More than two years after the 3/11 disaster, a tremendous amount of tsunami debris remains uncollected throughout Japan’s Tohoku region. In municipalties like Rikuzentakata, Kamaishi and Ofunato that were slammed by the massive tsunami, only 37 percent of the concrete, debris and household materials that litter the ground has been picked up so far.
More than two years after the 3/11 disaster, a tremendous amount of tsunami debris remains uncollected throughout Japan’s Tohoku region. In municipalties like Rikuzentakata, Kamaishi and Ofunato that were slammed by the massive tsunami, only 37 percent of the concrete, debris and household materials that litter the ground has been picked up so far.
As locals ponder whether to exit their often isolated, low-quality temporary housing to move inland toward cities like Morioka and Sendai, they look closely at the conditions in the area. Aesthetics matter to residents who remain undecided about whether to rebuild their wrecked homes or move on to greener pastures.
The inaction is partly due to cities, towns and villages being plagued by bureaucratic gridlock; many local communities have not yet reached agreement on issues such as collective housing relocation, with younger residents seeking to move to higher ground and older ones hoping to remain by the ocean.
One estimate by the Reconstruction Agency is that only half of 60 or so districts have agreed on land readjustment issues some two years after the disaster. Beyond the lack of agreement on what to do next, recent quantitative surveys (March 2013) carried out by the National Institute for Research Advancement (NIRA) underscored tremendous obstacles to efficient recovery. Among the problems documented in the NIRA reports were a lack of recovery in local industries, such as mining and manufacturing, and a large out-migration of young people from Fukushima Prefecture.
Against this backdrop, in discussions with local government officials, residents and NGOs alike, I heard many people expressing their belief that the recovery process--despite a tremendous amount of money being pumped into it--feels stalled. This may be because much of the more than 20 trillion yen set aside by the central government in budgets over five years has gone toward large-scale public works projects that are unrelated to the disaster.
That is, much of the funding is paying for the kind of pork-barrel projects, such as bridges, ports and roads to nowhere, which characterized Japan’s political economy for much of the late 20th century. These big projects were already being planned by central government ministries, such as the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, and were simply dusted off or revived with the new influx of cash post-3/11.
While new infrastructure will be of some short-term help (because of the construction jobs it creates), new buildings and physical structures alone will not assist the long-term recovery of these tsunami-affected communities.
Instead of the government-initiated large-scale projects, what is needed are bottom-up, community-based initiatives. Fortunately, there are some great examples of such programs that are happening on the ground, and several NGOs have worked closely with local communities in Tohoku to understand their goals for recovery and then continue as partners to achieve them.
The Ibasho project in Ofunato in Iwate Prefecture, under the direction of Emi Kiyota, for example, is breaking ground on a new project, called the Ibasho Cafe. The structure is located in the center of town next to a large block of temporary housing occupied by hundreds of survivors. The Ibasho Cafe will be managed and run by elderly community residents and will provide a meeting spot and cafe for community members of all ages.
Elderly tsunami survivors and residents have served as active participants throughout the process of planning, designing, constructing, managing and operating the cafe. Soon after the disaster, Emi and other project organizers heard various stories from the elderly and the younger generation about seniors who saved younger people’s lives by instructing them on where to escape and teaching them how to survive with extremely limited resources following the tsunami. Older people also expressed a great deal of gratitude for all the assistance they had received, and wanted to give back to and be part of community life.
The Ibasho project seeks to simultaneously provide a meeting space in a period when most families are cooped up in trailers and a way to foster the deepening of social bonds that have proved critical for resilience.
Another new bottom-up project has been created by the Japanese branch of the well-known organization Habitat for Humanity. Along with their standard procedure of providing hundreds of hours of volunteer labor to help locals in Tohoku rebuild their homes, Habitat has created a program to provide grants to selected families in need of financial assistance along with an innovative way to leveraging the new feed-in tariff (FIT).
The FIT was designed to encourage home owners and large-scale corporations alike to embrace renewable energy sources, such as solar panels, and helps lock in higher prices for electricity even for small-scale producers. Habitat is helping families install solar panels on their homes and on community centers to provide not only a source of power should another disaster strike the area, but also a small but steady stream of income thanks to the largesse of the central government.
One final project that has focused on the revitalization of local communities has come from the Sankaku Planning Iwate Project known as the Delivery Care project. By hiring unemployed local women to provide assistance to others who cannot go shopping themselves--because of pregnancy, illness or disability--the project provides both employment and social connections to those who need them.
Many of the elderly community residents in these Tohoku communities feel disconnected from friends and loved ones in their temporary shelters, and many women in the community have been unable to find employment because of the economic downturn of the area. In the communities of Miyako, Oda, Otsuchi and Ofunato, among others, this project has leveraged local needs into a positive force for change.
Top-down planning and large-scale projects describe the ways that most countries--advanced industrial democracies like Japan included--operate following crises. Regrettably, these sorts of plans have failed again and again. The current stagnation of Japan’s recovery can be overcome with creative, bottom-up approaches based not on pre-existing national plans but rather very local, focused ones. Grounded in the community, these initiatives have the power to push Japan forward.
We can only hope that the Japanese government itself will recognize the capacity of these initiatives and divert some of its funding from public works projects to local, innovative ones.
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Daniel P. Aldrich, associate professor of public policy at Purdue University, is the author of "Site Flights" (Cornell University Press 2010) and "Building Resilience" (University of Chicago Press 2012) and was an AAAS Fellow at USAID in 2012-2013. He is currently a Fulbright research professor at Tokyo University and a member of the Mansfield U.S.-Japan Network for the Future.