Japan earthquake: Iwate is in a state of misery and mayhem

By Andrew Gilligan 
Japan's nuclear crisis has brought a meltdown of morale to parts of the country. What the people have to fear is fear itself, says Andrew Gilligan.

Nine days after Japan's tsunami, the remarkable truth is this. The people who have lost absolutely everything are coping far better than the people who have lost absolutely nothing.

For 200 miles along the coast, the scene is an exact copy of an earlier Japanese horror. In the flattened towns, with their isolated skeletons of buildings and their hectares of rubble, Hiroshima is the only possible comparison.

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But at the evacuation centres in north-eastern Japan, survivors hold doors open for each other and bow politely to visitors. Postal service has resumed. The relief effort is going full blast, with

even visiting foreigners offered food because there is so much. There's not much of anything 

else, admittedly. But across the disaster area, journalists have searched in vain for a single case of violence, looting, panic – or even queue-jumping.

Time and again, you hear of lives saved by calmness, organisation and discipline. At one low-lying secondary school half a mile from the sea, the children lined up in the playground for a post-earthquake headcount; surely hundreds must have perished.

But the instant they saw the tsunami coming, and with little more than seconds to spare, the staff got 450 teenagers to a pre-planned fall-back site on higher ground. The school is utterly wrecked, but every single pupil in it that day lived. Now, even the teachers who have homes to go to sleep alongside their students on evacuation-centre mattresses to make sure they're looked after.

On this evidence, Japanese society, like its earthquake-proof skyscrapers, seems built to withstand the most severe tremors. Order and duty run deep; the good of the community outweighs the needs of the individual.

Yet in the nine-tenths of the country that suffered no damage at all, that strength appears to have gone missing. Japan as a whole is suffering a kind of nervous breakdown. In towns nowhere near the tsunami zone, normal life has effectively stopped, with offices and shops closed, pavements empty and factory production lines silent. The only cars on the streets are queuing for petrol.

Through much of Tokyo and northern Japan, food and fuel distribution systems have collapsed. In the few shops still open, there is nothing to be had. The trains, Japan's central nervous system, are running fitfully, if at all. Power cuts keep being threatened, though few yet seem to have materialised.

In the capital, 250 miles from the epicentre of the earthquake and untouched by the tsunami, only seven people died; a few broken windows was more or less the limit of the damage. But the city is running at quarter-steam, with thousands of Japanese and foreigners fleeing, the usual food and fuel shortages, entire companies packing up shop and some metro lines reduced to as little as hourly.

There has been panic selling on the stock exchange, and Japan's anaemic economy seems certain to take a long-term hit. Even in Hiroshima, in the far south of the country and more than 700 miles from the tsunami area, local papers have had to plead with people not to panic-buy.

Objectively, the impact should not have been so great. Petrol production did fall by a quarter immediately after the quake as six refineries were closed, though four quickly reopened and output is recovering. Most of the tsunami towns were not economically important and produced little that the country cannot live without.

All the main roads are available, as they have been for days: the very worst destruction can be reached in a few hours from Tokyo on the expressway. Or it could be, if there was any petrol to drive with and if regular traffic was allowed on the route – it has been closed to all but emergency vehicles, leaving fuel tankers and food trucks toiling slowly along the old A-road.

Having reported on the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, a country every bit as hammered as this one, it seems to me that, outside the area directly affected, Sri Lanka managed rather better than Japan is now doing. Sri Lankans are used to disorganisation. They are good at improvising. They live closer to disaster in all sorts of ways, so when it comes, it is less of a shock.

Japan, by contrast, is perhaps the world's most organised society. As in Britain during our own fuel crisis, it does not take much to tip over a complicated, just-in-time supply chain. People with emergency drills to obey and rescue plans to follow, as in the tsunami zone, seem to be coping. But when no one is giving orders, paralysis follows. The flip-side of discipline is a lack of initiative.

Most of the emergency vehicles that need to reach the disaster area have long done so by now. It would be sensible to reopen the expressway – for commercial traffic at least – to get fleets of tankers making a dent in the petrol famine, and convoys of food trucks restocking the supermarkets. But no one has given the order. Driving along the road on Thursday (journalists are allowed to), we passed perhaps five tankers in about 150 miles, and only about 10 food lorries.

Even before the disaster, Naoto Kan, Japan's prime minister, was extraordinarily weak, dogged by funding scandals, cabinet resignations, leadership plots and a 20 per cent approval rating. His government still seems paralysed.

And there is, of course, another problem large enough to poleaxe a better man than Mr Kan: 150 miles north of Tokyo, the largest metropolitan area on Earth, the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is leaking radiation in quantities the government admits could have an impact on human health.

Having been caught up in the rush to flee the area a few miles round the plant last week, I can testify how frightening this is. At least with a tsunami, you know what it looks like and you can tell when you've survived. Radiation is formless and might already be growing silent cancers inside you.

But on any sensible appraisal, the risk to anyone not right up close to the plant is small. Fukushima, which was not in operation at the time of the accident, will not be as bad as Chernobyl. Even Chernobyl, in the end, hastened the deaths of "only" 4,000 people, less than a third of those already confirmed dead in the tsunami.

Some of the paranoia has been, frankly, absurd. As far away as California, people are making themselves ill by gobbling iodine. Filipinos, Chinese and Malaysians have been painting their necks with disinfectant and buying up salt stocks after fake warnings from that ludicrous purveyor of online voodoo, Twitter.
The Island