Yumi Goto, 60, lives with her husband in a temporary shelter on a windy hill that overlooks vast stretches of tsunami-devastated seacoast where her home was once located.
“The huge earthquake and tsunami destroyed the life I had known till now. We are waiting to return to our former lives as soon as possible,” Goto told IPS.
Over the past month, Goto’s family has resumed its traditional occupation, but they are nowhere near harvesting seaweed and oyster on the scale they did before the Mar. 11 catastrophe that devastated the Tohoku region covering the worst-affected prefectures of Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi.
A poll conducted by local officials in the region last week indicated that fewer than 20 percent of displaced residents wanted to leave Minami-Sanriku which straddles bustling fishing ports, fertile farmland and small towns in the Miyagi prefecture.
For centuries, these pristine northern areas provided marine and agricultural resources for the capital Tokyo, with traditional livelihoods remaining undisturbed and communities content to remain isolated from the drastic global changes around them.
“Minami-Sanriku is an example of the challenges facing the post-disaster recovery process. The population, as illustrated by the polls, is deeply rooted in its traditional ways and does not want to move to new locations,” explained Prof. Akio Shimada, public policy expert at Tohoku University.
Japan has embarked on a vast recovery programme for Tohoku that the government says will take three years. For planners Tohoku with its displaced and aging population presents several dilemmas two months away from the anniversary of Japan’s worst disaster in recent times.
Populations in Tohoku’s disaster-affected towns are being asked to make tough decisions. Some like Goto and her husband have decided to remain, knowing that they can continue fishing only if they stay on in Minami-Sanriku.
But the younger generation is not so sure and already the total number of households in Minami-Sanriku has shrunk from 5,400 before the disaster to 4,893.
Population expert Ryuzaburo Sato at the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Tokyo told IPS that the shrinking of the rural population had begun even before the March disaster. “Youth prefer to seek jobs in big cities that offer them stable and modern lifestyles,” he told IPS.
Japan’s population fell by a record 123,000 in 2010, falling for the fourth consecutive year. The total number of new adults or people who turned 20 years in 2011 was 1.24 million, or less than one percent of the national population of 127.36 million.
Tohoku already has the lowest population density in the country with less than 200 people per sq km.
Determined to establish a new concept in the recovery process, Tohoku mayors and experts are pushing for a highly localised development strategy which, they say, is crucial for revitalising the region.
One of the more vociferous advocates of a new development model in Tohoku is Hiroya Masuda, former mayor of Miyakoshi, a fishing town of 60,000 people in Iwate prefecture, also devastated by the earthquake and tsunami.
Masuda is spearheading a movement pushing for funds from the central government to prop up the local marine industry as a priority. This, he insists, will boost the local economy and encourage the younger generation to stay on.
2012 IPS-Inter Press Service