"Japanese politics is tainted with egoism and populism. We need to use the tsunami to wipe out egoism, which has attached itself like rust to the mentality of the Japanese people over a long period of time."
- Shintaro Ishihara
Tokyo Governor
"The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll, and we can be grateful for that. The human toll is a tragedy; we know that. But these markets, all these markets - stocks, commodities, oil, gold - there is no major breakout or breakdown.”
- Larry Kudlow
CNBC host
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The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…
- WB Yeats
All eyes are now cast on Japan. The castrated tiger of the developed world.
Like anyone located in the margins of the world’s economy, I shall attempt to view the disaster – and the ensuing politics around it – from the vantage point I exist in.
It is an attempt by the global South to analyse how the global North responds to a catastrophe hitting one of its own. A basic principle is underplay: neo-colonial re-incarnations of the White Man’s burden can no longer work for the developed West.
Donations are not what Japan needs. There has been no appeal launched from the Japanese government.
Through the Japan calamity, the developed world, shall get the chance to reflect upon itself – a rare chance for those who sit atop its political chambers.
How the developed recover?
“How does one from the developed world recover from catastrophe?,” is the question in everyone’s subconscious. Many seemed to have fallen back to answer, “O, well, they shall recover. They shall be the same.”
No, they shall not.
And that is the important point. This difference in the Japan that emerges is where the eyes must be cast.
Only fools arise from calamity unshaken, unpreturbed – the same.
In the world that claims itself to be ‘developed,’ Japan has always been the odd one out. In maps of the world’s developed nations, Japan is the sole tiny dot on the East of the globe.
It own history is one of rising from clamity. Rising and learning, used to be the norm. Japan rejected an army (albiet through Marshall Plan designs) until very recently. Japan took to economic enterprise – and became a leading technoligical innovator. Japanese culture, both corporate and personal, is a strange mix of the tradition (in concepts of honour) and modern (in concepts of corporate dedication).
Japan, I repeat, is the odd one out.
A catastrophe is a time for great national reflection. It is a time to find new direction.
How to help an equal?
With a natural calamity befalling Japan, the Western world has turned to one of its own – and began to examine it.
To it, the negligence occurred at the Fukushima nuclear power plant cannot be just washed away by the claims of lack of technology or inefficiency (as with third world disasters). Something systematic is at fault.
The developed cannot turn to gratify itself by adopting Japanese orphans, as Time magazine made it realize in an article in last week’s edition.
The growing bulge of entertainers-turned-humanists in the US fell into crisis – clueless about how to help an equal.
Sympathy could no longer be the driving force. This put the developed world at odds with itself. How could it produce stories of the suffering masses – when the Japanese had refused to give in.
The trouble is that international relations today no longer knows relations between equals. We can be benefactors – but not friends.
A benefactor becomes a patron, taking control of the future of the needy. A friend only offers a shoulder for catharsis.
Pakistan still reels from a burgeoning set of benefactors. We all saw how NGO infiltrated the mind, body and soul of the flood-devastated areas (not all to its worse).
Japan appears to have shunned NGO’s to the extent that British newspaper, The Guardian, had to query its readers on whether they thought NGO appeals on Japan were just or not.
There is a difference in helping an equal – and there is a struggle to understand that difference in the developed world’s response.
Of matters economic:
Japan is the world’s third largest economy after USA and China. Early reports suggest the region affected constitutes 6-7% of the Japanese economy.
Two contradicting lens appear to be gazing at the Japan economy. At one end, the Japanese yen has risen. At the other, Japanese stock-values have fallen.
The damage to finished manufacturing plants appears to be limited. More information is being sought on whether the Japanese parts manufacturing industry is intact. If not, consequences are expected in both the manufacturing and spare parts markets.
Economists seem to be suggesting a mitigated impact based on the presence of alternatives to Japanese goods in the global market. The presence of Chinese and South East Asian goods has been cited as an opportunity.
