Had I been Tamil, I would have initiated this project in the Amparai district in Sri Lanka’s eastern province, the worst tsunami-affected district in the country. But I am a Sinhala Buddhist with no Tamil language skills and in 2004 the tsunami-affected areas in the east were occupied predominantly by Tamil people. Even if I found a competent interpreter, I also felt that even though a Cease Fire Agreement signed in 2002 was still in effect, the political situation was still too volatile for long-term ethnographic research which requires researchers to live among the people they study as observers and participants of their daily lives. So, I turned my gaze southwards.
The southern province was the second worst affected, and it is also the traditional stronghold of Sinhala Buddhists. However, I grew up in a Colombo suburb and emigrated from Sri Lanka in the 1970s, and had no close connections to anybody in the south. I was not affiliated with any relief organizations either, so when I arrived in the country two weeks after the tsunami to initiate this study, I sought the help of a Buddhist monk, Venerable Gnanaweera Thero [1] (hereafter referred to as Gnanaweera Thero). He lives in a temple in the greater Colombo area, but I knew that over two thousand tsunami survivors had rushed to their branch temple in the southern city of Galle for refuge, and that the monk at that temple was taking care of them under Gnanaweera Thero’s direction. When I explained to him the nature of this project, he readily agreed to help me.
The city of Galle is located about 70 miles south of Colombo. Its antiquity, traced to the Hindu epic, Ramayana, is so alive and well that in 2005, villagers proudly told me that a mountain range in Galle, Roomassalakande, was the site of a magical herb used to heal the Sri Lankan king Rama (who captured Sita, Indian king Ravana’s wife in the epic story,) when Rama was wounded by his brother. The city is also mentioned in the chronicles of Cosmas Indicopleustes, the sixth century Alexandrian merchant, and of Ibn Battuta, the Arabian traveler and navigator who visited it in 1344 A.D. [2]
With its natural harbor, the city of Galle was a busy cosmopolitan trading post where locals were trading with Indian, Chinese, Persian, and Arab merchants by the time the Portuguese arrived there in the 14th century. It remained the center of economic activity until the British developed the Colombo harbor in the 19th century. Today, Colombo is the financial capital of the country. But Galle is still the financial capital of the southern province, one of the country’s nine provinces.
For administrative purposes, each province is divided into districts, and the southern province is divided into three districts, Galle, Matara, and Hambantota. Each district consists of several divisions, which are in turn made up of clusters of villages. During research, I lived in a home in Talpe, a small coastal fishing village in the Habaraduwa division of the Galle district. It was found for me by Gnanaweera Thero, and four days after our conversation, he came with a group of people to take me to my new home. On the way, the monk decided to go all the way to Hambantota, the farthest and worst affected district in the south, so I could see the full impact of the tsunami along the southern coast. We stopped to speak to many villagers on what became a two-day trip, and in the next several pages I document some of the social, economic, and psychological consequences of the disaster that became evident on this initial drive down south.
We travelled along the same highway that Ciranthi and her children had their narrow escape – the A2 highway, popularly known as Galle Road. It runs parallel to the sea much of the way, as does the southern railway. I was quite familiar with the sights and sounds along the drive. Beaches are a perennial favorite of many families looking for relaxation and entertainment even though they became increasingly cluttered when Sri Lanka, like other developing countries, saw tourism as an attractive foreign exchange earner after the second World War – when the world became increasingly interconnected with new developments in transportation and information technology, and people in industrialized nations started to have increased disposable income and leisure time to travel.
Sri Lanka’s tourist industry was launched in 1966 with the passage of the Ceylon Tourist Board Act and the Ceylon Hotels Corporation Act and the following year, the GoSL invited a team of foreign experts in town planning, hotel investment, and market research to prepare a comprehensive 10-year tourism development plan for the Ceylon Tourist Board (CTB). With tax concessions for hotel investments, encouragement for hotel construction, relaxation of customs duty on hotel equipment, and concession on outward remittance of profits offered by the CTB, the industry grew rapidly from 1967 to 1982. [3]
But initial developments largely occurred in and around Colombo and in 1971, the southern coastline was still relatively free from clutter. That year, before emigrating from Sri Lanka, I went with my mother to Kataragama in Hambantota to pay homage to the Hindu god, Kataragama, who is said to reside there. [4] In all these years I never forgot that journey because the brilliance of the blue sea that shone through the coconut groves had captivated me. But on my first visit back to the country in 1979, I was dismayed to find that long stretches of the south’s beautiful pale golden coastline had disappeared behind an increasing number of houses, boutiques, fishermen’s huts, huge hotels, and small eateries. By the 1990s, one could drive for miles along the southern coast without even a glimpse of the sea – rather like in Japan, where, beginning in the 1800s, officials began building clusters of sea walls to protect communities from tsunamis, cutting off their view of the sea. Strategically built in areas where tsunamis are known to occur, they covered about 40 percent of Japan’s sea coast by 2011.
In Sri Lanka, the pace of change in the coastal environment accelerated when a new government came to power in 1977 and liberalized the socialist economic policies of previous governments. Adopting a policy mix popularly known as structural adjustment, the new Open Economy was built on a huge influx of foreign loans, outright grants, and investment. Its terms, set down by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, promoted export-oriented production, devaluation of the local currency, liberalization of imports, privatization of state-owned sectors, incentives for foreign investments, and the removal of restrictions on movement of capital, goods, and services between the country and the outside world. [5]
Economic liberalization was aimed at increasing employment opportunities, wealth creation, and economic diversification. With the country’s entry into the global village, rich entrepreneurs and poor fishermen alike saw the resource-rich coastal environment as the new tool they could use freely and remake at will to obtain maximum benefits from the market economy. But with the war spreading in the north and the east, it was to the south that the ambitious people crowded into and by the time the tsunami hit, the area had become home to 25 percent of Sri Lanka’s population, and 61.6 percent of all industrial units. [6] This is to be expected because as anthropologist Roy Rappaport reminds us, “Nature is seen by humans through a screen of beliefs, knowledge, and purposes, and it is in terms of their images of nature, rather than of the actual structure of nature, that they act.”
But post tsunami, as we drove down south, mile upon mile of the beach the sea had reclaimed was again visible. This time, however, this resplendent sight instilled in me not joy, but fear. The endless piles of debris littering the roadside, free standing walls and foundations of what had once been homes or businesses, clusters of tents sheltering the homeless, the destruction of the road system and bridges, the communication, electrical, water, and rail systems, schools, hospitals, government institutions, demonstrated only too well how lethal a weapon the tsunami had been. But then, as Rappaport also says, “….it is upon nature itself that they do act, and it is nature itself that acts upon them, nurturing or destroying them.”
While the built environment had been an eyesore, I was filled with ambivalence at its disappearance. Intellectually I agreed with Rappaport; but emotionally I was aghast. For all that was lost had also been symbols of human resourcefulness and strength in adapting to an environment that is continually challenged by storms and high tides. They had been layered with stories about tradition and change, the rich and the poor, conflicts and cooperation, and the multi-ethnicity and multi-religiosity that occurred as people came to settle or left to resettle, built and rebuilt, married, gave birth, worked, prayed, fought, celebrated, and cremated their dead. Many of those coastal communities were now broken or vanished, perhaps never to be rebuilt.
The story was the same in Japan, as NHK showed a horrified world in real time. A sea gone mad relentlessly attacked hundreds of miles of the country’s northeastern coast that humans had made their own, ruining vast swaths of farm land, flooding the nuclear facilities, battering cars, ships, and boats, and carrying off whole homes with people still in them.
Driving alongside the sea on my initial journey south in Sri Lanka, we saw in the ocean overturned boats, and pieces of wood that must have once been part of houses and other buildings, or of ports and piers that enabled fishermen to engage in their livelihoods. But the sea itself looked glorious! It seemed as if the waves, dancing in the sunshine and bursting into a frothy laughter as they touched the shore, were proclaiming to the world that the sea had finally regained control of the environment that we humans ruled over for so long.
But after any complex disaster humans have to reassert some measure of control over the environment again for the people and countries to move forward. In my homeland, the process began with the rebuilding of the coast line rail service the tsunami paralyzed. About 60 miles of the rail track was severely damaged, while another 25 mile stretch suffered slight damage. The waves also destroyed 35 train stations, 50 train cars, 4 railway bridges, and 3 power bases, and partially damaged 6 more railway bridges. [7]
In Beruwela, a scenic fishing village, we stopped to speak with a group of men repairing the rail tracks the tsunami had dumped into the lagoon. They said all railway employees were summoned to work and their leave cancelled, to get the rail system up and running by April. The Minister of Transport estimated losses to the rail sector at about Rs. 7 billion ($60 million.) Offers of help to rebuild the system poured in from the international community. But the national treasury quickly released funds, avoiding the usual bottleneck for maintenance work and the Sri Lanka Railways mobilized its own personnel and resources and local expertise in other State Sector Engineering institutions to install new bridges and rebuild destroyed tracks. The remarkable strength of the collective discipline, expertise, and cooperative efforts of Sri Lankan engineers became evident to all when they got the trains back on all the tracks by February 21, 2005. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) acclaimed their achievement as a heroic response by a dedicated people.
In Japan too, the tsunami devastated the Sanriku Railway, completely destroying its southern line, and sparing only two sections of its scenic northern line along Iwate Prefecture. But caught between the local people’s emotions and the government’s economic wrangling, Sanriku Railway’s future remains in question months after the catastrophe. Trains on this line were already running at a loss, but for the locals, it was the best mode of transport to get children to school or for the elderly to go shopping. In fact, the rail service was so much a part of the lives of the people in the area that they appear to have taken care of the stations as if they would of their homes, sweeping the platforms, planting flowers, and even hanging out dried persimmons for visitors. Besides, in this region that is highly dependent on declining fishing and farming industries, people say the railway is vital for tourism, which, like in Sri Lanka, is a recent industry in the region. So, local authorities want to rebuild the line. But the estimated cost to restore track, bridges, and stations is at least Y10 bn ($123m) which they do not have, and do not believe could raise on their own. And central government leaders are determined that in this region, where a rapidly ageing population and stagnating traditional industries have left many towns in steep decline, tsunami reconstruction should support economic sustainability. So, four months into the disaster, the future of the Sanriku Railway was still hanging in the balance. [8]
In Sri Lanka, not only did the railway get a new lease of life, the feat accomplished by Sri Lanka’s Railways Department was also cause for immense national pride in those dark days. But this achievement brought no joy to the people of Peraliya, a small fishing village mid-way between Colombo and Galle, where the tsunami inflicted one of its most horrendous tragedies, wrecking a train bound from Colombo to Matara. Over 1,500 men, women, and children died. Of the handful that survived this tragedy, said to be the world’s largest train disaster, I met five people. Four were relatives. The fifth was an individual from a different family. The voices of two relatives, Nihal and Sreenika, (uncle and niece respectively,) appear below along with Ciranthi’s. The voice of the fifth survivor is heard in Chapter Four.
