Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima Island, built by the warlord Taira no Kiyomori around 1168, stands at the edge of an inlet of the Inland Sea, not far from Hiroshima. Long regarded as one of Japan’s three most beautiful places, it was registered in 1996 by Unesco as a World Heritage Site.
The shrine’s architecture is a masterpiece of the shinden style: Poised on vermilion pillars and facing the mainland across the Onoseto Strait, it appears at high tide to float on the sea.
Over almost 900 years Itsukushima has survived many disasters — typhoons, fires, earthquakes, landslides, not to mention pollution, blind development, political squabbles and wars.
In 2004 a typhoon blew off segments of the roof and tore away floorboards. Visiting the shrine with a group of World Heritage experts some months later, I asked one of the priests accompanying us whether such severe damage could ever be repaired.
He answered that longevity and close proximity to nature had also bred a keen ability to cope with disaster — the shrine had managed to survive precisely because it had learned to adapt — but that the scales were tipping. No part of Japan, he said, would be ready if that delicate balance with nature shifted too drastically or too suddenly.
I was reminded of that conversation as I watched a press briefing on April 22 given by a delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency after their inspection of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, crippled by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Invited by the plant operator, Tepco, the delegation had come to investigate the cause of a spate of recent malfunctions. The mission’s official findings will be released in a month, but already a draft report stresses the need to improve “essential systems” at the plant.
Some of the problems at the plant initially seemed ludicrous. In March a power outage shut off freshwater cooling systems; it later emerged that a rat had munched through some cables. The imagery of the most globally scrutinized, high-stakes containment effort by the nuclear industry, in one of the world’s most technologically advanced nations brought to a standstill by a lone rodent, seemed surreal yet weirdly apt.
Then, in early April, it was reported that tons of radioactive water may have leaked into the soil from massive containment holes, existing tanks being full to capacity. Some 280,000 tons of contaminated water are currently held on site; fuel rod pools must be kept flooded with water, thus adding 400 tons of radioactive water daily to that load, with no real solution in sight.
Tepco is so chastised by previous accusations of secrecy — or so overwhelmed and numbed by bad news — that it does not even try to hide the severity of challenges it is grappling with. Three power failures in the past five weeks have been enough, though, to convince everyone else that the situation is grave; one can only imagine the sentiments of the local residents and plant workers. By Tepco’s own estimates, confirmed by the I.A.E.A., the hoped-for decommissioning of Daiichi remains up to 40 years away — a long time to count on the benignity of nature.
If rats and radioactive leaks were not enough of a reminder of the dangerous state of the nuclear cleanup efforts, there has been a spate of earthquakes recently. Seismic activity in a country that experiences at least 10 percent of all the earthquakes in the world is of course not news, but so many strong jolts can hardly be reassuring.
Still, there is also good news on the energy front. The feed-in tariff system, jump-started by the government last July to make solar energy more competitive, has succeeded beyond expectation. Investments in solar, wind and geothermal are all on the rise.
Marubeni, one of Japan’s largest trading houses, recently announced that it would bring significant investment to geothermal, an abundant source in a land of volcanoes and thousands of hot springs. In March, deep-sea drilling off the coast of Aichi Prefecture confirmed major reserves of shale gas.
The government still maintains that Japan’s nuclear power plants, which were closed or had their operations suspended following the 2011 disaster, will be restarted, though only if new safety standards are met. Those standards, just made public by the Nuclear Regulation Authority, will go into effect in July, and may be so stringent that almost none of the nuclear plants will meet the requirements for a restart.
In the words of David Suzuki, the Canadian environmentalist and geneticist on the board of the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation, a private sector initiative, an all-out push for renewable energy seems hardly more complicated than restarting nuclear reactors.
Necessity being the mother of invention, if this many gains could be made in the renewable sector, despite tremendous political uncertainty and the poor economy, how much more if the technology-savvy nation were to rally in that same direction? Conservation measures have thus far worked quite well, and people are willing to do more.
The shift away from nuclear energy will occur — with or without the politicians. But they have the power to greatly hasten or hinder it. Japan can make that shift now, moving ahead with the times rather than fighting the tide.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has spoken of his longing to restore pride in a “beautiful country” — taken from the title of his 2006 book in which he outlines the contours of Japan’s revival. There is no doubting his patriotism or political resilience; he enjoys approval ratings of about 70 percent.
But about 70 percent of the Japanese, according to recent polls, would also like to see nuclear energy phased out. There is a hunger for enlightened leadership to shift the country’s energy portfolio. Abe’s legacy will be shaped not just by how approving the Tokyo stock market is today, but by how Japan fares a decade or two hence because of the sustainable energy policies he helps enact now.
Kuni horobite, sanga ari — Country defeated, mountains and rivers remain — is an old saying that captures the feelings of the Japanese for the gifts and consolations of nature. A journalist friend in Hiroshima recently reminded me, though, how that proverb had been turned on its head by a dairy farmer near Fukushima when describing his plight: Kuni sakaete, sanga nashi — Country may prosper, but no mountains, and no rivers.
Nassrine Azimi, is a senior adviser at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) in Hiroshima.