Tourism in Japan has taken a severe blow since the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck on March 11, 2011, killing over 20,000 people [GALLO/GETTY]Toyko - Six months after the earth beneath their feet rumbled and the sea reached inland, wiping out entire neighbourhoods, the Japanese are doing what they do as a matter of cultural pride: They're persevering.
In the densely populated capital - hundreds of kilometres from the damaged Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima - life has returned to its regular rhythm, though perhaps only superficially so. The store shelves, left bare in the days following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, are full, and gone is the ghost-town feeling that gripped the city as fears of radiation exposure spread as fast as news of the meltdown itself.
But the triple disaster has left its mark in the form of fears of another major earthquake, radiation contamination and worries about a looming energy crisis.
These things weigh on the minds of locals and have kept foreigners away from the country, which adds a factor of economic pain into the equation. The constant stream of ganbatte (can-do) messages broadcast over the airwaves and screaming out in posters can't make up for six months of worry.
The Asakusa Kannon Temple, one of the city's grandest tourist and cultural attractions, is usually crammed full of tourists jockeying for the perfect spot to shoot the majestic gates of Tokyo's oldest temple.
But even on the sunniest days during what ought to be high season for visitors, the temple is hardly bustling, with most of its few visitors being Japanese.
Joseph Hung and Vivenne Su, from Taiwan, are among the few foreign visitors in the market near the temple.
"We're not worried the radiation will affect us here," said Hung, 26. But then, he's not taking any chances either.
"We will only be in Tokyo and only for five days."
That kind of mindset is bad news in these parts.
Nippon: No-go zone
While more subtle issues linked to fallout from the March 11 disasters linger, probably the most immediate, and obvious one, is the severe decrease in the number of tourists and other types of foreign visitors (such as students) here.
Follow Al Jazeera's coverage of Japan's disasterTourism has dwindled in Japan, where under normal circumstances, hotels could name their fees and anything amounting to a serious discount is generally unheard of.
Now, hotels and tour groups in Tokyo are offering major discounts in the hopes that a good deal will make potential visitors forget about things like earthquakes and leaky nuclear plants. The industry is simultaneously facing the double challenge of trying to offset the Yen's rise against the US dollar.
"Even top-class hotels have reduced their prices," said Yonehara Ryozo, president of the Institute for Japanese Cultural Exchange and Experience, who is among those tasked with getting things back on track.
Indeed, a four-star hotel room in the city's glittering Ginza district can now be had for between $120 - $150 a night, including all taxes. Not convinced? How about free breakfast and a room upgrade? No?
Ryozo figured as much.
He's fresh from a meeting with representatives of the Japan National Tourism Organisation (JNTO) - the umbrella group his organisation belongs to - and they are trying to figure out how to sell tourism in Japan to tourists from the US, Canada and Australia.
According to the JNTO's latest figures, there were 36 per cent fewer tourists visiting Japan in July compared to the same month last year. Data collected from 68 travel agencies in the country indicates that the loss of revenue varies month to month, down as much as 71 per cent some months.
Turning this situation around is a daunting task, especially given that the government has never really had to sell tourism in Japan, a clean, low-crime country with plenty of natural beauty and a fascinating culture. The place hardly needs a sales pitch. Now, the best they can come up with is to focus on promoting Kyoto over Tokyo - it's in the Kansai region, well south of the tsunami-damaged and radiation-contaminated Tohoku region and even the Kanto region, which includes Tokyo. They're also reducing prices for the tours by around 30 per cent. They're willing to try anything, really.
Ryozo said that prior to the earthquake, his organisation had 20 - 25 groups per month (a group can range from 1 - 50) during the winter months, and just before the earthquake, he had reservations for 40 groups, some stretching out through to September. But after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, they all cancelled.
"After that, nothing," said Ryozo, adding that, one of the groups, he said, rebooked their trip opting for a tour of Kyoto instead. But the other 39 never rebooked.
Even the free trip that he'd arranged for a contingent of Russian travel industry professionals in May was rejected. And the dozens of groups of visiting language students that would ordinarily book tours through Ryozo's organisation have also vaporised. This summer, only three students signed up for the tours.
Currently, visitors booking cultural tours through his group are at 10 per cent of what they were in the previous year. His bookings are sparse - mostly corporate clients looking for fun, cultural activities for their employees to check out after a convention or a training session. But he's not sure it will be enough.
"I'm not optimistic at all."
This isn't going to be what folks like Takaoka Masahiko want to hear. His Senbei rice-cracker stand on Nakamise Street is in a precarious holding pattern. Business for his is about 60 per cent of what it used to be, and he's not sure if he can sustain the stand, which has been there for 100 years.
"This is not normal ... this is my first experience with something like this. I really hope it gets better soon," he said.
Further down the street, Miyasaka Miwa, said her shop wasn't selling half as many Yukatas and kimonos as it did before the earthquake.
"We're not so aggressive with ordering, so even our suppliers and manufacturers are being affected," she said.
