The extent of the destruction caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan has shocked the world. An official report on the 20th listed over 8277 dead and 12722 missing – a great majority in the hardest hit areas of northern Japan. The “dead” are the number of the bodies found by police and rescue workers. The “missing” are those reported missing by friends and family. With whole communities swallowed by the tsunami, there is a strong chance that many victims simply have no one left to report them missing. The situation for survivors in the quake-hit areas around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi atomic energy plant has been particularly dire as many have been unable to leave their homes.

The exceptions can be brutal, such as the Twitter comments by Alec Sulkin and Gilbert Godfried, but overall, online and print media have conveyed an incredible outpouring of sympathy for Japan in the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake. This trend seems particularly pronounced among Japan's neighbors, many of whom have often been at odds with it over historical and territorial issues.

Assessing the Economic Aftershocks of Japan's March 11 Earthquake Stephen S. Roach warns us not to be complacent about the effects of the March 11 earthquake in Japan on the global economy. After outlining a “narrow view” based on a declining global profile for the Japanese economy – a shrinking percentage of both global exports and GDP, a rising China, and an irreplaceable position in only a handful of critical upstream industrial components – Roach urges us not to accept the “superficial” conclusions that might flow from this view: that Japan “doesn't really matter any more” and that disruptions to global economic activity from the March 11 earthquake and its aftermath will be “transitory” and “small.”

Tetsuo Sakuma has loaded his small pickup with all it can carry. There's not much of value: a television, some books, boxes of clothes, snatched in haste from a home he may never sleep in again. “We hope to come back, but it's difficult to tell when,” he says.

The Fukushima plant workers have been widely lionized but who they are, why they work under such desperate conditions, and how they are being treated is less discussed. On the 29th, however, the Tokyo Shimbun published an article that sheds light on some unpleasant realities behind the heroic “Fukushima Fifty” (workers at the plant really number in the hundreds) story.

Amid myriad scenes of tragedy, scenes of horror are also being reported from around the Fukushima Daiichi site. Because of elevated radiation, workers have been unable to collect and bury bodies. There are reports of corpses, at least one of which was found to be heavily contaminated with radiation on March 27, simply left where they lie. This news must be horrifying for families and could be the harbinger of a different public health crisis given the thousands missing in the region.

In the midst of one of the most serious nuclear crises in history and with 30,000 dead or missing and close to half a million people rendered homeless in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has submitted plans to build more reactors in Fukushima.

[Leuren Moret is an internationally recognized geoscientist and critic of nuclear power who has maintained a long interest in Japan's nuclear power program. As she points out in this article, Japan is the world's 3rd largest nuclear producer, with 52 reactors (versus 72 in France and 118 in the United States). Japan's reactors produce about 30 percent of the country's electricity. Japan is also one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world, with a multiplicity of active fault zones. In persuasive detail spelled out in a map, Moret shows that Japan's nuclear industry has generally neglected the earthquake threat and built its reactors close to fault zones. She shows that Japanese government and industry has no serious emergency planning in the event of a disaster. For example, Japan's most seismically dangerous nuclear plant - the Hamaoka reactor in Shizuoka Prefecture - has Emergency Response Centres (ERCs) equipped with tiny decontamination showers that would be of little avail in the event of a serious emergency. In fact, planning for a very serious nuclear emergency is in many respects not possible. According to Moret, the scale of the disaster would be of such magnitude as to render any conceivable emergency response totally inadequate and ineffective. She shows why the only adequate response ultimately is to prevent accidents by turning away from nuclear energy.

Magazine Shukan Post has reported that energy bureaucrat Nakamura Koichiro of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency was told to stand down from official press conferences after asserting on March 12, the day after the quake, that evidence pointed to a meltdown underway at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The Shukan Post argues that key cabinet members including Prime Minister Kan Naoto and Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio – who has been praised for his steady demeanor through the crisis – removed Nakamura from his position for “making the public feel uneasy”.

On April 12 it was revealed that the Japanese government is deliberating raising the level of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster to 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale of the International Atomic Energy Agency. This is the highest level and the same as the 1986 Chernobyl accident. At the same time, the Japanese government has made moves to evacuate high radiation areas outside of the 20km radius. This move is welcome as critics have decried the original evacuation zone as arbitrary. Discussion has also begun on compensation for victims in the evacuation zone, with talk of 1,000,000 yen per family.

