Last year, around spring break, I visited the bucolic hills of Fukui Prefecture in central Japan. I was so impressed that I intend to return in a few weeks. But much has changed since last year; this time my travel plans will include advance tracking of government and other websites for safety updates on the region's nuclear reactors. Small, rural Fukui has 14, the highest number for any prefecture. Welcome to the new Japan. It's been two months since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that claimed tens of thousands of lives and caused, at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the country's worst nuclear accident. For the first time ever for a sitting prime minister, Naoto Kan has requested that a nuclear plant — Hamaoka, 125 miles southwest of Tokyo — be shut down. It was considered too lax on security, too vulnerable to a tectonic fault line and too close to densely populated areas. All of Japan's other nuclear plants remain under close scrutiny. Across the country, central and local authorities are demanding utility companies to either comply with upgraded safety requirements or stop operations until these are in place. For some plants this could mean years of inactivity. Though most Japanese try to go about their lives with a semblance of normalcy, it is to be expected that the effects of this gut-wrenching collective trauma would linger. Bringing the stricken nuclear reactors to safety remains a daily and heroic struggle. It may also take months. My friend Akira Tashiro, one of Japan's most respected investigative journalists on nuclear issues, recently returned from Fukushima and his testimony is sobering. Even Akira, who has visited Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and co-authored a book on radiation damage, was clearly shaken by the plight of the people in the no man's land around the plant. He quotes a dairy farmer near the evacuation zone, describing the invisible radiation's leakage as “a tsunami that never seems to roll back.” Fukushima — which means “Happy Island” — is stirring renewed introspection in a country that was twice attacked by atomic bombs yet chose to promote nuclear energy as the ultimate triumph of science and technology. So it is to the government's credit that it has resolved to take a new look at the full range of its energy policy options. News coverage of Fukushima, particularly in-depth work by the national broadcaster NHK, has prompted not just solidarity and empathy with the victims, but a nation-wide conversation about energy. Every dinner gathering seems filled with an exchange of tips on what we can do to reduce our energy consumption (the magical goal being 30 percent, the share of nuclear power in the national energy portfolio). And everyone seems engaged in the debate. But if Japan can be changed by this disaster, what about America? When it comes to nuclear issues — from atomic weapons to nuclear power — no two nations could be more irredeemably intertwined. After the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, despite dissenting voices of some of its own citizens, America drew mostly wrong conclusions as it plunged into nuclear expansion. In their 1995 book “Hiroshima in America,” Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell painstakingly recount the relentless public relations campaign — unleashed by the Truman administration almost within hours of the Hiroshima bombing — that led to the Faustian bargain that blinded the Americans (and later the Japanese) to the insidious, long-term damage of radiation. Prominent journalists and media outlets of the time embraced, with enthusiasm, the “Dawn of the Atomic Age” and America fell, in the authors' words, into the “nuclear entrapment” that is with us to this day. The Fukushima disaster has become an existential moment for Japan. None of its energy options are easy — but at least the country will face the challenge with the gravity it deserves. Can the same be said of America? Much is made of America's capacity for change — but somehow this never seems to apply to energy policies. Not even the 9/11 attacks or Hurricane Katrina seem to have galvanized Americans — per capita still the most voracious and wasteful consumers of the world's energy supply. In a recent interview on the Fukushima disaster, the 2001 Nobel laureate for chemistry, Ryoji Noyori, spoke of the importance of an attitude of “rightful fear” toward nature and technology. Japan is now in that mode. Even poetry is affected. The winner of last week's NHK haiku competition, referring to “spring evenings” — an expression that evokes the arrival of fair weather and happier times — was a haiku that read “2011 — no spring evenings yet.” – The New York Times (The author is senior adviser at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research.) __