***
Nihal and his wife, Latha, planned the train journey because their two daughters, a teenager and a seven-year-old, had never gone on a train. They decided to show the children the the famous coral gardens in Hikkaduwa and invited other relatives to go on the trip. Six people, including their 22-year-old niece, Sreenika, joined them.
Since it was a public holiday, the train soon became jam-packed. But the group of relatives had boarded it at the journey’s inception in Colombo and they traveled comfortably seated, with views of the sea, enjoying the sandwiches Latha brought. As they neared Hikkaduwa, Sreenika retrieved her handbag from the luggage rack and got ready to disembark. But the train came to a halt unexpectedly in Peraliya, a couple of miles before their destination.
No one knew why the train stopped, but as she looked down the coast, Sreenika saw terrified people rushing towards the train, yelling. Then looking out to sea she saw a big wave about six or seven feet high racing towards the land. (It was the one that sent Ciranthi’s van spinning.) Inside the train people began screaming, but though the sea dumped water and debris inside their car, Sreenika said nobody got hurt. With its wheels submerged in water, however, the train could not move. The passengers were fearful, not knowing if another wave would come. Someone suggested that the women and children go to a temple nearby, but another person prevented it saying people might get bogged down in the mud since limestone had been excavated in the area.
While the train passengers were anxiously debating what to do, Ciranthi and her children had reached a home on higher ground and stopped to catch their breath. “The house belonged to village people, who, even in this calamity, were hospitable enough to bring a chair from inside the house for me. After all, we were akin to foreigners, we were from Colombo, in our holiday gear, sporting designer shades – what a laugh!” she writes.
While she rested, Malla ran back to retrieve Ciranthi’s spectacles from the abandoned van. He had just returned when people started fleeing inland, yelling another wave was coming. Malla grabbed his mother and sister, “two heavy weights, as he loves to joke,” says Ciranthi, and forced them to run. “But” says she, “Everyone knows how I’ve sculptured this great-looking body over the years, and how attached I am to it, that I don’t want to shed even a pound of it, and at this point, how could I run? I couldn’t even walk! But that was before I saw what was chasing us!!! I have never in my life seen anything like it. Not in books, not on TV, and not in the movies. And if someone had told me about it and I had not seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed it either. It was the hugest, tallest wall of the greyest water ever– taller than the coconut trees which were just being swallowed up. No froth, no foam, just a massive mass of grey substance rushing at us with lightning speed. The noise is what I remember most. The Deafening Roar of the Sea, as if the whole ocean had risen up and was closing in on us. I never looked back after that, running, falling, stampeding along till the sound receded….”
According to eyewitness accounts, the second wave was about 15 meters. Inside the train, said Sreenika, people started screaming and wailing. “Did you also scream?” I asked. “For some reason I did not,” she said. “Almost instinctively I stood up on the seat, hung onto the luggage rack, and began chanting pirith.”
Pirith or Paritta Sutra are a part of the many discourses the Buddha gave. They teach us many things such as the noble qualities of the Buddha like kindness, generosity, and compassion towards all beings and how to develop those qualities; the reality of existence; and how humans can improve their worldly lives. People believe that pirith chanting invoke the blessings of the Buddha and they often invite monks to chant them when embarking on important projects, during significant life cycle events, and during serious illnesses or other problems. Most Sri Lankan Buddhists learn some of them at an early age and chant regularly in their homes. And when in danger, like Sreenika, most instinctively chant pirith.
As the tsunami engulfed the train Sreenika closed her eyes tightly and held her breath. She gulped water, and was aware that their car fell on its side. When, as the water receded, she opened her eyes to “a blackness and a deathly silence,” only about ten people of the scores that had packed the car appeared to be alive. Her uncle’s older daughter, Naduni, was one of them.
In the next car, Naduni’s father, Nihal, had also survived. As the water subsided he climbed onto the roof of the train and together with another survivor, pulled out whoever was alive. Latha and four other family members were among them, but the couple’s younger daughter, Hiruni, and a seventeen-year-old niece were missing. (Their story as well as Ciranthi’s continues in subsequent chapters.)
***
On that journey down south, we stopped to look at that ill-fated train, now standing on the track with all the cars reattached. There were policemen guarding it because a man told us, “Some villagers could not run because the stalled train blocked their path and they got into the train. People are now threatening to set the train on fire saying those relatives and friends would not have died had the train not been there.”
As we saw in the case of Japan’s wrecked railway, symbols that emerge during tragedies are multivocal; they reflect the mental processes of a collective people. Different individuals see and interpret the same sights, sounds, experiences, differently, and in Sri Lanka too, the same rail system that symbolized human ingenuity and perseverance, the strength of collective action, and the fact that the country had begun to recover and move ahead, carried vastly different meanings for the people of Peraliya and neighboring villages. For them, the battered train triggered unbearable memories which resulted in anger so violent that the state had to dispatch police officers to prevent its destruction. Its presence in their midst day in and day out was making it impossible for some people to move beyond the tragedy and regain the mental peace so essential to rebuilding their lives, and the nation to heal.
A young mother, with her five-year-old son hanging onto her arm, told us that one train car fell on their house. “Before all this we lived quite well. We even had gold jewelry worth about one hundred thousand rupees ($10,000.) But now, we have become beggars!” the woman sighed. In Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, and many other societies where marriages are arranged gold jewelry is a desired dowry item, and its ownership brings economic security for women. So her parents, like that of thousands of other girls, may have bought some of that jewelry while the woman was still a young girl.
The woman and her son survived because they saw the first wave when they were walking along Galle road and fled inland. Her father and husband had survived too, but her mother had perished. The survivors were now living with relatives. She visited this site daily to collect aid and to prevent moneyed opportunists and squatters claiming her piece of land. This was a very real possibility: the tsunami washed away people’s deeds as well as fences, trees, parapet walls, and other landmarks that originally demarcated boundaries. A month after the disaster it was reported that with some 600,000 deeds washed away, and with the sea eroding about 30 meters of land in at least 15 areas, the Surveyor General’s Department was envisaging new legal and demarcation problems. [9]
Good and evil are universal human characteristics. As we will see in other chapters, disasters often bring out the best in people. But they also bring out the worst in human nature, and a UN report charged the Indian, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, Maldivian, and Thai governments of standing back or being complicit as coastal communities were pushed out in favor of commercial interests, a topic I discuss further in Chapter Five. [10]
With the loss of their homes, people in both countries also lost money as well as important documents which had both immediate and long-term consequences for the victims. In Sri Lanka, ten days after the disaster the Department of Registration of Persons initiated a special program to provide National Identity Cards to IDPs who lost them. Soon after, steps were taken to issue duplicate birth and marriage certificates, revise adoption laws to facilitate the process for adopting newly orphaned children, and to certify tsunami deaths.
As we walked back to our vehicle, a big white banner strung between two coconut trees on the beach on the other side of the road fluttered in the wind. It wished tsunami victims the bliss of Nirvana (Enlightenment,) the ultimate goal in Buddhism. Such banners are commonly displayed at traditional Buddhist funerals. But the majority of the train victims did not have traditional funerals, normally attended by scores of relatives and friends of the deceased, as well as of surviving members of the family. The bodies of most victims were extricated from the wreckage only after they had baked in the hot sun for days. To make matters worse, salt water hastens the process of deterioration, so, even when relatives were able to identify them they couldn’t, and sometimes wouldn’t, take the bodies home for the traditional rituals and cremation. Since rapid deterioration made finger-printing impossible, officials photographed the unclaimed bodies and documented details helpful for identification. Then after the Sangha, as the community of Buddhist monks are known, performed the pansukula ritual (see Chapter Four) collectively for all victims, to prevent the spread of diseases the bodies were unloaded by backhoes into mass graves on the beach, even though Sri Lankan Buddhists normally cremate the dead. For reasons explained in Chapter Three, in which I describe and analyze the funeral rituals of the two countries, it is not essential to have the body present at the first ritual in the Theravada tradition, and families would have performed the ritual in their homes too for their deceased loved ones.
In Japan too cremation is the norm. But as we see in Chapter Three, in the Mahayana tradition, it is extremely important to have the body present for the first ritual. Therefore, even as the first anniversary of the disaster approached, some grieving survivors were still trying to find the remains of their loved ones. Rev. Tatedera, who returned to Minamisanriku, his devastated hometown, a few days following the disaster said that after officials took DNA and blood samples from bodies that were recovered, families had the priests perform the rituals as best as they could under the circumstances. They then buried the corpses, enclosed in body bags or blankets, individually in shallow temporary graves and local government officials made arrangements to cremate them in other Prefectures, even going as far as Tokyo, because local crematoriums were unusable. When the time came, survivors dug up the bodies and took them there.
***
Japan is located on the “Ring of Fire” in the basin of the Pacific Ocean where about 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes and a large number of the world’s volcanic eruptions occur. When earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides occur under the sea, they create enormous oscillations of water, resulting in tsunami waves. So, geographically and geologically, Japan is very vulnerable to tsunamis as well, and besides building sea walls, the state has been creating a culture of safety to ensure people are protected from these natural hazards.
After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, for instance, Tony Waller says that Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism introduced The Seismic Retrofitting Promotion Law and in 2009, the Ministry set out to survey and improve all federal buildings considered inadequately protected. The goal was to make 90% of the federal buildings earthquake-resistant by 2015. [11] Their success was seen in 2011 when none of Tokyo’s swaying sky scrapers collapsed in the strongest earthquake ever to strike Japan. The country had made significant progress in other areas too. Bullet trains halted without any derailments as rail company seismometers triggered automated braking systems on, thus averting the type of tragedy that occurred in Peraliya.
To protect people from tsunamis, besides building sea walls, breakwaters, and dykes, Japan has installed other sophisticated safety mechanisms as well. When earthquakes occur tsunami sirens sound in many coastal towns, along with radio and TV warnings. Networks of sensors set off alarms in individual residences too in some coastal towns. Floodgates shut down automatically to prevent waves from reaching upriver. Along the coast, there are warning signs and well-marked escape routes. Communities have designated evacuation centers and schools and other institutions have emergency manuals telling them where to go. Earthquake and tsunami drills are routine for all citizens.
