Rebuilding efforts just "inching along"

December 1, 2014

3/11 recovery slow going under Abe

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/12/01/national/311-recovery-slow-going-abe/#.VHyvcMl5Cos

Efforts to rebuild areas devastated by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami have inched along since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe returned to power in December 2012.

Three years and eight months have passed since the natural disasters, which sparked the nuclear crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 power station.

Nearly 236,000 people are still living as evacuees in communities stricken by the powerful earthquake, tsunami and triple meltdown.

Similarly, little progress has been made on the disposal of radioactive soil and other contaminated waste from the nuclear disaster.

Yet, since his return to power two years ago, Abe has visited disaster-affected areas almost every month in a bid to show he remains focused on reconstruction.

“I want to make sure all disaster-affected citizens can return to normal lives as early as possible,” Abe has said, noting that his government has taken steps to build homes and create jobs for them.

Public housing for those displaced by the disasters has increased to 3,000 units from less than 100 units at the time of Abe’s 2012 return to power. But those 3,000 homes are only 14 percent of the planned total. As of Nov. 13, the number of people still living as evacuees across Japan was 235,957.

Efforts to create jobs in disaster-affected areas have also seen slow progress.

The fishing industry, the main source of business in the northeast, has been struggling with a sharp fall in sales. Less than a third of the merchants have seen sales recover to 80 percent of pre-disaster levels.

Efforts to promote new businesses have just recently begun in the damaged areas and thus contributed little to job creation.

The disposal of radioactive waste poses another headache, including soil gathered by crews decontaminating areas near the crippled Fukushima plant.

In August, the Fukushima Prefectural Government accepted a plan to build interim storage facilities for highly radioactive soil and other such waste in the prefecture.

The Diet has enacted a law stipulating that the country will finish disposing of the waste outside of the prefecture within 30 years, in line with a request from prefectural officials. But little headway has been made in negotiations to buy land from owners in the Fukushima towns of Okuma and Futaba, which host the plant and where the interim storage facilities will be built. So it’s uncertain whether it will be possible to begin storing radioactive soil at the site in January 2015, as planned.

The central government also wants to build permanent disposal facilities for lower-level radioactive soil and waste in five other prefectures that got nuclear fallout, including Miyagi and Tochigi. But the policy faces strong opposition from residents in those prefectures.

The town of Shioya in Tochigi Prefecture was selected as the site of one such facility. But local authorities have proposed the lower-level waste should be housed in Fukushima Prefecture — a suggestion that has angered many evacuees displaced by the disaster.

Abe’s administration has raised the total spending limit on post-disaster reconstruction measures during the five-year intensive rebuilding period through fiscal 2015 from ¥19 trillion to ¥25 trillion.

But reconstruction costs are expected to peak over the next three years, according to Iwate Gov. Takuya Tasso. Municipalities in disaster-affected areas are uneasy about future funding because the central government has been unclear about reconstruction spending during and after fiscal 2016.