By: Prof. Jeff Bayliss

I promise to keep this short. I’ll have to, because it’s already late, and I intend to post this before I call it a night and set the clocks forward for the spring. But I won’t do that until sometime after 12:46am here, at the very earliest. That will be the exact moment, one year ago, when the quake that spawned the killer tsunami waves struck, and irrevocably altered life for so many people in northeastern Japan. 12:46am in Connecticut is 2:46pm in Japan. As of the morning of March 11th, 2012 in Japan, the figures from the disaster stood as follows: 15,854 confirmed dead, 3,155 still missing but officially presumed dead, and 343,935 dislocated and living in temporary housing facilities or other arrangements. In addition to these figures, it is necessary to bear in mind that these numbers represent whole communities along the coast of northeastern Japan; communities that are nowhere near making a recovery after a year. Some may never do so, especially in the areas closest to the failed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The disaster goes on. So much so, in fact, that it almost doesn’t seem to make sense to speak of an “anniversary” – although much has changed since. So, as I sit down to watch the NHK satellite feed tonight, as we press on toward 2:46pm in Japan, here are a few thoughts, by way of commemoration. Most of what I would like to say, though, concerns not how far things have come in a year, but how much further they have yet to go. This is not to be overly pessimistic. Reconstruction is happening, because the survivors won’t let it be otherwise. Still, in the very act of “reconstructing” one finds the ongoing toll of the disaster at every turn.

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