Despite all these efforts, however, writes British journalist, Mure Dickie, the enormous difficulty in predicting the likely strength and direction of approach of tsunamis, and the inadequate measuring systems of earthquakes – capable of measuring only up to 8.0 magnitude in 2011 – resulted in authorities initially warning of a much smaller tsunami than what occurred, probably giving people a false sense of security and stopping them from rushing away from the area. Survivors had also told Dickie that the death toll was so high because many people tried to find loved ones or retrieve precious possessions instead of heeding tsunami tendenko, the traditional teaching that says in tsunamis, people must focus on saving themselves. Still they acknowledge, regular tsunami drills and shared memories of past disasters may have saved lives. [12]
In Sri Lanka, on the other hand, tsunamis were virtually unknown in 2004. Although the Vihara Maha Devi story, a well known historical legend among Sinhala people, describes a tsunami-like disaster in the country in ancient times, by 2004 it was thought to be fiction. Scientists too had not identified that region of the Indian Ocean as tsunami-prone and the Sinhala lexicon did not even have a term to refer to the phenomenon. So, the country appropriated the Japanese term ‘tsunami,’ meaning ‘great harbor wave.’
Historical chronicles, however, show heavy monsoonal storms, tides, and currents have threatened particularly Sri Lanka’s western and southwestern coastal regions since ancient times, and the country’s Coastal Conservation Department (CCD) has built protective revetments in vulnerable areas. But a CCD engineer told me that they were based on calculations to contain the known risks, not tsunamis. This made sense; as anthropologists, Oliver-Smith and Hoffman observe, societies deal with hazards depending on how they perceive the risks posed.
In fact, the CCD itself was created in the 1980s out of two other agencies because coastal erosion had become a growing threat to the island’s coastal zone, which translates to about 23 percent of the island’s total land area, and lie within 14 of the 25 administrative districts. [13] The agency first took shape as the Coast Protection Unit in the Colombo Port Commission in 1963. In 1978, the government created a second entity, the Coast Conservation Division under the Fisheries Ministry. But when the liberalization of the economy led to the expansion of the tourist, fishing, garment, and other industries and brought more and more people to the coastal zone, it became evident that to protect coastal resources, an integrated management program was needed. Consequently, the GoSL passed the Coast Conservation Act No. 57 in 1981 and three years later, upgraded the Coast Conservation Division to form the CCD. Today, it is the principal agency among several to have jurisdiction over the preservation, conservation, and the sustainable development of coastal resources. [14]
***
Peraliya, where the train was derailed, is a low lying area and therefore highly vulnerable to extreme events such as storms and tsunamis. But the country’s location within the tropical belt makes this area ideal for coral reefs, which experts believe protect coastlines from tides, storms, and tsunamis because their natural harbors and walls reduce the speed and pressure of the waves. So, I asked a CCD official, “Even if the revetments could not withstand the phenomenal force of the tsunami, shouldn’t the coral reefs offer some protection?” “They would have, if healthy reefs were there” he replied. “But people now see the reefs as a huge source for money and damage and destroy them to get what they want, and this (the disaster) is the result.”
Being the habitat of many species of fish, the reefs are one of the world’s most diverse and productive natural ecosystems and provide livelihoods for thousands of people. With few exceptions, there is open access to Sri Lanka’s coastal fisheries and the CCD official said that after the country opened up to the global market, intense competition to supply the increasing demands of the global community for fish and other reef products led to widespread destruction and degradation of the reefs particularly by fishing, tourist, and construction industries.
I found out firsthand the detrimental impact of globalization on coral reefs when, during the second phase of this research project, my land lady, her house hold help, and I went out to the reefs with three fishermen who catch ornamental fish for America’s marine aquarium trade. The trip came about because the previous year I had become acquainted with Susith, one of the three men, through his brother-in-law who regularly drove me around in his three-wheeler (a scooter fitted with a hood and a body with a passenger seat,) during research.
“Hang on tight nona (madam,)” the men shouted as they pushed the boat into the water. And hang on we did, as the boat bumped over surging waves the three or four miles to Habaraduwa, where it was anchored to the reefs. Susith and a mate quickly tucked plastic bags into the waistband of their shorts. The ornamental fish they catch will go into those. They then put on goggles, flippers, and fins, heaved oxygen tanks onto their backs, took ‘moxy nets,’ ‘bottom set nets,’ and crow bars, did back flips, and disappeared into the water. We waited in the swaying boat with the third man until the divers hooted from some distance away about an hour later, signaling they were ready to be picked up. They came aboard, transferred the fish into a big pail of water, and dived back with a second oxygen tank. That morning they caught about two dozen ornamental fish.
There is no separate estimate of the export value of marine aquarium fish. But experts believe that reef fishery may constitute about 15percent of the total fish landings in Sri Lanka, and that the export value of marine ornamental fish and invertebrates amounts to about $3.5 million. Sri Lanka was the first country in south Asia to develop the trade, and business became quite lucrative as new communication technologies developed because people could now transmit detailed customized information to global customers in a matter of minutes. By 1994 the country was exporting more than 250 species of marine fish, invertebrates, and other reef and reef-associated products to 45 countries.
This fishing trip revealed how fishermen harm the reefs to supply the global demand. As mentioned, the men anchored the boat on the reefs and it took some pulling and tugging to release the anchor. It came up with a piece of the reef dangling on the hook. Fishermen also break the reefs when tugging at nets that get entangled in them, and when they disturb the reefs with crowbars to chase the fish from nooks and crannies. A CCD official said some men even dynamite the sea bed to catch ornamental fish, and that others who supply fish for elite Asian restaurants and European markets, stun the fish using cyanide sprays. With thousands of fishermen going out to sea twice a day when conditions are good, the reefs stand little chance of remaining healthy and years before the tsunami, environmentalists warned the reefs were dying. Consequently, the government passed the Fisheries and Aquatic Resources Act of 1996, declaring the use of moxy and bottom-set nets, and of dynamite and cyanide, illegal. But as I witnessed in 2006, the men were continuing to use the outlawed implements, and said they know people who engage in the more violent methods.
A CCD engineer explained to me how the tourist and construction industries also cause reef destruction. Operators of glass bottom boats taking tourists out to show the reefs also anchor boats to them and some even sell pieces of reef of varying sizes to tourists. Some hoteliers run businesses without permits, and they, and even some owners of legally built hotels, have not constructed the required waste discharge facilities. They unload sewage right into the sea and these pollutants, and the loose dirt that washes down to the reefs when developers cut down coastal vegetation and bulldoze the land for buildings, impede the growth of corals and eventually smother them. On top of all this, people blast the reefs to obtain limestone for the construction industry.
The official said that the CCD outlawed reef blasting, but that people then started mining inland lime deposits, creating more low-lying areas. So in the 1980s, the CCD took proactive action to stop the problem. It prohibited coral mining and operating lime kilns in the coastal zone, removed the kilns, relocated the miners to other areas, and gave them parcels of cultivable land. “But,” said the official, “most men cut down the coconut and rubber trees on their land, sold the timber, returned to mining, and transported the harvest to lime kilns located outside the coastal zone, though this is illegal as well.”
What draws the men back to mining, and why are officials unable to enforce the laws? A CCD official speculated that increasing poverty levels may have pushed the miners back to their old job because “Unlike farming, mining brings in quick money.” This could well be. After independence, Sri Lanka had well developed and comprehensive welfare programs that had resulted in rapid advances in literacy, health, and many other social indicators. [15] But as Asoka Bandarage, a Sri Lankan sociologist now teaching at Georgetown University, points out in The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka: Terrorism, ethnicity, political economy, the Open Economy drastically reduced social welfare programs in the country, removed price controls on food and consumer goods, and replaced the rice subsidy with a limited food stamp program. She says that in the 1978-1980 budget period the total government expenditures for food, education, and health declined from 42 to 26 percent. [16]
Arjan Rajasuriya of the National Aquatic Resources Research and Development Agency points to political corruption as another reason for people violating the laws. He observes that people in coastal regions have direct influence over politicians of their respective areas, and that since different community groups are affiliated with different political parties, the CCD finds it difficult to channel the collective strength of the local people to managing their resources. [17]
The politicization of rural communities was begun during the British colonial period with the introduction of universal franchise in 1931. In 1956, the sweeping victory of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who canvassed with a strong emphasis on an indigenous style of nationalism, demonstrated to villagers that powerful ruling governments could be toppled at general elections, and that involvement in national party politics could yield concrete benefits for themselves. [18] So in this climate where corrupt politicians and their constituents serve each other’s interests, the CCD and other authorities have been rendered powerless to enforce the laws that may have lessened the impact of the tsunami on the train and the villages. By contrast, after surveying the post-tsunami situation in the Maldives Islands, the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) said diligent efforts by the government there to protect the reefs that shield the islands from the open sea prevented substantial damage to the islands and loss of lives. [19] In Fukushima, on the other hand, political corruption was a major factor in creating the nuclear disaster.
***
Award winning Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma, observes that designers and planners must study maps, and assess risks and potential of each region they plan to develop. [20] Accordingly, based on the height of a tsunami that hit the area in 1938, TEPCO built 5.5 meters high sea walls to protect the nuclear plants. But the 2011 tsunami that hit the area was some 13 meters high. As if that wasn’t terrible enough, the earthquake had caused the entire Honshu Island to subside a meter and the vacuum created at the top gave even more power to the sea.
TEPCO may be excused for the design error because scientists acknowledge it is extremely difficult to predict the size and force of tsunami waves striking the shore since they depend on the local topography, the shape of the shoreline, and the direction of approach. And as the Canadian ecologist, C.S. Holling reminds us, some natural processes unfold within time frames that vary considerably from those in which human decision-making takes place, and when lapses between the occurrences of disastrous hazards are extraordinarily long, they allow for considerable trial and error in societal adaptation to the environment.
