Hypocritical much?

I'm well aware that Japan and the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami is out of international news by now. It's been long replaced with other stories, such as Libya, Syria, other countries that end with -ia, and politicians tweeting their wieners. If covered at all, chances are that what you hear from Japan has the word "Fukushima" in it, since that seems to be the preferable way news desks worldwide see the potential for scaring people into buying papers.

That might sound cynical, but I've been monitoring foreign coverage of Japan lately, and it's not encouraging. If you have spotted Japan in the news recently, there's a good chance you think the entire country is a wasteland. If you haven't, though, there is an equally good chance you think everything is back to normal.

Neither is particularly close to the truth.

First of all, there are areas where the tsunami left entire societies in pieces, many of which are still not rebuilt, some of which it will take years to fix. Many of the people - those who survived - previously living in these societies, have not been able to return yet. Some are still living in shelters - high schools and sports centers and whatnot - while others have moved to temporary housing of the slightly more permanent kind. But even here there are problems. Some of these houses do not have tap water, or if they do, it might not be drinkable. Some of them are located far away from shops and other facilities, which is unfortunate since many of the residents are elderly and/or without cars (a substantial number of cars were washed away or destroyed in the disaster).

Then there is Fukushima. It is still very much a topic - both because it is ongoing, even though the reports of new developments are few and less spectacular now than they were in the beginning. But there remain unanswered questions. How much radiation was actually released, and can we trust the measuring now? What sort of impact does this, and the still heightened levels surrounding the defunct power plant, have on the people living there, the food produced close by, or the fish in the surrounding sea?

In addition, there is a political crisis in the country. The Prime Minister is sitting on a bit of a catapult seat (the details of which you can find in a rant from yours truly, here). While it seems to me that the Japanese population isn't particularly happy about changing the head of the government right in the middle of a crisis, the members of the parliament seem intent to do so. Further, the political crisis might have direct influence on the general crisis, since passing of laws and bills (such as the reconstruction budgets, for instance) requires political agreement.

And let's not forget the economic crisis while we're at it. The disaster sent Japan into its first trade deficit for more than a decade. That alone isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the fact that exports have gone down - more or less the only thing that was pulling the already sluggish Japanese economy - is not good. However, by now a lot of the production in Japan is nearing its pre-crisis level. That opens for exports again, and thus there might be light at the end of the tunnel. But Japan already faced tremendous economic challenges before the crisis, and so far it's looking like the impact of the crisis has been all bad (without even the small benefit of inflation, as some economists hoped for).

Apart from this, however, most of Japan is functioning as usual. It's not dangerous to travel here - unless you insist on going to the no-go zone around the Fukushima-power plant... Same goes for food produced in Japan - I don't worry about that anymore. I trust that the tests the authorities in cooperation with international organizations such as WHO perform are as good as they can get, and that the food here probably will not kill me anymore than food produced elsewhere would (e.coli in Europe, anyone?). And despite all the bad things I said about the Japanese economy in the previous paragraph, I do think it's safe and wise to invest here again. The tsunami did not wash away the Japanese innovative spirit. They *will* recover, and foreign investments will be much needed (and probably much rewarded, with time).

As for quakes? Yes, there is still the occasional aftershock, but by now they are mostly down to the pre-disaster levels. Japan has always been, and will always be, a seismically active country. Those of us who have spent some time here know this, and by now I'm not even as edgy about them as I was. I had the following conversation with a friend from back home the other day:

"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, my cold is getting better..."
"I meant the earthquake..."
"Earthquake? Oh, you mean the 6,7 we had this morning? Yeah, didn't feel it. Don't think it did any damage. No biggie."

So that's not so much an issue anymore.

What IS an issue, though, is the energy supply, and what will happen with it during summer.

You probably knew that the Fukushima plants are now closed (or as closed as they get, since they are still struggling to cool them down). But did you also know that a good 30 others of Japan's total 54 reactors are closed for the time being? Due to interruptions of regular security checks after 3/11, many plants were shut down as a safety measure. Japan has relied quite heavily on nuclear power, and thus this is putting a severe strain on the energy supply. During the summer, when the sweltering heat makes living and working without air-conditioning seem almost impossible, it is feared that the country will face blackouts. This coincides with industries trying their best to make up for lost production by running the assembly lines at top speed. And at a time when fossil fuels are running at an all-time high cost precisely due to the incidents in Japan, and those in the Middle East.

