The land of rock and roll and meltdown

It is not surprising that Japan is now faced with a nuclear meltdown. As far as we can remember, Japan has always been associated with earthquakes and nuclear issues. It is because of its rocky history that Japan has put into force very stringent building laws that require buildings to be able to withstand earthquakes. And not any ordinary quakes at that! It has to withstand a rocking of eight on the Richter scale. It is also the first country in the world to experience the atomic bomb. Japan is a beautiful country but steeped with natural disasters. Tokyo city, its capital sits on a piece of earth’s crust that is not only unstable, but also moving in various directions underground. There is a probability that it will one day sink in. There is no telling of the kind of disaster that awaits the Japs but if that were to happen, millions of its inhabitants will have to lose their lives. Today, the people of the land of the rising sun have realized that life is so unpredictable but there is nothing they can do. People in Japan know that there are very little resources to be found there. It strangely does not have coal, oil and the essential minerals. Fortunately, it does have a very hard working population. But even that is not enough. Perhaps it is because it knows its limitations; the people look elsewhere to settle down during the Second World War. There was then a need to conquer other countries that has the resources. What happens was history in the making and we all know now, and even the Japanese knows that going invading others' land to make up for the shortfall in their own land is not the answer. Maybe they overdid it and now, there is nothing much to do but to embrace what is to come with dignity and pride. The people who tout the principles of karma would want you to believe that there is indeed a cause and effect thing going on in this world of ours.


Yet, in the after math of the great earthquake at Senda and the ensuing tsunami that follows and the meltdown of a few nuclear reactors, Japan has finally got the sympathy of the rest of the world, even those whom had suffered under the Japanese occupation during the Second World War. There is today a new crisis in nuclear fallout from radiation. This is however self inflicted because they went with a wrong policy of stealing Mother Nature’s energy chest by building multiple nuclear reactors and extracting cheap power. In retrospect, if they had succeeded in colonizing its neighbors during the Second World War, then perhaps we could postulate that many Japanese would be moving out and settling down in these countries and do not have to endure all the rocking and irradiation nonsense that has engulfed Japan today. But as it happened, Japan could still be able to steer herself back to the future by ways that we would consider as unconventional. Whole townships would have to be re-sifted inland, far away from the coast to avoid tsunamis. Buildings would also have to be redesigned to take into consideration of more fuel efficient technologies. Japan has a huge untapped pool of geo-thermal energy in its backyard. They should put their engineers on a fast track basis to help tap this rare resource that other countries don’t have. Yes, there has to be a way to tame all those belching heat under its core to wean Japan from oil. Japan is after all sitting in the rink of fire and they don’t have to look elsewhere to look for energy. Maybe that could be Japan’s contribution to mankind for the next century. Forget about colonization and forget about being an economic giant. Making products for the rest of the poor should be given to other countries who have more human resources!