While this may have been the case in Sri Lanka as mentioned, it was revealed that at a safety review meeting called by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency in June 2009 – a meeting at which TEPCO officials were also present– seismologist, Yukinobu Okamura, pointed out that scientific surveys and analyses of sediment in the area confirmed historical accounts of a much larger tsunami inundating the region in the year 869, and questioned the assumptions underpinning the plant’s design. But in the 21 months that passed, TEPCO did nothing. The government did nothing either to ensure that the company increased the height of the existing sea wall or built a new one. [21] Instead, the government approved another 10-year extension of the plant’s No. 1 reactor that had begun operating in 1971, despite the fact that in 2003, TEPCO was found to have falsified safety data and was forced to close all 17 of its reactors, including the six at Fukushima, and despite the fact that when its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, Japan’s biggest, was rocked by a 6.8 magnitude earthquake a few years later, the company admitted the plant was not built to withstand a quake of that strength. [22]
Disaster scholars theorize that it is usually a society’s most socio-economically disadvantaged people, whether based on their race, class, ethnicity, religion, or other factor, who are the most vulnerable to the various debilitating impacts of complex disasters because perceived as the ‘Other,’ they are relegated to the peripheries of settlements as societies become larger and more complex, and people organize themselves by cultural values and belief systems, power structures, and social and economic arrangements. This became quite evident when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, [23] and an earthquake devastated China’s Sichuan Province in 2008. [24]
But not all societies experience disasters in the same way or to the same degree. Even when they result from the same climatological, geological, or technological phenomenon, the interpretation of cause, effect, and responsibility, patterns of destruction vary. When Haiti was hit by the 7.0 quake for instance, it was the capital city that crumbled. Over 230,000 people lost their lives and urban slums were decimated; but also leveled were the presidential palace, the biggest businesses, and various office buildings including that of the UN. As we saw in Sri Lanka too, the tsunami victimized people of all socioeconomic backgrounds – including big hotel owners, middle class home owners, poor fishermen and laborers – because as the area became increasingly industrialized, the rich and the poor alike flocked to it. Japan’s Tohoku region, on the other hand, fits the above theoretical perspective.
Before the quake, many of the hardest hit coastal settlements in the Tohoku region had been in long-term decline. Income in the worst affected prefectures of Miyagi and Iwate were 15 to 20 percent below the national average. The area as a whole has a high unemployment rate and a population that is shrinking and aging faster than in the rest of the country. Therefore, says Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma, TEPCO found it easy to locate the nuclear power plants in Fukushima; residents and local governments of Tohoku consented to host the power stations – in spite of the risks – because their installation brings generous subsidies to the locals. But once they were installed in these out-lying regions, TEPCO, a large urban-based organization, as well as the government, was not conscientious about their maintenance. So, echoing the above theoretical perspective, Kuma says, “The disaster has drawn attention to not only the economic disparities in what is traditionally depicted as a wealthy nation, but also to the high-handed and heedless stance of the urban elite towards poor areas.” [25]
Japan is the only country in the world to have experienced the immediate and horrific destruction, and the slow, lingering effects of radiation poisoning after America dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. Radiation is an ‘invisible enemy’ that contaminates the earth, and can spread through air and water. Human exposure to radiation is measured in millisieverts (mSv.) 50 to 100 mSv leads to changes in blood chemistry; 700 mSv leads to vomiting; 1000 mSv or 1 sievert, can cause radiation sickeness including nausea and an elevated risk of cancer, and lead to damage to the central nervous system and death. [26] So, there is substantial opposition to building nuclear power plants in the country. Why then did the government ignore TEPCO’s corrupt practices?
In 2006, the government announced a new energy strategy to reduce the use of oil by 40 percent or less as a source for all energy needs by 2030. [27] Targets set include reducing Japan’s transportation sector’s reliance on oil as a source of energy from 100 to 80 percent, and reducing the costs for solar energy development by developing nuclear power plants so that nuclear energy will account for 40 percent of the nation’s power generation. So, says Yoichi Funabashi, head of the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation which set up the independent investigation commission on the nuclear accident, interest groups and utility companies seeking to gain broad acceptance for nuclear power wove a twisted myth of the “absolute safety” of nuclear energy to dampen public opposition. He says, for example, that in 2010, to avoid sparking “unnecessary misunderstanding and anxiety” among the public, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) had Nigata Prefecture’s plans to conduct an accident drill for earthquake preparedness replaced by a less menacing alternative – of heavy snow! And he says, utility companies, averse to any activity smacking of preparations for a nuclear disaster, stopped the development of robots to assist in nuclear accidents. In fact, says Funabashi, “At its core, Japan’s nuclear safety regulatory regime was phoney (sic.) Regulators pretended to regulate; utilities pretended to be regulated. In reality, the latter were far more powerful in expertise and clout”. [28] But the national and global outcry that followed the Fukushima disaster resulted in the sacking of three top state officials for cozy relations with the company. Top TEPCO officials resigned as well. The nuclear crisis also cost Prime Minister Naoto Kan his job. In July 2011, Yoshihito Noda became Japan’s new Prime Minister.
***
In southern Sri Lanka, with 3074 bodies recovered, Hambatota district was the worst affected in the province. [29] Its town center was so devastated that GoSL commenced its reconstruction programs of tsunami battered areas with the building of a new town center further inland. But driving into Hambantota, one may be surprised at the nature and scale of the destruction there because long stretches of its beaches are guarded by huge sand dunes which ensure that people live further inland, and are thus less vulnerable to the ravages of the sea. Another eye-catching feature of this district is the impressive mangrove forests growing in the intertidal zone between land and the ocean.
In terms of biodiversity in the marine environment, mangroves are second only to coral reefs as highly productive eco-systems for fish, crab, and shrimp nurseries. They are a valuable asset also because they prevent erosion and extend the shorelines by trapping mud with underwater roots. Some experts believe that these plants, like coral reefs, protect coastal areas from storms and tsunami because while some of their thick roots project vertically above the water to obtain oxygen, other roots, spreading about ten meters around the trees, enable them to withstand powerful waves, and their branches break the speed with which the waves slam into the shore. With all these natural barriers protecting the land area from the sea, why did this district suffer such severe damage?
In Great Planning Disasters, Peter Hall writes that, whether it is town and country or urban and regional planning, the process of planning the physical development of a geographical space entails making decisions about “how much of what to put where.” [30] Planners must consider the population distribution, and the distribution of activities and their related structures – homes, factories, schools, offices, businesses, hospitals – in relation to the environmental features of an area.
In Sri Lanka, the CCD works with local government officials, the Urban Housing Authority (UDA,) the CTB, and other institutions to regulate development activities in the coastal zone and in 1983, established a permit procedure for activities such as breaching sand bars, removing sand, dredging, filling, landscaping and grading, and removing vegetation or coral. The Department also provides educational programs on conservation and preservation of the coastal zone to the people. In short, ‘sustainable development’ – ensuring that the needs of the present are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs – as the World Commission on Environment and Development defined the term in 1987, is a goal it tries hard to meet.
It seems particularly important that development work in Hambantota is carried out under the supervision of the CCD and other agencies because like Peraliya, this is low-lying terrain. But this area has been continuously settled since pre-historic times, and in pre-colonial times when Sri Lanka was divided into three territorial divisions, the capital of Ruhuna – as the southern region is still known – was Magampattu in the Hambantota district. So human intervention in this district has a centuries-old history and some projects people carried out long before the CCD was created made the Hambantota town extremely vulnerable to a disaster waiting to happen. For instance, at various points in time local people as well as the colonizers dug canals, affecting the natural flow of water to the lagoons. The description of a painting by British artist, Henry Salt, of “A View Near Point de Galle” (circa 1803) reads: “The view in the vicinity of Point de Galle is taken at the spot where ended a canal, which had been constructed by the Dutch, for the purpose of bringing down from the forests of the interior, those beautiful woods, which form the chief ornament of the cabinet-work of Europe….” [31] In 2004, the sea flooded artificial canals running through town, amplifying the volume of water.
A more recent planning disaster in Hambantota town was the temporary relocation of the Sunday open air market to an empty strip by the side of the main road, and across from one of the area’s seven major salt pans, the Karagan Levaya. In Sri Lanka, salt is produced by solar evaporation, and salt pans are found in both the northern and southern regions. These are huge tidal flats that are periodically inundated with sea water in areas where the dry season is prolonged. While salt marshes in the north occur mainly on exposed tidal flats, those in the south occur in the shelter of sand dunes. About six decades before the CCD was created, the then urban authorities destroyed the sand dunes that sheltered the Karagan levaya and built a housing complex. That Sunday morning, the tsunami carried the crowded market and the homes into the levaya. Wing Commander Welikala of the Sri Lanka Air Force who visited the area later that evening told me he saw about 50 vehicles, including buses, submerged about a kilometer into the salt pan. Some 1600 bodies were recovered from there. Many people had also drowned in Maha Levaya, another salt pan. But in that case, the sea itself had devoured six meters or so of the dune and rushed into town.
Besides the loss of lives, the tsunami’s economic impact on the salt industry was considerable. Although Karagan Levaya was not operational in 2004, Maha Levaya was and the large volumes of sand and marine sludge carried in by the tsunami affected the natural composition of the salt marsh. Consequently, said W.A. Dharmasiri, the Hambantota Additional Divisional Secretary, salt production at the Maha Levaya was halted for a year until it was cleaned, leaving 600-900 temporary workers in limbo.
More environmental changes that made the district vulnerable to the tsunami occurred when, with the liberalization of the economy, the government acquired land for new ventures. Old timers who sold up and moved inland took the traditional knowledge with them. Entrepreneurs who replaced them had made money in gem-mining and other businesses and many only saw their new environment through a purely utilitarian lens. From their vantage points the dunes and mangroves occupied potentially valuable real estate and they were destroyed to build hotels, aquaculture projects, and other businesses.
Jeff McNeely, chief scientist of the Swiss-based World Conservation Union (IUCN) says the aqua culture industry was developed “So people in Europe could have cheap shrimp and prawns.” To put McNeely’s statement into a more global perspective, shrimp is the most popular seafood in the U.S. and about half of the stock consumed here is farm-raised in developing Asian countries.
Shrimp farming can be done in temperate zones, but Vandana Shiva, founding director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in India, says that global food corporations move these out to developing countries because this industry involves heavy and varied environmental costs: Aqua culture projects require that sea is created on land, resulting in the removal of mangrove forests and other vegetation to make way for fields that are filled with sea water using huge pumps. But says Shiva, the process is extremely harmful to the environment and threatens life and livelihoods because salt water seeps into ground water, ultimately resulting in a lack of drinking water in the area. And the enormous amounts of polluted waste water that is pumped out from the farms to the sea degrade sea fisheries, harming the fish and threatening the livelihoods of sea going fishermen. [32] And as we know now, large bodies of water inland greatly heightened the tsunami destruction.
Summing up the situation in Hambantota, a CCD official said, “There, the impact of the long-term encroachment of humans on the coastal zone was proven beyond doubt. The tsunami came inland with much more force in places where people converted sand dunes, mangrove forests, and sea-grass meadows into managed landscapes such as hotels and resort venues, shrimp, prawn, or ornamental fish farms, and coconut plantations.” IUCN representatives who traveled to Hambantota district confirmed his observation when they reported that most areas where the dunes remained intact did not suffer tsunami damage. [33] The minimal impact of the tsunami on Bundala National Park, surrounded by mangrove forests, and on Rekawa village where the CCD restored the plantations (both in this district,) also prove that like coral reefs and sand dunes, they too are a powerful deterrent against raging seas.