“3/11” is emerging as new shorthand for The Great Eastern Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011 and its aftereffects: the tsunami that destroyed much of Japan's northeast coast, and the crippling of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant . The sobriquet has the virtue of brevity; it also, of course, calls directly to mind the atrocities visited on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001 – one of the reasons it seems to be coming into use. For while the two events had radically different causes and the scale of the devastation wrought in Tohoku – measured both in human suffering and in economic damage – was orders of magnitude greater than that inflicted on Manhattan, the parallels are sufficiently striking that the echo of “9/11” evoked by “3/l1” may well be justified.

Between 2012 and 2014 we posted a number of articles on contemporary affairs without giving them volume and issue numbers or dates. Often the date can be determined from internal evidence in the article, but sometimes not. We have decided retrospectively to list all of them as Volume 10, Issue 54 with a date of 2012 with the understanding that all were published between 2012 and 2014.

スティーブン・ローチ（Stephen Roach）は、日本で起きた3月11日の地震が世界経済に与える影響について、のんびり構えていてはいけないと警告する。彼が批判する視点、つまり世界経済における近年の日本経済の地位低下――世界における輸出とGDPで日本がシェアを落としていることや中国の台頭、そして成長が見込まれる重要な工業製品のなかで日本でしか生産できないものが少ない――にもとづく「狭い視点」の概要を説明したのち、ローチはこの観点から導かれる次のような「表面的な」結論を受け入れるべきでないとする。彼が批判する結論とは、日本は「すでに重要な役割を果たさなくなっており」、東日本大震災とその余波が世界経済にもたらす混乱は「一時的なもの」で「小さい」というものだ。

Sleepy, idyllic and dangerously irradiated, Iitate is preparing to evacuate. The junior high school is closed, its children bused every day to nearby towns. Tractors sit idle and weeds poke through rice and cabbage in the fields. Half-empty shelves greet customers at the A-Coop supermarket. By the end of this month, this mountainous farming village of 7,000 people, recently voted one of Japan's most beautiful places, will join the Ukrainian ghost town of Pripyat in the planet's short list of nuclear casualties.

On April 19, the Japanese government raised the allowable annual radiation exposure limit from 1 mSV (millisievert) to 20 mSV. The decision has been heavily criticized by experts inside and outside Japan, as it is applied to children who are more susceptible to radiation, and this limit does not take internal radiation dosage into consideration. 20 mSV is the yearly average of what is allowed for Japanese nuclear plant workers under normal circumstances. On this website, we have so far primarily written and provided information in English on this “20 mSV” issue and on the Fukushima nuclear crisis in general. In this post we attempt to compile a list of articles, video news, press releases available in English and other languages.

Popular culture has long been an important tool used by the Japanese government and energy companies to promote nuclear power. In the two months since the 3.11 quake and the beginning of the Fukushima crisis, Japanese netizens have circulated key examples as a reminder of past propaganda. This 1993 video “Our Reliable Friend Pluto” was produced by the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, a group associated with the Japanese government. In it, a cute cartoon stand-in for radioactive element plutonium tells children that not a single case of cancer can be traced to him and that he is even safe to drink!

Of Japan's prefectures, Okinawa lies farthest from Fukushima Daiichi. At over 1000 miles from the plant, even Seoul is closer. Okinawa also has no nuclear plant and seems to be distanced from the consequences of Japan's nuclear policies, but is this really the case?

Watanabe Atsushi (not his real name) is an ordinary Japanese man in his 20s, about average height and solidly built, with the slightly bemused expression of the natural sceptic. Among the crowds in Tokyo, in his casual all-black clothes, he could be an off-duty postman or a construction worker. But he does one of the more extraordinary jobs on the planet: helping to shut down the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Korean-American writer Paul Yoon's 2009 short story collectionOnce the Shore (Sarabande), which won the prize for fiction at the 13th Asian American Literary Awards, is set on a fictionalized version of Jeju Island and deals with the devastating impact of militarism, colonialism, and the cold war on a rugged island culture.

There are many other ways of spending time, but I find wandering around inside Fukushima Prefecture's supposedly sealed 20-kilometer “exclusion zone” has a special, although at times macabre, fascination.