One of the particular horrors emerging from the aftermath to the tsunami is that the low-lying areas which were hardest hit were the cheapest districts and they had been abandoned to the aged, of whom Japan has more than anywhere else.  They also seem from the pictures to have lived in cheap houses made of wood and paper.

 

Old people are the least able to survive a tsunami. I read in this morning's Times (Tuesday) in an excellent report from their staffer Richard Lloyd Parry that in the town of Minami-Sanriku, the tsunami also engulfed the town hall, which is now "a twisted mass of girders. All local tax records and citizenship lists have been wiped out. The man supposed to back-up the electronic town registers is kicking himself."  said a spokesman for the town office.

 

The upshot is they no longer know who lived there in the first place. "But it's very serious," said the spokesman. "Now we don't even know who the people of this town are." That is creating confusion about the most basic fact of all - the death toll. Minimi-Sanriku can only account for 9,800 of its supposed 17,431 citizens.

 

Further up the coast, the number of missing is approximately 10,000 and similar figures are reported for other towns. Are any of you surprised that the truth is dribbling out piecemeal and in contradictory form, or that the Japanese authorities haven't the faintest idea about what is going on? Or that the Japanese people now trust their government less and less?

What price now the 'Japanese miracle'? It turns out to be a just another corrupt, administratively incompetent Oriental backwater after all. See my posting of yesterday about the BRICs.

 

"Even in towns which have saved or backed up their records, the bureaucratic problem is enormous. Many civil servants were lost in the tsunami. The Minami-Sanriku town hall lists 38 of its 230 staff among the missing."

 

"Surprising numbers of Japanese keep their savings at home in cash." 

Now I wonder why they do that?  "And many have lost family register documents, safes, bank books and crucially, the hanko or name stamps, which take the place of signatures on official documents."

 

"Tomoaki Abe, a headmaster, hopes the bank clerks will give him access to his account because they know his face".

What has this writer been preaching since 1991 about the utter importance of bank managers who know their customers face to face? And that banks which abandon that principle "have forfeited their right to run retail banking." I said as much in an article in Britain and Overseas, the quarterly journal of the Economic Research Council, this time last year.

 

Chris M

London