***
While all those spaces various groups of people opened up between the sea and the land became death traps in Sri Lanka, in Japan, the opposite occurred. Japan is made up of the four major islands of Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku and thousands of smaller ones. Together they add up to a total land area of approximately 145,825 square miles – nearly six times as big as Sri Lanka. But almost 75 percent of the archipelago is mountainous and the vast majority of the population lives on flat lands because says Lucien Ellington in Japan, although most of Japan’s tree covered mountains are only a few thousand feet high, people are generally reluctant to live there for fear of volcanic activity and landslides.
According to Ellington, only 20 percent of the nation’s land is suitable for human development and unlike Sri Lanka, which has a luxurious amount of arable land, Japan has precious little arable land and that too in the scarce flatlands. [34] Consequently, Japan, which, is the world’s 10th most populous country with 127 million people [35] has the largest population density per unit of area cultivated in the world. There, tall industrial and business buildings are crowded between farm plots and two- or three-story homes. Given the geological make-up of the country, it seems this settlement pattern cannot be helped but when the tsunami hit, those tall structures, and even the safety instructions officials had issued, were major contributory factors in a terrible tragedy.
As told by NHK, in Ishinomaki City in Miyagi Prefecture, Okawa Elementary School, located on the banks of a river, was a designated tsunami evacuation center. As we already know, inland rivers and other waterways multiplied the devastating power of the tsunami waves, but behind the school is a hill accessible within a few minutes, an environment familiar to the youngsters since the school takes them up there on occasion.
Emergency workers shouted warnings over loud speakers 12 minutes before the tsunami reached the school. About seven minutes before the water engulfed the school, a woman driving away with her children by car on high ground saw the oncoming deluge. But as she realized, no one at the school could see the impending disaster because the tall buildings surrounding the school blocked their view. There was no time for the woman to go back to warn them however, and another woman who went to the school just minutes before the impact found a chaotic scene with teachers trying to take roll call and trying to decide whether to go up the hill or to the parking island nearby, another designated evacuation center located on low-lying area. They decided on the latter for two reasons: By then many elderly people had come to the school and the school’s Emergency Instruction Manual directed them to go there and not up the hill.
As the narrator said, with an ageing population and declining birth rates in Japan, children are true treasures of the future. At the school, the tsunami took the lives of 74 children. Only four children survived. The tragedy has torn the community apart as well. Grief stricken parents have grown distant from one another, and a mother of a child who survived said they no longer talk to her and that she doesn’t know how to break the barrier. So a meeting has been organized to try to bring the community together. [36]
Looking at land use and tsunami damage in Tohoku, Professor Hitoshi Miyazawa of Ochanomizu University observes that the area ratio of ground according to urban land use shows a prevalence of building lots and public facilities within the inundation zone. The ratio is as high as about 60% in the Sanriku coast area, and is particularly large in its southern part, where built-up zones concentrate on the narrow plain land of ria coast bay heads, easily affected by tsunami damage. A wide range of built-up zones was flooded also in the Sendai Bay area, including the port, airport, and industrial areas. Ishinomaki is located in its northern part where a built up zone had formed in front of Sendai Bay, and about 45% of such built-up zones were inundated. In the Hamadori area, industrial areas that had developed along the shore and building lots in Iwaki city – in Fukushima Prefecture – were flooded mainly in built-up areas. [37] And Architect Kuma says that in the 20th century, as urban planning and architectural design became the tools of a city-centric era, architects and planners served only urban needs, and “obliviously” pushed the light, translucent elements of popular urban design onto local regions and their citizens, weakening them physically and culturally. [38]
***
In Sri Lanka’s Hambantota district, the Yala National Park, which attracts about a million local and foreign eco-tourists each year, also sustained heavy damage. The sea had rushed in about two kilometers around the park’s coastal perimeter, uprooting giant trees, submerging grasslands and water holes, wiping out the Yala Safari Game Lodge, the Brown Safari Hotel, a safari bungalow, and a cluster of fifty or so fishermen’s huts, and killing at least 120 people.
With about 300 hectares of the park turned into wasteland, officials closed the park for a few weeks. But on my initial trip down south, we visited a family in Hambantota known to Gnanaweera Thero and our host, Ranjith, took us to there. Ranjith and his brother-in-law are park employees and had just driven their jeep up a hill when they heard the roar of water. Horrified, they watched as the gigantic wave swept up vehicles into the air. When it subsided, the two men hurried to join rescue efforts.
Going to Yala opened my eyes to an important aspect of disasters that gets little attention in the media or in published accounts: the psychological trauma rescue workers and relief providers suffer as a result of their heroic efforts. Japan too is now beginning to realize this fact and a few months after the catastrophe, Japanese psychologists began to provide counseling sessions for volunteers from Tokyo before they left to help tsunami survivors. [39]
In any disaster, rescue workers’ primary mission is to save lives. Every time a victim is found alive, it gives them a huge boost of hope, helping to sustain them through the arduous work. But as Ranjith described their rescue efforts, it was clear that the success rate depends not only on how fast rescue workers reach the victims, and whether they have the necessary tools and machinery, but also on the nature of the disaster, the victims’ conditions when rescued, and whether first responders possess the necessary skills to do the job. Ranjith said the majority of the people they pulled out of the jungle were already dead. “Some people were impaled in trees, or entangled in thorns and bushes by their clothes and their hair. Others were stuck in the mud. Some had sand and bits and pieces of stuff in their eyes, ears, noses, mouths….” After a moment’s silence he said, “Some people were writhing and squirming when we pulled them out but we did not know how to give them first aid, and we had to go on rescuing people, so they died.”
Ranjith also recalled that almost immediately after they took the bodies out of the water, many became black and bloated, eyes turned blue and bulged out, and that when they touched the bodies the skin just came off. His wife said he now has trouble sleeping and someone asked if he was scared at the time. “No, I never thought of anything except that we had to get these people out of the water as quickly as possible. It is now that the whole thing is sinking in. When I see rocks and tree stumps and things, I remember the water rushing in, carrying all those people….” His voice trailed off. His eyes were full.
We drove over to where the Yala Safari Game Lodge once stood. All that was left of what was a sprawling eighty-room structure was the swimming pool and a pillar. I spied a boat lodged in a tree in the far distance and was just raising my camera when a man came by. I asked if he knew anything about the fate of the people who were in the hotel when the waves slammed into it. “A couple who worked in the hotel was on a tree embracing each other, both were dead,” he said. This man works for the Wildlife Department, but escaped the deluge because he works in the front office located inland. We walked among the ruins as we talked and I saw a faded, gold-colored curtain of expensive brocade lying on the ground. It must have once adorned a window of the hotel.
“How do you feel when you see all this? Do you feel scared to work here now?” I asked. “I don’t feel scared. I only feel this indescribable sadness,” he said. “This hotel was built according to a proper architectural plan; it was not put up according to somebody’s whim. Not even an atom bomb would create this much destruction!” he said in anguish. “People had got battered by rocks, trees, hotel furniture, vehicles, that came in the waves. Many were bleeding from the nose and mouth. Some had black streaks across their bodies as if they were electrocuted. Some did not have even one piece of clothing on their body. Whoever we found, we put in our jeeps and private vehicles and sent to hospital….For two days we did not eat one meal, and we didn’t even realize it. Our only experience was this immense sadness. All we wanted to do was to save anyone who was alive. Saving even one life became the most important thing.” He bowed his head.
According to scientists, the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake released energy equivalent to a 100-gigaton bomb – about as much energy as is used in the United States in six months. [40]
I asked the Wing Commander about the condition of the corpses he saw. “I cannot remember,” he said. “There were so many bodies! I looked at them and then shut my emotions off because I had so much to do.” But this father of two young children said he was particularly moved by the bodies of small children. His own family was visiting him in Hambantota when the disaster stuck, and he sent them back to Colombo the next day. I asked his wife what she saw on their way back and she shuddered involuntarily. “It is not easy to talk of what we saw that day. There were hundreds of bodies….People were pulling them out from under slabs of walls, broken homes and furniture, mangled vehicles….One body we saw on top of a tree was completely white. Everybody who was helping to recover them seemed to be in a hurry, but they looked really fearful and in shock. They did not look normal somehow.”
An Inspector of the Galle Police told me that some corpses turned white because the sea water eroded the top layer of skin. Most Sri Lankans vary in complexion from shades of brown to fair, and he said the white skin made it quite difficult for them to determine if the dead person was a Sri Lankan or a foreign tourist. When the Inspector gave me two CDs with photos of over 900 corpses, I realized just how traumatic it must have been for rescuers and relief workers to deal with the corpses. Some were fully white while others had the brown top layer of the skin still intact in various parts of the body. Still others were fully or partially black. The Inspector said they photographed the bodies after cleaning them, and someone had covered with pieces of cloth or paper the genitals of those who died without a shred of clothing. But without adequate time or resources to prepare bodies as undertakers normally do, many pictures showed the blood, frothy saliva or phlegm that streamed out of their mouths, noses, and ears. Some looked frightening because they were so bloated, bruised, and disfigured. What disturbed me most were the expressions on the faces of the dead. Some looked really angry as they fought the sea to the end. Others looked terribly sad, perhaps knowing they could never return home. Only a handful looked as if they had a normal, peaceful death. Perhaps knowing they could not overcome the horrific nature of their tragic end, they succumbed to it. For death is normal, and to die in dignity and peace is the wish of most humans. But for the thousands who died in the tsunami, that dignity and peace were denied.
***
Anthropologists Anthony Oliver Smith and Susanna Hoffman say that hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, ice burgs and other such forces are ‘natural hazards’ and not disasters in and of themselves. They say it is we humans who transform them into complex disasters as we change, mold, and force our natural surroundings to suit our needs and desires. The foregoing analysis showed they are right: it was maladaptive strategies by humans that made the Tohoku region of Japan and Sri Lanka’s southern coastal zone so vulnerable to a disaster waiting to happen. Some occurred because of population increase and many people were unaware of consequences of their activities, or miscalculated the risks. But most were largely driven by a utilitarian view of nature and ambitions for wealth and power on the part of entrepreneurs as well as corrupt politicians and other officials.
