DEEP MOVES

I was standing at the kitchen sink at 6:20 this morning doing the usual - having my tea, looking out the big window into the garden, letting the veil of sleep fade and slowly recovering in greater detail who I was – when I heard a way deep and growing sound , seemed to be coming from the north, then it felt increasingly like I was standing on some kind of foot vibrator as the rumble and vibe intensity increased at high frequency-- then it peaked and faded, the upper timbers of the house gave one big 'crack' as though the house had just uncricked its neck, and all was dawn silent once more.

It had been an earthquake. The force - in a mass, not as distinct waves – passed through the house in less than ten seconds, as a strong vibration deep in the earth; there was none of the usual vibration associated with earthquakes, like when I experienced my first quake not long after arriving in Tokyo back in the early seventies, ran out of the swaying, rattling house and heard the earth grinding like huge cobblestones, saw trees swaying strongly in no wind.

The soil beneath Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya - and most major cities of the world - being alluvial, is in fact just a stage above liquefaction, like a vast tract of pudding. The temblor forces travel through it in large waves: first one side of a building is upward, then the other side, the building on alternating sides of the wave thus flipping back and forth until the oscillation wanes. But mountains, being fairly solid rock, don't transmit the force in waves; instead, it seems to pass through deep down, in a 'solid' mass like a shock wave, that can generate avalanches and landslides.

This had been smaller than the boom of force that had passed instantly though our solid concrete house in Kyoto, early on that morning in 1995, after having devastated Kobe. As I'd done back then, I turned on the tv immediately (as one always does here after earthquakes) to see where the epicenter had been: Otsu, so close, right at the southern end of the lake, the tremor ranking only 1 on the scale. At that point Echo got up, said she hadn't heard or felt a thing.

Sometimes deep in the silence of the night I hear the rumbling way down in the earth as our planet makes its deep moves, yet without a tremor up here at the surface; it sounds like giant subway trains traveling across the landscape far below daily life. At such times, lying there in the calm darkness atop what is in fact a mass of seething volcanic tectonic turbulence, I can sense how small and fragile we are in the face of all that lies beneath us, feel a touch of reality that makes our waking moments all the more precious, our struggles for power and hegemony like friction among microbes…

NOT IF, BUT WHEN

As a person who is not yet radioactive, I feel that the primary approach to resolving Japan's energy problems should involve lifestyle simplification and education, coupled with all-out support for research and development of alternative clean energy sources.

But then my thoughts are affected by the facts that the Japanese government, the world's longest single-party rule, is enthralled by nuclear power (a bottomless public works pork barrel), that tiny Japan has the third most nuclear power plants in the world (53, after the US and France [Addendum, July 2007: now second in the world, with 55]), that Japan is one of the most earthquake prone nations on earth and that of those 53 quietly seething nuclear facilities, 13 (and 2 in planning) are clustered together on the Japan Sea coast within a few dozen kilometers of my house. And immediately upwind of 30 million other people.

The extent to which the use of nuclear power in Japan depends on public ignorance and corporate-government callousness is apparent in these two articles:

"Of all the places in all the world where no one in their right mind would build scores of nuclear power plants, Japan would be pretty near the top of the list.

When I asked ERC [Emergency Response Center] officials how they planned to evacuate millions of people from Shizuoka Prefecture and beyond after a Kobe-magnitude earthquake (Kobe is on the same subduction zone as Hamaoka) destroyed communication lines, roads, railroads, drinking-water supplies and sewage lines, they had no answer."

***

"It was clear that most Commission members were either pro-nuclear or felt that to encourage spirited discussion of basic issues like the necessity of nuclear power was not part of their mandate. After all, they had a five-year plan for Japan's nuclear power industry that they had to compile by late 2005, and since nuclear power was already providing about a third of the nation's electric power needs overall, what was the point in arguing with people who didn't want it? The result of the meeting was not a lighthearted farce, but something that looked as rigged as a pro wrestling match.

And so it was. Just a few weeks later, on November 12th, the Atomic Energy Commission released an interim report on nuclear fuel recycling and concluded that it should go forward. Virtually none of the facts presented by the anti-nuclear activists were acknowledged. But when it comes to Japan's nuclear power industry, inconvenient facts often do not matter."

Am I glowing yet?