The need for a Japanese economic recovery has been identified – but the (immediate) response has not been as was during the US economic meltdown. The US meltdown spilled over into Europe and the ‘bubble economy’ of the Middle East. That a severe shutdown in the world’s second largest economy is expected to pass without much ado is indicative of changing trends in the world economy. Specifically, this leads us to a comparison between the impact of the collapse of the services industry versus the manufacturing industry.
It appears in the new global economy manufacturing has taken a back seat.
What has been suggested though is a oil price hike must be expected given the power crisis that has emerged within Japan after the shutdown of 11 of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors.
Of matters nuclear:
Speaking of which it is time to turn to the Fukushima nuclear power plants partial meltdown. Arguments emerging from its ability to sustain – or rather not sustain – the tsunami and quake have flowed both ways.
Anti-nuclear voices, however, have found themselves more loudly articulated. That the world needs to end its fossil fuel dependency was already known. It appears now that a ‘stay’ has been imposed on a turn to nuclear power to make this transition possible.
The stories from the Fukushima power plant must now be well known and need not be repeated. In terms of impact, there has been relative silence. A 20-km radius zone has been marked off and reports of radiation being found in Tokyo’s water supply have also circulated.
The idea that a nuclear catastrophe of the scale of Chernobyl has not passed us yet has dawned upon us.
Though it is also correctly suggested that the European response has been over-exaggerated to say the least.
Personally, I stand by the side of the anti-nuclear voices in the knowledge of the lack of knowledge about Pakistan’s nuclear plants: what are the security measures in place, where is the waste disposed, who is affected?
TEPCO, Fukushima’s operator, was reported to have hidden over 200 instances of false reporting between 1977 and 2002. At least TEPCO was reporting. The ‘doctrine of security’ covering Pakistan’s nuclear plants (be they for power generation) appears to offer no freedom for such reports to filter through.
Pakistan has its own shoreline 150-MW nuclear power plant, the KANUPP, located at Paradise Point eleven miles to the West of Karachi. KANUPP is operating beyond its design life. Commencing operation in 1972 it was shut down on 2002, only to restart operation in 2006. At present, it is said to be undergoing safety upgradations to allow it to operate beyond design capacity. There are also plans to build a 1000-MW KANUPP-II in its place. But located so close the country’s largest metropolis, is there a guarantee of it not being put under stress by any natural calamity in the future? And what of the already operational but beyond design life KANUPP-I?
Of what is wrong and what is right:
There is a certain something that disasters bring to humans: an ability to introspect.
Amongst the best introspection amidst the West, there is one in The Guardian titled ‘If we aspire to put the world right, we must be sure of what is wrong.’Reflecting on the calamity, the writer says, “Common to most of these horrors is the world's convulsive greed for energy – whether nuclear or fossil. It's that greed which makes people rush in with cowboy repair solutions, failing to seek the real sources of a problem. Fukushima is only one example.”
It is a statement that resonates in Pakistan, reeling from its own coal mine disaster. Only that we retain shorter memories. We must remember March 21 2011 for the 48 Baloch miners to have sacrificed themselves to the energy greed of the rest of Pakistan.
But as Japan recovers there is a need to avoid knee-jerk reactions. The same article presents another quotable incidence, “All over the world, from China to Germany, governments are halting their nuclear power station programmes because of Fukushima. But what is that supposed to "put right"? Whatever went wrong in Japan must have something to do with laying a chain of obsolete reactors precisely along a famous tectonic fault. But the German reactors at Unterweser or Neckarwestheim are nowhere near an earthquake zone, so why has chancellor Merkel shut them for three months?”
There is a sense that the developing world does not know how to respond to a calamity having stricken one of its own.
But then there is a question left outstanding for us: do we have a vantage point to understand such a disaster?
The world’s most earthquake proof country is reeling from the one natural disaster it could not handle: an earthquake and a tsunami.
What shall we learn from it?
…or are we to remain tainted by the ignorance of the two men this article chose to quote before it began.
- The article was printed with The Review in Pakistan Today on March 27, 2011.
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