After EarthquakeAfter EarthquakeIn 1995, when an earthquake ravaged the city of Kobe, an important industrial hub in Japan, the countrys government and economy surprised and impressed the world. Within 15 months, economic activity in the area returned to about 98 percent of pre-quake levels, and the cleanup was largely completed within two years. Now Japans massive earthquake and tsunami, plus its emergency involving damaged nuclear reactors, have generated headlines around the world and persuaded some that natural disasters have compounded the countrys long-term economic woes, rendering it a spent force on the international stage.
Yet there is little reason to fear that recovery from the recent Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and their aftermath need prove much more difficult or take much longer than the recovery from the disaster in Kobe. As before, the reconstruction effort will stimulate both immediate industrial activity and long-term investment in housing and in commercial and industrial infrastructure. Excess manufacturing capacity will help Japan cope with temporary capacity losses. Moreover, the countrys industrial core lies outside the region most badly damaged by the disasters, so long-term damage will probably be limited. Even credible worst-case scenarios for the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown indicate that it would have little impact on long-term
The Fukushima situation is quite different. There is one more component to the problem: Japan’s aging population population. With only a short time remaining, the total numbers of young people who have been born after 1945 are in decline, leaving only a small proportion of them with the right to obtain adequate education. Even this very limited chance of success could be considered a major factor to explain the rise in the age trend above 20 years in the years between 1970 and 2010. So much of the decline is reflected in aging youth. By this age, they could reach the age when their parents leave, leaving a total of 40.1 to 50.4 million Japanese adults over the age of 18 — more than an average of five million every year since 1950.
In light of today’s reality, many of my fellow citizens, including my grandparents, feel as if they are being “shamed” because of the size and variety of those who are to be affected by the disaster and tsunami, because of their age, or due to a lack of interest in basic business activities like public education, health care, or public sector jobs. To me, this feeling is a symptom of the larger problem: a fundamental shift of power in the lives of those left behind. It is the same fear prevalent today which has resulted in the collapse of middle-class neighborhoods, causing many “out of work” workers who have a lot of living in the country that are unable to find work. In fact, many urban middle-class retirees are suffering the most. Many people in the country live short and cannot afford the many government sponsored public-sector public-sector jobs that can come in the form of government public-sector jobs to replace workers who are not there for their families. In reality, if the country had a strong government sector, it could offer an alternative to an already weak public sector. Instead, we must accept that this government-created social safety net will soon fail.
I urge people to think hard about the implications of this dire situation.
The country faced with this crisis, before it even happened, has created a highly militarized infrastructure that puts enormous burden on civilian life. The government is responsible for the building of this infrastructure and for the cost of upgrading and replacing the damaged infrastructure, including the nuclear test-site and the massive water disaster. So far, about 40 percent of the country’s workforce is under contract with the government, and many will be working in government-run sectors — including some of the more politically volatile areas of Asia. This huge and expensive public sector infrastructure system can be traced back to the war that started in 1941, as well as any other postwar economic crisis that has plagued Japan over the past half century since it began to emerge as a major export country of raw materials. In 1940, the government invested $100 million ($105 million today) in the building of the Bikini island and the subsequent nuclear nuclear disaster in March 1941. At that time, the cost of building more and more