‘You have to live.
‘You have to live. You have to find a way to live,’ a Japanese woman told the 15 elderly people who were trapped on the third floor of a concrete building in one of the small towns worst affected by the natural disaster in March. She had gathered them together after the earthquake, and in fear of a tsunami she kept urging them to struggle up the stairs to the third floor: ‘Move up. Move up.’ Then suddenly she saw that the telegraph poles were ‘popping’ out of the ground and a sea of black water was surging towards them. ‘Am I going to die now?’ she thought. But she didn’t, and it was her optimism, her human spirit, that allowed them all to survive as they waited for four long and terrifying days before rescue came.
Justin Webb was talking to Masako Shirade for the Today programme on Radio 4 last Friday in a series of reports from the earthquake-ravaged region. His visit has been timely, just as it appeared that Japan’s story of recovery from the terrible devastation in the north-east had slipped from the news agenda. Shirade’s story was unusual in its passion and its positive outcome. Most of the people Webb talked to were dissatisfied that the Japanese government has not been doing enough to help those worst affected and is stifling the will to clean up the mess because of its desire for control. In these be-Murdoched times, it was as if Webb (or his editors) were made to feel uncomfortable by those small acts of kindness upon which recovery depends, and sought out only the worst.
The problems faced by Japan are beyond our imagining, with its nuclear energy programme now in question.
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