Ten Years After Disaster: My essay on Japan's 2011 triple catastrophes and "Ghosts of the Tsunami" for Words Without Borders
After Disaster: Embracing a Living Past through “Ghosts of the Tsunami” in Words Without Borders Gymnasium, Namie, 2016 Seven years ago Japan underwent its most devastating national crisis since the end of World War II. On March 11, 2011, the genpatsu shinsai triple natural and industrial disaster—a 9.0 earthquake, a tsunami that rose to 128 feet and flooded 217 square miles, and a meltdown and radiation leak at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant—is now cited as the costliest such catastrophe in the world, running to an estimated $400 billion as of 2017. At the time, the impact reverberated nationwide—physically, in the form of aftershocks that rattled buildings throughout the night, and logistically, as distribution and transportation routes were hampered or shut down entirely, leaving some store shelves periodically bare. Japan’s network of nuclear power plants went offline, and the term jishuku, denoting a measure of self-restraint in the face of others’ suffering, was manife
