Japan's earthquake recovery offers hard lessons for Turkey.
TOKYO – Mountains of rubble and twisted metal. Death on an unimaginable scale. Grief. Rage. Relief at having survived.
The combined toll of Monday’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake rose past 20,000 deaths as regional governments announced the discovery of new bodies Thursday. That has already eclipsed the more than 18,400 who died in the disaster in Japan. Japan, for instance, has recognized thousands of other people who died later from stress-related heart attacks, or because of poor living conditions.
Today, while the wreckage of the quake and tsunami has largely been removed and many roads and buildings rebuilt, there are still large areas of empty space, places where buildings haven’t been erected, farms haven’t been replanted. Businesses have spent years trying to reconstruct decimated customer bases.
The long haul of rebuilding has challenged this resolve. The work has been uneven and, at times, painfully slow, hampered by government incompetence, petty squabbling and bureaucratic wrangling. Nearly half a million people were displaced in Japan. Tens of thousands still haven’t returned home. The years since 2011 have seen another failure, one officials in Japan have acknowledged: an inability to help those traumatized by what they experienced.
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