TONIGHT: Suzuki revisits Japan’s Disaster Zone

Hard to believe it has been almost a year since the devastating tsunami overwhelmed the north shores of Japan. Dr. David Suzuki visited the region in December and his report back airs tonight on The Nature of Things’ “Journey to the Disaster Zone: Japan 3/11” (CBC, 8 p.m.).
I screened an unmixed early cut of the special last week and, in a phone interview, told Suzuki how, despite the lack of narration and other elements, a great sense of shock and awe was still conveyed. In an age when Flipcams and iPhones can capture and transmit video in an instant, images of actual earthquakes and tsunami’s are making people all around the world instant eye witnesses.
Suzuki says he was up early the morning of March 11, 2011, and happened to turn on CNN. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “Those images were pouring out live of the tsunami rolling over the land. Cars and trucks were being swept away, it was all happening at a rate of about a block a second.”
An earthquake off the northern seaboard of Japan sent tsunami waves 20 meters high sweeping toward the nation. Townsfolk who had experienced 6-meter waves just one year earlier, felt secure in their homes, scrambling to upper floors. Many drowned when waved went crashing way over their roofs.
Teachers at one school, judging that nearby cliffs were too hard to navigate, led 70 children to a large bridge spanning a river in hopes of avoiding the flood. It wasn’t high enough, and all those children and teachers perished.
There are other happier if harrowing tales of rescue and survival in tonight’s hour. You could tell Suzuki was deeply moved by what had to have been a touching and personal experience.
While reports back at the time suggested Japan acted with great speed to repair roads and bridges, Suzuki says he still saw huge piles of debris in the cities he visited. “There was no building going on anywhere except temporary housing,” he says, noting that half a million people needed housing after the disaster.
What Suzuki also didn’t see or find evidence of in the wake of the tsunami was looting. “Contrast this with New Orleans after Katrina or even Vancouverafter the Stanley Cup loss,” says Suzuki, a B.C. resident.
For the Japanese, says Suzuki, it is “inconceivable to pick up a rock or break a window to get supplies–it’s just not in their culture.”
That stoicism and composure serves them well in a crisis but it can also be seen as weakness, he suggests. People should be “shouting and screaming what the heck is going on, you guys aren’t telling us the truth about radiation from [damaged nuclear plants].”
Suzuki did come away with the hope that Japan, a rich, industrialized nation, may now look seriously at alternative sources of energy and back away from nuclear generators. He points out that hundreds of natural hot springs exist in the region–so why build nuclear generators which basically are used to boil water to create steam to drive turbines? The earth itself provides an alternative geo-thermal fuel answer, he suggests.

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