The 311 Earthquake: One Year Later

One year ago today, the Tohoku region of Japan was hit with the largest recorded earthquake in the country's history. The quake spawned an enormous tsunami, which in turn damaged the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing an eventual meltdown that has left everything within an 18-mile radius abandoned, possibly for decades.

It's hard to overestimate the effect of this disaster, known locally as the 2011 Tohoku Quake or simply as 311, on the Japanese population. Aside from the incredible destruction and the massive loss of life, the events of 311 have shaken the Japanese psyche, with radiation fears plaguing the country's largest metropolitan areas and deepening distrust of the government as their mishandling of the Fukushima crisis becomes clearer every day.

For us, down here in distant Fukuoka, the main effect of the disaster has been a nagging kind of guilt. We felt nothing; we were never at risk of radiation; most of our produce comes from Kyushu and most of our seafood from the Genkai Sea, hundreds of miles away from the Fukushima reactors. There have been only the tiniest hardships: an uptick in food prices and utilities rates, a last-minute change to our spring break travel plans. If anything, Fukuoka has benefited from the disaster, with many foreign companies shifting operations away from Honshu. School enrollment is increasing. The yen is high. Our 311 post from last year is our most popular to date, and led to a permanent gain in readership for the blog.

Thus it's with a mild sense of shame that I look back on the last year and realize how little we've posted about the aftermath of the quake. Part of me feels like it's not really our story to tell, but part of me realizes how many friends and family back home keep up with the our posts, and how easy it may be for them to think, given what we've written, the disaster has passed.

To partly remedy this shortcoming, I've gathered links to some of the best anniversary coverage of the disaster. Much of it comes from the BBC, which was our major source of information while the Fukushima crisis was unfolding. Some of it is hopeful, some of it sad, some of it cynical. But it's all worth a look. The bottom line is that 311 is a disaster that Japan and to some degree the whole world will be dealing with for a long time to come.

(BBC) Japan to mark quake and tsunami anniversary
(BBC) Grief of Japan's tsunami survivors
(BBC) Japan's damaged Fukushima nuclear plant, one year on
(BBC) Global fallout: Did Fukushima scupper nuclear power?
(BoingBoing) Fukushima and mental health
(BoingBoing) Inside the Fukushima exclusion zone