Eye on Daiichi
In the days following the initial fires and explosions at the Daiichi plant, operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), mothers in Tokyo snapped up bottled water for their children or they packed up and heading south in an effort to limit their children's exposure to radiation. The initial wave of panic has passed, and life has returned to normal.
However, to those still tracking the situation, troubling questions remain over contamination from the Daiichi site and broader issues of the safety of relying on nuclear power in such a seismically active island nation.
Nuclear contamination is still a concern [EPA]The government has tried to alleviate those concerns by subjecting the country's nuclear plants to additional safety testing, and TEPCO has returned to burning fossil fuels to make up for the energy shortage following the meltdown.
Hideyuki Ban, co-director and secretary general of the Citizens' Nuclear Information Centre (CNIC) worries that the urgency of dealing with the dangers of nuclear power will fade in public consciousness as time places distance between the present and the meltdown at Daiichi plant in Fukushima.
His group is maintaining an online campaign as well as organising protests to keep the issue alive, aiming to collect 10 million signatures during its "Sayonara Nukes" protests, a series of marches around the country starting on September 11.
"We now know that what the government was saying - that the nuclear plants are safe - is not true. Maybe there is a slight chance, but there are more than 50 nuclear plants all over Japan and we now know that accidents could happen at any one of them," said Ban.
The pro-nuclear campaign maintained for so long by the government, has relaxed somewhat in recent months. "It's a sensitive time now," said Ban, and the multi-billion Yen campaign to sell nuclear power as a clean and safe alternative seems to be on hold. Still, the 41 nuclear plants currently being inspected will resume operations within months.
This is something anti-nuclear activists are hoping to avoid. They want to keep the plants shut down for at least another year. Long term, the CNIC, which has been operating since 1975, aims to move Japan away from nuclear power and towards renewable energy, shutting down all 54 nuclear power plants.
"The government should listen to the points made by the minority, because the possibility of a tsunami and earthquake had been known by the government's own researchers, and TEPCO knew about it, but they have done nothing," Ban said, referring to what the nuclear industry calls the "unforeseeable" theory (how can they prevent an accident that couldn't be predicted?).
"In the next few years, it's clear that we will see impact on children from the radiation - this is very serious. Like Chernobyl, the government will not admit the connection between illnesses and Fukushima," said Ban.
So even though the estimated death toll for the earthquake and tsunami hover somewhere around the 20,000 mark - including those who are still technically "missing" - there's a chance that the nuclear meltdown will make the March 11 disaster an even deadlier one, with a slowly unfolding rate of casualties.
But what to do about it at this point?
Given that expanding the evacuation zone beyond the current 20 km radius to the more ideal 60 - 80 km away from the leaking plant is nearly impossible as it would involve moving nearly 1.5 million people, there's only one thing left to do: Keep a watchful eye on the situation. It's telling that he's not counting on the authorities to do so.
"Over the next few years, the media should keep chasing the story," said Ban.
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REUTERSA car drives past piles of wrecked vehicles, destroyed by the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, in Rikuzentakata.Yoko Kubota & Rie Ishiguro YAMADAMACHI: Sakari Minato has fixed up his house just enough for his family to move back in. The walls still have holes, the windows are temporarily sealed. You can still see the water marks on the outside of the home left by the March 11 tsunami that roared into this north-eastern coastal fishing town at the speed of a freight train and bulldozed everything in its path. Minato doesn't know whether to spend the $100 000 needed to completely restore the house or move the family to higher ground away from the ocean. He still doesn't know whether the government will declare his part of town by the coast an uninhabitable tsunami zone. Five months after Japan's worst disaster in generations left more than 20 000 dead or missing, entire communities along the country's north-eastern coast face a similar dilemma. They have cleaned up much of the rubble and mud, fixed up roads and restored power. Tokyo and local governments, however, have yet to come up with detailed plans and money needed to start the actual rebuilding. Every day of delay brings more agony for hundreds of thousands of survivors who cannot move on with their lives and makes it increasingly unlikely the economy will get a powerful jolt from the rebuilding effort any time soon. “Even if I get the house fixed, it could be the case that the national government ends up buying this area in two years because it's a tsunami-flooded district,” said Minato, a 48-year-old auto dealer. “So we stopped fixing the house for now since it's good enough to live in.” His family barely escaped the deadly waves and a fire that wiped out most houses in his neighbourhood in Yamadamachi, a fishing town about 470km north-east of Tokyo that lost nearly 800 of its 19 400 residents. When the disaster struck on March 11 government planners, economists and aid agencies looked back 16 years when a magnitude 7.3 earthquake hit Kobe killing 6 400. The conclusion was that the triple blow of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, a tsunami that reached heights of 15m, and a nuclear plant meltdown crisis, eclipsed anything Japan had experienced in the past half century. Yet Tokyo was expected to crank out a hefty emergency budget by August, allowing rebuilding to start in earnest in the second half of the year. Even as that timetable slipped, the government remained optimistic that reconstruction would kick in by the final quarter of this year. Today this looks like wishful thinking and reasons can be found both on Japan's north-eastern Pacific coast and in Kasumigaseki, Tokyo's