Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Nobody wants the debris caused by the tsunami?

It's been a year since the tsunami and only 6% of the debris generated by the big wave has been removed from the area. Why? Basically, because so far the rest of Japan is very reluctant to accept them.

A few days ago, Professor Yoshio Sugimoto used this fact to explain the regional duality in the country. Behind the modern metropolis there are backward rural areas with declining and increasingly aged populations, largely devoted to providing the urban areas. For example, the northeast, now affected by the disaster and the stigma of Fukushima, used to produce much of the energy consumed in the provinces of metropolitan Tokyo.

Now they get solidarity in the form of good words, and even money, but they also receive cold responses to requests for cooperation in this regard. The central government has just announced it wants to assume the task of finding destinations for the debris.

It is capital. Because without removing it building can't be done. But also because the devastating psychological effect it has on the survivors to live surrounded by the remains of their past, now a pile of garbage.

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