When you read about something in a book or a newspaper it is written in a way that is easy to understand. Before I came on this trip I thought I understood the impact of dropping the nuclear bomb on Osaka and the massive earthquake that hit in 2011. I was good student in high school and read my history textbook chapter WWII and the dropping of the nuclear bombs. I had seen the bold print on the front of the newspaper alerting my family from the comfort of our home of the destructive earthquake that had just hit Japan. As I am about to leave Japan I now know that my assumption of understanding was impossible and the things I read had oversimplified what the Japanese had experienced for my convenience.
An earthquake is not the earthquake in my textbook, and it is not just an earthquake. I still thought I understood what an earthquake was like when we visited the Disaster Prevention Center in Tokyo. They talked about what we should do if we are ever in an earthquake and we even got to go into an earthquake simulator. As I sat under the table while the platform shook below I waited for the three minutes of computerized tremors to stop. I felt incredibly lucky that I had had time to prepare myself for what was going to happen, and I knew that when they stopped my life would continue unchanged. The Center had taught me that this was the key difference between a real earthquake and the one in my textbook is what happens after. In Japan the earthquake was followed by a tsunami, fires, power outages, and in some cases like Fukushima, homelessness and relocation.
This is the mascot of the Disaster Prevention Center we visited in Tokyo
Back home I didn’t think of the earthquake anymore. For me it was in the past, but its effects are still in the present for Japan. When we visited Fukushima later that week, we passed boarded up houses and buildings, and gas stations covered with overgrown vegetation. No one has lived there for years, and no one will live there for many more while the radiation levels are still to high.
The effects of a nuclear bomb are not the same as the description in my textbook, and it is not just a nuclear bomb explosion. At the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, I had the opportunity to hear and read the stories of people who were in Hiroshima when the United Stated dropped the bomb August 6th, 1945. The museum went forward in time so much further than just the explosion and large mushroom cloud I had known before I came. The stories I heard told of black rain, city wide fires, and years of trauma and discrimination. Even once the city had started to recover there was no treatment known for survivors and many died prematurely of cancer or struggled to work and cover medical expenses.
The Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
It takes me five minutes to read a news article about the latest disaster, while it can take years or generations to fully recover from them. Visiting places effected by these disasters in Japan has taught me more about the true impact these events have on peoples lives. As an aspiring public health professional this trip taught me to consider things more broadly when I think of how to help a community facing a natural or man-made disaster.