In their Preface to Worldviews and Ecology, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John A. Grim observe that “World religions have been instrumental in formulating views of nature and in creating perspectives on the role of the human in nature.” [41] But if we look at the place of nature in Buddhism that is the foundation of Sri Lankan culture, and also permeated the intellectual, artistic, and social life of Japan for well over a thousand years, we see a religion that goes against a utilitarian view of nature, as does Japan’s indigenous Shinto religion. Rooted in the beliefs of the agricultural people of ancient Japan, natural phenomena is venerated as deities in the Shinto religion, and even today Japanese people maintain shrines dedicated to nature deities and ask for their blessings by performing many traditional rituals.
In the Buddhist cosmology there is no concept of an almighty God who created the world. The Buddha says that this universe is born, sustained, and destroyed naturally in a cyclical process, and that all animate and inanimate things in the universe are constituted of units of atomic particles that are characterized by their abilities to harden and to soften; to flow and to paste; to expand and to contract; and to heat and to cool. According to him, all substances are formed by the mixing of these four principle elements (maha bhutha) to a greater or lesser degree. In other words, they are interconnected and interdependent, and to destroy one or more means destroying the whole; to destroy our environment is to destroy our very existence.
Therefore, although his teachings uphold the view that human beings are superior to all other sentient beings because we have the highest intellect among all such beings, the Buddha’s message was that for the healthy survival of all, humans must live in harmony with the universe, and act responsibly and non-violently towards both sentient beings and insentient things. Buddhism is based on a theory of samsara or rebirth and as explained in the next chapter, not harming other living beings is the first of the Five Precepts that Buddhists undertake to live by. Violating this precept would result in negative consequences in our sojourn through samsara.
So, unlike other major world religions that have moral teachings for human relations and social interaction but not for biocide and genocide, Buddhism is founded on such principles and the teachings are not merely theoretical. In what may be the world’s first environmental laws, the Buddha prohibited fully ordained monks to cut down or set fire to trees, or to pollute them by urinating and spitting on them. [42] Sri Lanka’s ancient monastic complex in Mihintale – where India’s Emperor Ashoka’s son, Arhat Mahinda, introduced the Buddha’s teachings to Sri Lanka’s then king, Devanampiyatissa – was even equipped with lavatories with a purification system to purify urine through sand and charcoal pots before being absorbed into the soil. The process is required by the disciplinary code of the monks for two purposes: for hygiene and to protect the life of creatures living under the earth. [43]
But the teachings were not confined to monks and nuns only. Ancient Sinhala kings and nobility created public parks, planted groves and forests, and designated large areas of land as animal reserves. In The Personality of the Buddha, S.R. Wijayatilake observes they also built hospitals for people and animals, herbiaries, and homes for the aged and the infirm. In World Religions, Geoffrey Parrinder echoes Wijayatilake in his observations of Japan, where, the prince regent, Prince Shotoku (574-621,) who introduced a new constitution based on Buddhism, built temples and established monasteries. “Alongside the monasteries,” says Parrinder, “were the visible signs of Buddhist compassion – dispensaries for people and animals, hostels for the sick, the orphaned or the aged.” [45]
In Sri Lanka, the teachings were also integral to every aspect of the Sinhala villagers’ way of life which revolved around the temple, the village, and the reservoirs supplying water for the rice fields. The fields were surrounded by a belt of residential gardens with fruit trees and vegetables, beyond which were forest lands. Villagers cleared patches of the forest temporarily for chena (slash and burn) cultivation, and they also hunted, grazed cattle, gathered wild fruits and kindling, and obtained timber from the forests. The country’s abundant folk songs, stories, poetry, and proverbs provide ample evidence that living in this ecological and cultural environment, people perceived nature not in utilitarian terms, but as a source of sustenance not only for the body, but also for the mind. In one song for instance, farmers express the pleasure and satisfaction they feel at the sight of the ripened rice paddies, the leaves that provide thatching for their homes, flowers blooming on trees, and the speckle-leafed vines embracing the trees around them. [46]
Thus in the Buddhist worldview, satisfaction and happiness are not dependent on ownership, profit margins, or consumption, but on the satisfaction derived from social service and on a mental state that is free from attachments to material things, a worldview transmitted to children from a young age. A song I learned in my childhood, still popular, when translated means, “In this tree of honey sweet oranges, the branches are hanging low with the ripened fruit. But my younger sister and I need only two, and that is all we will take. For we are not bad children who take more than we need.” [47] Such songs instill in young children the idea that simplicity and non-violence are closely related, and that one need not pillage nature’s bounty to live happily.
As the British economist, E.F. Schumacher observes, in Buddhist economics, people’s needs and wants are maintained at satisfactory levels without jeopardizing the environment; to produce, distribute, and consume more than is needed at a time makes no sense. All this does not mean that the Buddha said people must not acquire wealth or enjoy material happiness; only that one should not be selfish and cleave to, or be attached to wealth because life is in constant flux and change brings dukkha – dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and suffering – and the more attached one is, the more dukkha one experiences. So, the teachings also promote philanthropy and social service and Wijayatilake relates an interesting anecdote that shows how these ideals were woven into the fabric of Japanese culture.
The former principal of Ananda College, a foremost Buddhist school for boys in Sri Lanka, Wijayatilake recalls a speech given by Shiroji Yuki, the then Japanese Ambassador to Sri Lanka, at the annual award ceremony at the school. After illustrating how the Dhamma is woven into the texture of the educational, economic, social, national, and personal life of the Japanese people, the Ambassador had talked about how, during the Nara period, candidates enrolled in the twelve-year training course to become ordained Buddhist priests had to pass an examination in civil engineering by constructing a bridge over the river Uji – the largest river in the Nara region – before they could qualify to sit the higher examination for ordination. Wijayatilake reminds us that Dogen (1200-1253,) the founder of the Soto School of Zen said that installing ferry service, erecting bridges, and promoting industries, are all acts of dana, a fundamental Buddhist concept I discuss in detail in Chapter Four, but generally meaning generous, benevolent, compassionate activities done for the good of others. G. Claiborne says, “So thoroughly integrated into the Japanese psyche have the assumptions and values of Buddhism become that their influence is apparent in every aspect of the lives of the people of modern Japan.” [48] An excellent example of the practice of dana on a global level by the nation today is the country’s consistent generosity to disaster stricken and poor countries around the globe.
So, when, how, and why did a profit-oriented utilitarian view of nature take firm hold of the Sri Lankan and the Japanese psyche as we have seen? To understand, we must look at the unprecedented socio cultural and economic changes brought about by the Enlightenment Movement and the Industrial Revolution in Europe; changes that would transform the societies and cultures of the non-western world with the advent of western colonialism.
David Harvey says that medieval Europeans also saw the earth as a place where nature and humanity coexisted in partnership, both being God’s creations. [49] But as Tu wei-ming, scholar of religion, Chinese history, and philosophy observes, this changed when a model of the universe, based on “the Greek philosophical emphasis on rationality, the biblical image of man having ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’ ” became the new dogma, and scientific and philosophical discourses began perceiving humans as ontologically distinct from nature. [50] Humans, seen as “cultural” rather than “natural,” were said to be endowed with the rights to control and tame nature, conceived and defined as wild and violent. Its taming would enable humans to achieve emancipation and self-realization through maximum benefits in the evolving profit-oriented market economy.
It needs no great imagination to see how the view that humans are the only creatures on earth that God willed for themselves, with minerals, plants, and animals existing for the sake of man, reduces nature to a mere object of consumption. So, European and American colonizers came to the East and other parts of the world with the singular ambition of dominating, controlling, and exploiting the local peoples and their lands for economic gain and enforced wide ranging cultural, political, and socioeconomic changes on the traditional societies. In Sri Lanka, I focus on the British period to show how colonial policies and practices radically changed the people’s traditional views of harmonious human-nature relations.
***
Pre-colonial Sri Lanka was divided into independent principalities ruled by local kings, but one by one, they fell to foreign rulers. When the British defeated the Dutch in 1796, only the Kandyan kingdom, extending from the central highlands up to parts of present day northern and eastern provinces, still remained independent. But in 1815, a traitor enabled the British East India Company to conquer it.
The new rulers signed the “Kandyan Convention” promising to uphold the region’s separate laws and customs. But, following a harshly suppressed rebellion in the region in 1818, the island was declared a Crown colony and the imperial government abolished the separate administration of the Kandyan Provinces, imposed a central government with political control based in Colombo in the southwest coast, and in1832-33, carved the country into five new provinces – North, South, East, West, and Central – with no executive or legislative powers devolved to the provinces. As Bandarage points out, their aims in doing so were both political and economic: to avert the resurgence of Kandyan nationalism by subduing the Kandyan elite who wielded enormous influence over the masses, and to open up the highlands for planting cash crops. [51]
It was the Dutch who started the coffee plantations, but the first large-scale private coffee plantation of 400 acres was started in Gampola in 1825 by the brother of the then British Military Commandant of the Kandy district who obtained the land from the government “for a small amount and a loan of 400 pounds.” [52] In 1840, the rulers legislated the forestland where poor villagers had traditionally had the rights to cultivate their chenas, as Crown land, creating huge numbers of landless peasantry for the first time in Sri Lanka’s history. They also imposed new laws to acquire lands belonging to the Sinhala nobility, and those that had been donated to Buddhist and Hindu temples, for these ventures. A Viennese landscape painter and writer who visited Ceylon (as the country was then known) in mid-1860s, struck by the assaults on the natural environment, wrote the following description of a bungalow of a coffee planter he painted:
The bungalow of Mr. Cruwell, a coffeeplanter in Laymastotte near Happootella-pass, which has been built in a very picturesque situation at the foot of bold crags. One of these is still over grown by the curious network of roots springing from a fig tree, while the remaining pieces of large trees around, prove that a majestic wood has been felled here only a few years ago, where now the coffeeplants hold possession of every patch of available soil, intervening between the large blocks of a fallen cliff, and even finding a place on the very summit of the rocks, yielding their annual tribute to their owner. [53]
When coffee leaves developed a disease in the 1870s, the British started tea plantations, and continued developing coconut, cocoa, and rubber plantations as well.
Besides felling trees for plantations, the British also cut down valuable hardwoods for export for fine furniture, and to build factories, houses and furniture for planters, ‘line rooms’ for workers, barrels for the coffee industry, packing boxes for tea. Along the coast they cut miles-long swaths of mangroves and other vegetation for coconut plantations, and to build the road and rail systems connecting the various areas of the country with Colombo. The colonizers also earned enormous profits from environmentally destructive industries of graphite mining and lumbering, and from arrack (alcohol distilled from coconuts) sales.
