Hope as Japan marks tsunami anniversary

JAPAN: The catastrophic tsunami that smashed into Japan, killed almost 19,000 people sparking a nuclear disaster. Now, two years on and with an energised new administration in Tokyo, some are daring to believe that better times lie ahead for the stricken northeast, and the country as a whole.

Monday marks the second anniversary of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake that sent a huge wall of water into the coast of the Tohoku region, splintering whole communities and ruining swathes of prime farmland.

Waves battered the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, 220 kilometers (136 miles) northeast of Tokyo, where reactors went into meltdown, sending out radioactive material that forced tens of thousands of people to flee.

More than a million homes were destroyed or damaged by the natural disaster.

Of the roughly 470,000 people who fled during the initial catastrophe and in the weeks after the nuclear crisis began, more than 315,000 people still live in temporary housing -- many of them dreary public units. But hopes that massive infrastructure spending would put the region back on its feet, and reinvigorate a national economy that has suffered more than a decade of growth-sapping deflation, did not materialise.

Debris has largely been cleared from the streets of coastal settlements. But it remains piled up in parks and empty lots, grim monuments to the worst crisis to hit Japan since World War II. Nearly 10,000 aftershocks have been recorded, including 736 jolts that measured above magnitude 5.0, some shaking the ground at Fukushima where there are still no permanent fixes for the damaged reactors.

Recovery work in places has stalled, victim sometimes of turf battles between local and national governments, or of indecision in communities unsure whether to rebuild on the same spot or move to higher ground.

AFP