to day."

The barracks-like compound is the sixth place Mrs. Nishihara has laid her head since she and her husband left their home in Tomioka, next door to the nuclear plant, last March 11 for a series of schools, gyms, and relatives' homes. Now their plans are on hold until the government decides whether their village can be made habitable or until TEPCO, the plant operator, compensates them.

For now 'we are in-between'?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/xjcr4l2sDZE/One-year-after-Japan-tsunami-Roads-repaired-but-lives-still-disrupted

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