Japan is trying. The Prime Minister - from his catapult seat - is promoting renewable energies. It's a good cause, and an important one if Japan is to find economically and environmentally affordable energy sources in the future. But "future" is a keyword here. You cannot exchange nuclear for solar, geothermic, wind and hydro power overnight. The time frame Prime Minister Kan has set is "20% by early 2020s". It's commendable, ambitious and perhaps even possible. But it doesn't solve the problem right now, this summer.

People living here are also trying to save energy. They turn off their AC, or at least set the temperatures higher. In order to make this more feasible, the "Super Cool Biz" campaign  (a intensification of the regular "Cool Biz", where people are encouraged to loosen [or remove] their ties and jackets to better cope with the summer temperatures) is running. I haven't seen many Hawaii-shirts in Tokyo streets yet, but who knows - perhaps this will be the end of the traditional Japanese salaryman "uniform" - black suit, white shirts and ties?

It's difficult, though. Have you tried working in an office environment where the temperatures rise above 25, 30, 35 degrees (celcius)? It doesn't really matter if your shirt is white or Hawaiian, I can assure you. And the same ting goes for my house. Lately I've been sleeping poorly, waking up every hour or so, guiltily letting the AC run for a few minutes. I can't open the window - since the mosquitoes here seem intent to eat me alive - and it wouldn't do me much good anyway with the still hot night air flowing in with the bugs. It's not comfortable, and it's not healthy. And this is just the start. Summer in Tokyo is hot and humid, and June is nowhere near as bad as July or August. The worst is yet to come. Some claim that the nuclear lobby - a considerable force in this country - are keeping a low profile until the worst commotion has settled down. Then, when summer sets in for real, they might remind people how one again can afford using cooling systems. It might be a conspiracy strategy, but it really sounds quite effective...

The Ministry for Economy, Trade and Industry is saying that it is safe to turn the nuclear reactors closed due to the security check interruptions back on. Prime Minister Kan admits that a (near) future without nuclear power in Japan is hard to imagine. The population, I don't know... As often is the case here, they generally don't speak up much. We've had some demonstrations, but we're talking a few hundred people. Out of 127 million. The newspaper Asahi Shimbun recently published an interesting survey, however. 74 percent said that they supported a gradual termination of nuclear power. I think this is probably the closest to the truth you get. Japanese people are pragmatic. They understand that shutting down all reactors tomorrow is impossible. But they also don't want another Fukushima.

Personally I see a lot of problems with nuclear power plants. If it were up to me, we'd have nothing of them. We'd go all the way for renewable energy (and when I say renewable, I mean that, and not pseudo-renewable as nuclear is, since it leaves HUGE infrastructural and logistic problems once the reactors are too old. They will continue to demand attention [and potentially costs] for centuries or millennia after they stop producing values). I'd like solar panels on every rooftop, windmills, and every other environmentally friendly energy form there is to dominate the market.

But for now it is an illusion. Maybe Japan will manage 20 by 2020. In the meantime, however, it's difficult not feeling like a hypocrite. I don't want them to turn the reactors back on, but I also don't want to live through the summer feeling like a raisin-zombie. I'll be leaving mid-July, so probably I'm not even going to see the worst of it. Which makes me an even bigger hypocrite.

But there you go. The world works as it always does. We all want too much. I want my cake, and I want to eat it too. And since I will leave the cake soon (stretching the metaphor here now, I know...), I feel that my nibbling at its edges won't make that big a difference. I'm good at turning off the light when I'm not in the room, after all... But of course it does, if we all think that way. Thus, I can only hope for Japan's sake that the rest of the people living here are not as big hypocrites as I am...

This weekend I had the dubious honour of baby sitting a room.

Actually, it wasn't so much the room, as all the stuff inside the room. You see, we had an event at the embassy, with lots of kids and adults who weren't always entirely sober. Now, the main part of the event took place outside, since the weather was gorgeous, but since we couldn't be sure of that in advance, we had also prepared some indoors activities, in our lovely multipurpose hall.

The problem with this hall is the multipurpose part. There is a rather expensive AV-system there, and the walls are peppered with buttons and touch pads that control the AV-system, the air-conditioner, the lightning, the blinds, and so on. There is even a red button with a sign above it reading it capital letters - DO NOT TOUCH!!!  Obviously, this would be terribly tempting to touch...

Thus the baby sitting.