government district. “Reconstruction would be a big boost to the economy … But full-fledged rebuilding may need to wait until next year,” said Takashi Onishi, professor of city and regional planning at the University of Tokyo. Onishi sat on the government's advisory panel on reconstruction and is helping the fishing towns of Kamaishi and Kesennuma in their reconstruction planning. Japan's steel industry initially counted on reconstruction to boost demand by 3-4 million tons over the next three years, but analysts have slashed their forecasts for next year and beyond by as much as half. About half of the estimated 22.6 million tons of rubble the tsunami left behind has been cleared and the government aims to remove most of the debris from residential areas by the end of this month. But out of nearly half a million people displaced by the disaster, 84 000 remain in evacuation centres, temporary housing or with relatives or friends. They will not move on until local authorities decide what they want to rebuild and what to move out of the danger zone. Once that is decided, Tokyo will draw up a national plan and allocate funds. “How much will the government help? Or big firms and reconstruction funds? We are reliant on them and the question is where is the money,” said Katsutoshi Tomiyama, 70. His jazz café in the picturesque fishing town of Rikuzentakata was swept away and he hopes to reopen it in neighbouring Ofunato, where he lives in temporary housing. Officials in Tokyo point the finger up north and vent their frustration with how slowly requests from local communities are trickling in. Some local officials admit they are overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. “Honestly speaking, this is the first experience for us as well and we are now fumbling our way to figure out what and how to move forward,” said one official at a coastal town in Iwate prefecture. The town hopes to have a final reconstruction plan ready by the end of the year. Similarly in Rikuzentakata, where nearly 1 800 of its 24 250 residents are dead or still missing, officials aim to prepare a plan in November hoping to get money from the regular budget for the next fiscal year starting in April 2012 rather than this year's emergency allotments. That means that the bulk of the spending may be pushed back well into next year. “The national government has revealed a basic plan, but the details are not out yet,” city official Takeo Banno said. The relocation of homes to safe areas, which is one of the focal points of the rebuilding, could take several years. “In three to five years, large-scale relocation of houses is likely to make headway,” says Shogo Tsugawa, a senior government official in charge of rebuilding of Iwate prefecture. To be fair, those dealing with the aftermath of March 11 face a task like none before and Prime Minister Naoto Kan was not exaggerating when he said Japan faced its biggest crisis since World War Two. Rebuilding what was damaged the way it was done after Kobe is not an option. Even before the disaster struck the Tohoku region was in trouble. Its fragmented fishing industry was struggling to stay afloat, agriculture dominated by small-plot farmers well past retirement age and its working population was shrinking at the fastest rate in all of ageing Japan, having fallen more than 8 percent in the past 15 years. “We need to avoid just doing the recovery job to pre-quake conditions,” said Ryutaro Kono, chief economist at BNP Paribas, who sat on the reconstruction panel. Among the proposals are consolidating the fishing business, giving tax breaks for investors and creating special economic zones. They also include relocating homes to more elevated areas and rebuilding ports and other tsunami-ravaged facilities. Aside from the sheer complexity of the challenge is the slow grind of the political process. The deeply unpopular and increasingly isolated Kan has struggled to pull together his divided party and get any sort of cooperation from an openly hostile opposition that controls the upper house of parliament. It took two months to get the first $50 billion batch of emergency spending out and another two to sign off on the next $25 billion installment, both earmarked for the initial relief, clean-up and temporary housing. More than five months after the catastrophe the main spending plan worth up to 13 trillion yen has yet to take shape and no clarity on how it will be financed. With Kan on his way out, it is anyone's guess when the “big budget” will be ready. “Government agencies need to work on the extra budget and next year's budget at the same time but there are limitations in terms of manpower,” one finance ministry official said. In contrast to exasperated residents, financial markets have been sanguine about signs of slippage in the reconstruction timetable. Those who are now rethinking their growth assumptions beyond this quarter are more concerned about the strength of the yen and clouds gathering over the global economy. Some economists say their colleagues may be too complacent and point out that while rebuilding spending will come sooner or later, the timing matters too. Up to now, the base scenario has been that the serious money will start pouring in the final quarter of this year and early in 2012. That would boost sectors such as construction, steel and machinery at a critical time when the global economy may hit a soft patch and the upswing driven by companies restoring supply chains will have run its course. Now the risk is the big rebuilding effort will not come in time to act as a cushion. “Come the winter, seasonal factors may further delay construction projects,” said Hideo Kumano, chief economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute. “From October-December and beyond, the economy is likely to show visible impact from the yen's strength and if there is no lift from reconstruction, the economy's rebound is likely to peter out in the fourth quarter,” Kumano says. While the economy may still get a reprieve if Japan's main export markets recover, those living in the belt of destruction on the coast can only wait or leave. Hiroki Haga, 63, whose newspaper delivery service in the coastal town of Otsuchicho was washed away by the tsunami, says the risk is that young people will pack up and look for work elsewhere. “The basics of how the town should be rebuilt are not ready. Our mayor died. No one can do anything.” - Reuters