The impact of colonial rule on Sri Lanka’s natural environment can be gauged by the fact that by the time the country gained independence in 1948, 80 percent of the land that was covered by tropical forests when colonial rulers came to the island had been clear-cut to 50 percent. [54] The British alone had sold some 728450 hectares at give-away prices to European speculators, adventurers, and fortune hunters, [55] and by 1948, tea, rubber, and coconut, which became the country’s principal exports in the first half of the twentieth century, were generating over 90 percent of export proceeds.
But the British could not have succeeded in their various economic ventures without the collusion of the local people; there simply were not enough European workers to carry out the arduous labor needed in the above businesses. To combat the labor problem, the rulers employed three strategies: they disrupted the traditional social system based on caste and kinship and created a new class based social hierarchy; devised various strategies to break the close bond between the monks and the people; and started a new educational system in English to spread their value system. A brief overview of the impact of these strategies helps us to see how they laid the foundation for the tsunami disaster by radically changing the traditional society and culture.
Sri Lanka acquired the caste system from India along with other cultural influences, but caste rules among Sinhala Buddhists are relatively mild. Among the Sinhalese there are neither Brahmins nor Untouchables because Buddhism does not subscribe to the religious rationale and sacred sanctions of Hinduism. The highest among Sinhala castes are farmers (goyigama caste) and in traditional times they made up over half the population. But like in India, each caste is made up of subcastes and the goyigama landowners who headed the system wielded enormous power over goyigama subcastes and the lower castes – drummers, washermen, fishermen, and cinnamon peelers, among others. Back then, although the various castes fulfilled particular economic roles in society, almost all low caste people also worked the land and performed their caste duties on a ritualistic basis. [56] Still, the ascribed caste status did not allow them upward mobility, and by creating a class system and rewarding low castes with land grants and titles, the British gained huge numbers of loyal groups and workers to work in the plantations.
The second strategy the British employed, reducing the authority of monks and breaking up the close bond between them and the people, was necessary because as Walpola Rahula Thero documents in The Heritage of the Bhikku, monks were de facto community leaders. In addition to being the spiritual guides, they also provided formal education, transmitting the traditional culture to sons of kings and peasants alike free of charge, helped whoever turned to them in times of need, and allowed the poor to cultivate temple landholdings to feed their families. Most importantly, they also organized resistance movements against the colonizers. [57]
Opening English schools of course ensured that the new ideology would be widely transmitted to the locals. But unlike in the temple-run schools, educational standards in the British-run schools varied hugely. In Modern Sri Lanka: A Society in Transition. Tissa Perera and Robert N. Kearney note that particularly after schools were privatized in 1880 the ‘higher social class,’ consisting of Europeans and Europeanized Ceylonese who attended school in Colombo and in Jaffna, were given a superior education that prepared them for professional careers of higher lever employment in government service. The ‘middle class’ was educated to serve the lower grades of government service, and to work in business enterprises. The poorer sections of the community were given a basic education needed for clerical and other minor white-collar jobs. For the rural masses who could not migrate to towns where schools were located, the British opened vernacular schools only in 1947 – a year before independence – and they got no knowledge of English whatsoever. [58]
The degree to which the colonizers succeeded in changing the traditional human-nature relations and their cultural values through these processes is documented by Kumari Jayawardena in Nobodies to Somebodies: The Rise of the Colonial Bourgeoisie in Sri Lanka. She writes that the goyigama landowners, the ‘Somebodies’ in traditional society, who had acquired land through purchase or service to colonial regimes, converted them into growing plantation produce for the market. The ‘Nobodies’ – goyigama subcastes and lower castes who became ‘Somebodies’ in the new social structure, also derived their wealth from plantations, and/or through graphite mining, arrack renting, and by becoming successful planters and businessmen. The cultural and psychological transformation of this new Bourgeoisie class, many of who were Christian converts, was so complete say Perera and Kearney, they spoke English at home, adopted western dress, and imitated western living styles and behaviors.
The wide chasm the British created between the English educated urbanites and the rural masses was highlighted in 1945 by J.R. Jayawardene, a future president of Sri Lanka, in a speech to the state Council. “Our educational structure is divided into two types of educational institutions; some institutions giving instruction through the mother tongue, and the other institutions giving instruction through English. This particular defect has created, to my mind, two different nations….I think this has been one of the worst features of British rule introduced into this country” he said. [59]
Ironically though, Jayawardene himself was a product of the westernization process. It was he who liberalized the economy in 1977 on the advice of the World Bank and the IMF, organizations that Malcolm Crick, an anthropologist and researcher of Sri Lanka’s tourist industry observes, “….are seldom neutral; their functions is often to foster the development of tourism and other activities, not to raise fundamental questions about whether such developments might be beneficial for a particular country or not.” [60] So, as shown above, the development route they advocated, which continued the colonial legacy of environmental devastation for monetary gain, contributed heavily to making the southern coast extremely vulnerable to the tsunami.
***
While Sri Lanka’s location along the ancient Silk Route, its famed spices, and the strategic position in the Indian Ocean attracted foreign traders and European conquerors, the Japanese archipelago’s remote location protected its people from successful foreign invasions, and for a time, enabled the country to resist western encroachment. However, as shown by W. G. Beasley in The Rise Modern Japan: Political, Economic, and Social Change Since 1850 [61] and by Lucien Ellington in Japan, [62] with the arrival of Portuguese traders off southern Kyushu in 1543, this history changed forever and set the country on the path that would ultimately bring it to the nuclear disaster. We will trace these developments beginning with the Tokugawa period (1600-1868.)
The Tokugawa shogunate brought peace and stability to the country after long years of civil war. With political stability came a rapid rise in population and land under cultivation, resulting in increased agricultural production, which in turn stimulated domestic commerce and urbanization. Osaka became the centre for the commercial and financial aspects of the system, and Edo – later renamed Tokyo – a huge consumer market. This period also gave rise to about 250 smaller cities, with road and shipping routes linking the two great cities with each other and the rest of the country. A national market in some commodities emerged and villagers in various parts of the country shifted from subsistence farming to producing cash crops, and some products such as silk, cotton, and sugar, became regional specialties. Farmers in the countryside of the more advanced regions were operating in a money economy. This period produced a considerable number of people with expertise in finance and commerce, and a small but widely distributed accumulation of capital among commoners.
So, as Beasley observes, Tokugawa rule gave rise to an embryonic capitalism that is the prerequisite for western-style industrial growth, and with the arrival of the Portuguese, the county also acquired western ideas and technological know-how, including advanced fire power. The new knowledge existed largely among the ruling class only, but a basic level of literacy among a good proportion of the population facilitated the circulation of information and ideas.
But all these developments led to fears among Tokugawa rulers of dissident alliances with western military forces, and ‘corruption’ by Christian conversions, and they established a policy of sakoku (closed country). However, recognizing that to meet the challenges presented by the foreigners they needed to build up national strength, the government continued trade relations with the Chinese, Koreans, and the Dutch throughout the 17th century, and also sent envoys abroad to learn from the west, subjects including military science, navigation, ship-building, medicine, law, and education.
Despite these efforts, the lack of frequent western contact caused Japan to stagnate especially in science and technology, and particularly after Britain’s Opium War with China in 1840, which opened Chinese ports to foreign trade as far north as the Yangtze, western imperial powers were irritated by Japan’s seclusion policies. When, with an increasing numbers of merchant ships and sizes of naval squadrons guarding Chinese ports, the powers in the region – Britain, France, Russia, and the US – acquired the means to intervene in Japan, the US, fast becoming a Pacific Power, started the process. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry and the US Navy arrived in Tokyo Bay and the following year he forced Japan into signing the first Unequal Treaty. It opened Shimoda and Hakodate as ports of call where American ships could obtain stores from Japanese officials, authorized the appointment of consuls at a later date, and made no unambiguous provision for trade. Other nations quickly followed with their own treaties and the weakened Tokugawa government fell in 1868.
In the Meiji period that followed (1868-1912), to cope with world capitalism, resist western imperialist ambitions, and get the unequal treaties revised, the Meiji leaders began an all-encompassing program to modernize the country. Every aspect of the western culture – philosophy, political institutions, law and judicial practice, tax system, science and industry, armed forces, patterns of behavior, music, food, clothing, the arts – had to be learned. Knowledge was acquired by sending representatives to America, England, France, Germany, and other countries to study their constitutions and laws; finance, trade, industry and communications; and educational systems; by hiring foreigners to serve as teachers and technical advisers until Japanese workers became competent in the various fields; and through Japanese students whose families sent them overseas for studies. The information was disseminated to the nation through a growing range of translations, books about the west, and articles in newspapers and magazines.
The threat of colonial or semi-colonial dependency also led to the government equipping the country with armed forces, the high cost of which put fiscal policy at the heart of government concerns. Consequently, the government sold the factories, mines, and ship yards it owned to private enterprises, helped establish new factories making glass, cement, matches, paper and other products, and encouraged the sale of rice, raw silk, and copper to foreign countries. It also established a western style postal system, a national currency and banking system, and modern communication and transportation infrastructures by building railroad and telegraph systems. To create an educated workforce, and to promote loyalty and patriotism, a national education system was established in 1872.
By the late 1880s and early 1890s, profits from tea and silk exports brought capital for imports of equipment and raw materials for heavy industries including coal mining, steelworks, and ship building, which had increased following the Sino-Japanese war of 1894. Though agriculture continued to dominate the economy for many more years, the foundation for a modern industrial economy was now established.
The modernization process, initiated to repel western colonial aggression, succeeded in achieving that goal. Japan was never colonized; indeed, the country became so strong militarily and economically by the 1890s, she asserted her independence, ended the unequal treaties, and went on to become an imperialist power herself, colonizing Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, and China. These colonies yielded raw materials for increased industrial growth and opportunities for government bureaucrats and private company employees to gain experience in joint economic planning and successful foreign investment. [63]
World War I saw Japanese exports quadruple with a steady growth in ship building, iron, and steel works. Even during the world depression of the 1930s, Japan’s manufacturing sector grew and by 1937, the country possessed the world’s largest marine fleet. That year, the large military buildup also led to the heavy industrial production sector surpassing light industry in value. [64] But the country’s great economic and political strides came to halt when it was defeated by the Allied Powers in the Second World War. For the first time in history, Japan fell under foreign occupation when America occupied it from 1945 to 1952.
The war caused widespread destruction of homes, shops, and industrial plants and left millions of Japanese people unemployed. In 1945, the rice crop was only two-thirds of the norm, the annual coal production was reduced to a million tons, and there was rapid inflation. But the country retained the vast amount of knowledge and experience gained in industrial production, management-labor relations, and government and business economic development. The war had also raised the level of technology and production capacity in heavy industry and among the unemployed, there was a pool of skilled labor to be steered towards new tasks.
