Tomorrow it will be March 11th, and at 2:46pm, it’ll be exactly five years since the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown struck Northern Japan. It rattled us here in Central Japan too.
To mark the anniversary, I’m giving away Children of the Tsunami for free for the next five days. (The links are at the bottom of this post).
Back in 2011, I thought the disaster would herald a new age. Perhaps we would figure out a way to live without nuclear power, political corruption and the mass media… but it didn’t happen quite as I’d hoped. The nuke plants are coming back on line, the same party that was in power in the 1950s is still in power today and social media has become as asinine and all-powerful as TV, just more demanding.
Still, there are positives. It is still possible to sneak a few doses of reality through the cracks. Around this time last year I was fortunate to spend time visiting survivors of the tsunami in Ishinomaki, Rikuzentakata and Kesennuma and I wrote up and sketched what I saw. The result is Children of the Tsunami, which I’m making available to download for free from all Amazon sites including Amazon.com, Amazon.co.jp, Amazon.co.uk for the next five days. Enjoy.
Patrick Sherriff 