During my guard duty, two girls of about ten were playing in the hall. They were just that age. A little too young to realize the full consequence of their every action, but definitely old enough to know when they were doing something they were not supposed to. It goes without saying that they pushed the button.

Now, as far as DO NOT TOUCH!!!-buttons go, ours is relatively innocent. The only thing that happens is that it messes with the settings for the system, so it creates extra work for the next person using it. Hardly comparable to what I'm about to compare it with, but bear with me...

You see, these girls, knowing that they shouldn't be doing something, but not being able to resist it anyway, made me think of something else that is never far away from my thoughts these days. All things nuclear.

Mother nature produced radiation. But for the most part, she kept it neatly tucked away, out of our reach. As man grew old enough to realize there was something his mother was holding back, he decided to ignore that he didn't know exactly what consequences pushing the button would have, and just do it, even if he knew he probably shouldn't.

Humans wanted so bad to use these resources hidden from us. We put our best scientists to the task. They got some great results. Marie Curie's discoveries led to great achievements in medicine, but she eventually gave her life to her research. Like a Mummy's Curse, injuries from long-term radiation came sneaking in on the eminent scientist unexpectedly. Perhaps we should have taken this as a warning, and been content? Use x-rays and avoid developing these substances we did not know how to control further?

But there were more buttons to push. The power contained in the tiniest piece of all - the atom - was too tempting not to explore further. Like the explorers desperate to win the race to the South Pole in 1911, the curiosity - and perhaps the glory? - was too much to resist. In 1911 Robert Scott died in attempt to get back from the pole, after having discovered that he had been beaten by a countryman of mine, Roald Amundsen. Scott took four expedition members with him in death, people who willingly (I presume) had gone with him to try to be the first to go where no man had gone. The nuclear scientists who tried to do what no man had done,  also took others with them in death. Only the numbers are infinitely larger, and the willingness is more than questionable.

Japan knows the effect the enormous powers contained within a minuscule fraction can have. This nation has felt it up close, even if it is a long time ago. Stories of the horrors experienced in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 66 years ago have been a part of what every Japanese child has been taught about their own country ever since. And yet. Japan too had to go nuclear when it came to energy.

I get it, in a way. With the bombs ending World War Two, then the subsequent 45 year standoff between the US and the USSR where both parties held enough nukes to destroy the planet multiple times. It must have felt good to finally be able to put the atomic power to positive use again. Nuclear didn't have to be a synonym to weapons. Power plants! Peaceful use of this wonderful energy!

How clever they must have felt, when the first nuclear power plant opened. It worked! It really did! It generated electricity, it was (relatively) cheap, it was - marvelously so - CLEAN! The nuclear age was upon us, and it was every bit as wonderful as imagined. People didn't even turn into spider-superheroes or other cartoony predictions. We touched the button, and the button had delivered.

Of course there was Chernobyl. Three Mile Island. Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas warned us in The China Syndrome. Hippies sold anti-nuclear stickers. But the hippies also sold "save the planet"-stickers, and nuclear power plants was the only way to ensure stable, large-quantity, energy supplies that were also environmentally friendly. You can't have both, hippies.

I must admit I haven't been particularly nuclearly aware in my life. Norway doesn't have nuclear power plants - we don't really need them, due to an abundance of hydropower and then the oil and gas, of course. We have neighbours whose plants we aren't too fond of - an accident at the Russian plants in Murmansk, the British ones in Sellafield, or even the Swedish ones, might prove disastrous to Norway. We actually still have problems after Chernobyl, which due to the direction of the wind those fateful weeks in 1986 ensured that a significant amount of radioactive material ended up in the Norwegian mountains. But it never felt very close.

Here, in Japan, it definitely does. I've stood with you, Japan, through the crisis. I admired your high-held heads, your dignified grief, your determined reconstruction starting from day one. But if there is one thing I find hard to forgive in the midst of this, it is the nukes. Whose delusional idea was it to build a massive amount of nuclear power plants on a seismic fault line? Didn't it occur to you that even your superior technology might not be able to harness the wrath of Mother Earth once she decided that we had gone too far in pushing the buttons she deliberately asked us not to touch?

Those two girls discovered that pushing that particular button had limited effect. I asked them - a little sternly - not to touch anything, and explained why. They agreed not to do it again, and to my knowledge, they kept their promise. The system had to be reset, but nothing was broken.

The same cannot be said for the nuclear button. We pushed too hard, this time. It's time to find something else to play with.