Naoto Kan

For every immigrant, speaking about his or her home country can be somewhat emotional and personal. For us immigrants,  the experiences of leaving former identities framed in memories of the land, people, smells, tastes, smiles, laughter, tears and other feelings wrapped in the native tongues and rebuilding our own personhoods in foreign words, foreign-scapes, foreign frameworks held together with the values, beliefs and norms of others gives us a special opportunity to see our world dimensionally.

It has been five years since the Fukushima disaster. Many of us have forgotten the press describing millions of gallons of ‘nuclear’ water leaking into the ocean, but nearly 400,000 people who had to be evacuated remember the event vividly. The panic and irresponsibility by TEPCO following the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdowns was unprecedented.
In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Japan’s former Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, stated that the country had come within a “paper-thin margin” of being absolutely devastated.