Postwar, Japan used these advantages to again regenerate Japanese industries. Along with American help for economic self-reliance for Japan after 1948, and with the establishment of the Economic Stabilization Board and the Ministry of International Industry, and the Development Bank providing low-interest funds for industrial investment and tax reforms in the form of investment allowances and other measures to regenerate Japanese industries, the country became an ‘economic miracle’ from mid-1950s to early 1970s.
But when war broke out in the Middle East in 1973, Japan’s identity as a technological and economic giant was threatened. The country is not endowed with a great variety and amounts of natural energy resources needed to sustain its high energy demand. It imports most of the natural gas, which accounts for about 13 percent of the energy needs as liquid natural gas from Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Australia, and elsewhere [65] and about 80 percent of oil, which accounts for about half of the country’s energy consumption, from the Middle East. But when the war started there, Arabs invoked ‘oil sanctions,’ quadrupling the price of Japan’s largest single import item. This hefty price increase, along with increasing demand for oil by the emerging economies of China and India, in addition to that of North America, steered the Japanese government towards nuclear power.
It partnered with TEPCO to build up the nuclear industry to meet the country’s energy demands and the company began operating its first facility, the Fukushima Daiichi plant, in 1971. The Fukushima Daini plant was in operation by 1982. At the time of the tsunami Japan had 54 operational nuclear facilities and obtained over 25 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. TEPCO owned 17 of the facilities. By 2011, nuclear energy accounted for approximately 40 percent of the company’s total electricity output, [66] and 10 of the reactors were located in the Fukushima Prefecture. Following the meltdown, both plants in the Fukushima Prefecture are slated to be decommissioned, a process estimated to take another 40 years.
Although Japan had begun the process towards industrialization and becoming a modern economy during the Tokugawa period, whether it would have gone on to become the industrial giant as fast as did if not for the colonial threat is an interesting question, but no one can answer it. What we do know is that the western aggression catapulted the country into modernity, and that the process intersected with the country’s geodynamics and various people’s self interest to steer it towards the nuclear accident. Now, like the country’s tsunami survivors, thousands of families evacuated due to the nuclear crisis must rebuild their lives elsewhere.
Mass displacement of people demands that their basic needs for food, water, clothing, shelter, medical care, must be met immediately, and for how long the situation will continue, nobody knows. Even when countries are prepared to deal with such situations, the nature and scale of disasters may prevent relief providers from reaching all those in need for days, or make it impossible for relief work to continue. When countries are completely unprepared to deal with complex disasters, or when the capital city and a country’s administrative infrastructure collapses, the challenge of relief provision, even for large and long-established global relief agencies, can be overwhelming. But relief provision in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami in both Sri Lanka and Japan show that with proper leadership and networks of relations, the situation can be managed without allowing it to morph into other disasters, as happened in earthquake stricken Haiti in 2010, as shown in the next chapter.
“Venerable” is an honorific prefix used for Buddhist monks, like ‘Reverend’ for Christian priests.
Abeyawardana, H.A.P. Heritage of Ruhuna: Major natural, cutlrual, and historic sites. Matara: Ruhuna Development Bank, 2001.
Bandara, Herath Madana. Tourism Planning In Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka: Stamford Lake (Pvt) Ltd. 2003.
Although Sinhala people are predominantly Buddhist, most also respect Hindu deities for their various powers. ‘Kataragama deviyo’ as we call the god, is perhaps the most popular among them. According to Hindu mythology he is Lord Shiva’s second son, and in south India, he is known variously as Lord Murugan, Kartikaya, or Skanda.
Bandarage, Asoka. The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka: Terroristm, ethnicity, political economy. UK: Routledge, 2009.
ibid.
See “Looking for silver linings in a dark cloud” (Kalu walawe ridi rekha seveema) in Dinamina. March 30, 2005.
“Quirky rail line fights to get back on track” in Financial Times, June 29, 2011.
“Deed tsunami hits Surveyor General’s Dept.” The Sunday Leader. January 30, 2005.
BBC (Internet) News. ‘Scant help’ for tsunami victims. Retrieved on March 3, 2010. See also Wave of Destruction: The Stories of Four Families and History’s Deadliest Tsunami by Erich Krauss. U.S.A.: Rodale Inc, 2006.
Paper entitled “Reconstruction for Japan’s Tohoku Region” by Tony Waller. The Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation. July 5, 2011.
Financial Times. “Defeat natural disasters with high-tech and old wisdom.” December 6, 2011.
This Act defines the coastal zone as “the area lying within a limit of three hundred meters landwards of the Mean High Water line and a limit of two kilometers seawards of the Mean Low Water line.” In the case of rivers, streams, lagoons, or any other body of water connected to the sea either permanently or periodically, the Act says the landward boundary shall extend to a limit of two kilometers measured perpendicular to the straight base line drawn between the natural entrance points thereof.
The CCD was authorized to survey the Coastal Zone; prepare a Coastal Zone Management Plan; regulate and control development activities within the Coastal Zone; provide for the formulation and execution of schemes of work for coast conservation within the Coastal Zone; make consequential amendments to certain written laws; and provide for related matters connected to the Coastal Zone.
Kalinga Tudor Silva and Siri Hettige. “Multiculturalism and Nationalism in a Globalising World: The Case of Sri Lanka” in Post-War Reconstruction in Sri Lanka: Prospects and Challenges, edited by Dhammika Herath et al. Sri Lanka: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2010.
Bandarage, Asoka. The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka: Terrorism, ethnicity, political economy. UK: Routledge, 2009.
See Internet article, “Impact of Fishers on Coral Reef Habitats in Sri Lanka.” Arjan Rajasuriya.
Perera, Jayantha. New Dimensions of Social Stratification in Rural Sri Lanka. Colombo: Lake House Investments Ltd., 1985.
“Green Construction of tsunami-shattered coasts can limit disasters – WWF”. The Island. January 11, 2005.
“Tokyo cool has swayed Japan for too long.” Financial Times, April 6, 2011.
“Nuclear frictions,” Financial Times editorial, March 21, 2011.
Ibid.
“Poor left to fend as more affluent fled: Disaster Plans never included transportation.” San Jose Mercury News, September 4, 2005.
“China had quake warnings.” San Jose Mercury News, June 5, 2008.
“Tokyo cool has swayed Japan for too long.” Financial Times. April 6, 2011.
“Japanese nuclear plant still ‘fragile’ officials say.” Financial Times. February 29, 2010.
Nuclear frictions." Financial Times editorial March 21, 2011.
“My findings in the existential fallout from Fukushima.” Financial Times, March 10/11, 20112.
Jirasinghe, Ramya Chamalie. The Rhythm of the Sea.. Sri Lanka: Hambantota District Chamber of Commerce, 2007.
Hall, Peter. Great Planning Disasters. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1980.
De Silva, R.K. Early Prints of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 1800-1900. London: Serendib Publications, 1980.
Shiva, Vandana. “The Myths of Globalization Exposed: Advancing Toward Living Democracy” in Worlds Apart: Globalization and the Environment edited by James Gustave Speth.
See “Still beautiful after the tsunami.” Mirror Life, April 4, 2005.
Laing, Craig R. (2007.) cf. Japan by Lucien Ellington. California: A B C Clio, 2009.
Wikipedia. Retrieved on Oct. 29, 2010.
NHK World. Story aired on September 15, 2011.
Miyazawa, Hitoshi. “Land Use and Tsunami Damage in Pacific Coast Region of Tohoku District” in The 2011 East Japan Earthquake Bulletin of the Tohoku Geographical Association.” Retrieved on September 25, 2011.
“Tokyo cool has swayed Japan for too long.” Financial Times. April 6, 2011.
NHK
Science, May 2005.
Tucker, Mary Evelyn and John A. Grim, eds. Worldviews & Ecology: Religion, Philosophy, and the Environment. New York: Orbis Books, 1994.
The Buddha’s teachings about environmental preservation and conservation is contained in the Vinaya or disciplinary rules for monks, and in many other discourses such as Vanaropa Suttta. Thera gatha and Theri gatha, compositions of monks and nuns ordained by the Buddha himself, also contain beautiful verses sung by the disciples about nature.
Seneviratna, Anuradha. The Dawn of a Civilization: Mihintale. Sri Lanka: The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd. 1993.
Wijayatilake, S. R. The Personality of the Buddha. Colombo: M.D. Gunasena & Co. Ltd., 1970.
Parrinder, Geoffrey. World Religions: From Ancient History to the Present. U.K. The Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1971.
The Central Cultural Fund and the Ministry of Cultural and Religious Affairs. Our Cultural Heritage (Ape Sanskrutika Urumaya.) Sri Lanka: 1995.
Me gase boho/penidodam thibe/pehila idila bimata nevila/bara wela athu. Nangitai matai/ gedi dekaka ethi/wediya kadana naraka lamai/Ema nowe api.
Ibid.
Harvey, David. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference.. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996.
Tucker, Mary Evelyn and John A. Grim, eds. Worldviews & Ecology: Religion, Philosophy, and the Environment. New York: Orbis Books, 1994.
Bandarage, Asoka. The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka: Terrorism, ethnicity, political economy. UK: Routledge, 2009.
Jayawardena, Kumari. Nobodies to Somebodies: The Rise of the Colonial Bourgeoisie in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka: Social Scientists’ Association and Sanjiva Books, 2007.
De Silva, R.K. Early Prints of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 1800-1900. London: Serendib Publications, 1980.
Ross, Sri Lanka: A Country Study. Internet version retrieved on Mar.6, 2010.
Natural Resources of Sri Lanka 2000. Colombo, National Science Foundation, 2000.
Fernando, Tissa and Robert N. Kearney. Modern Sri Lanka: A Society in Transition. New York: Syracuse University, 1979.
Walpola Rahula. The Heritage of the Bhikku: A Short History of the Bhikkhu in Educational, Cultural, Social, and Political Life. New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1974.
cf Tissa Fernando and Robert N. Kearney in Modern Sri Lanka: A Society in Transition. New York: Syracuse University, 1979.
Ibid.
Beasley, W.G. The Rise of Modern Japan: Political, Economic, and Social Change Since 1850. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Ellington, Lucien. Japan. California: A B C Clio, 2009.
Tames, Richard. A Traveller’s history of Japan. New York: Interlink Books, 2002.
Ibid.
Karan, Pradyumna (2005.) cf. Japan by Lucien Ellington. California: A B C Clio, 2009.
www.Tepco.com Retrieved on September 9, 2011.