Interview: Red tape, rotating ministers delay reconstruction progress, says Rikuzentakata mayor

Five years on since a devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami destroyed the city of Rikuzentakata in Iwate Prefecture in northeast Japan, the city has not yet recovered from the catastrophe as a large number of reconstruction projects have been delayed forcing residents to move out.

Futoshi Toba, who took office as Rikuzentakata mayor in February 2011, only one month before the disaster, said that only 50 percent of the city has been reconstructed and over 3,000 people are still living in temporary housing as the development of highland for permanent housing facilities has been postponed due to the central government's laborious bureaucratic protocols and procedures.

"There are too many restrictions and procedures in the central government. Even if we want to accelerate the reconstruction projects, we have to wait for the approvals for months or years," Toba complained to Xinhua in a recent interview.

The mayor, who lost his wife in the disaster, recalled when immediately after the tsunami with the city totally destroyed, he applied to set up some temporary shops on farming land on the highland area so as to help supply food and water to the disaster sufferers, but the application was rejected by the central government citing agricultural regulations.

"I think it is ridiculous, the sufferers had no water to drink, no food to eat and were going to die, but the central government was still firmly sticking to the regulations and laws," Toba said, blasting the central government here.

He also mentioned another issue involving soil in the area being largely washed away by high waves and reconstruction projects needing a lot of new soil to fill in the affected land. "We applied to blow up parts of mountains to get the soil we needed, but the application procedures took about three months and some reconstruction work was therefore delayed for about one year," said Toba.

The laws relating to mountain development were actually enacted to prevent the overdeveloping of golf courses, but the government now faces a totally different situation in the disaster-hit region, the mayor said.

He went on to say that officials in Tokyo know nothing about the devastated region and the policies they made are also disconnected from reality. "Officials at the Reconstruction Agency make decisions without holding discussions with us and that sometimes causes delays to urgent projects and some less urgent ones get prioritized."

"Meanwhile, the changes of minister in charge of reconstruction are far too frequent. The ministers have changed five times since the quake jolted the region. This means continually introducing the same issues, but making no progress," said the mayor, complaining that even people who understood the situation couldn't brief the prime minister when he visited the region. "The prime minister was in his own limousine," Toba added.

Toba also expressed his worries about the future of the sufferers and the city. He said due to the delay of highland development, the people who live in temporary housing may have to wait for about another four years to get their new housing land and will have to spend more time to build their new houses.

"The sufferers can't wait any longer, especially for the self-employed, their finances are very stretched now since many people left Rikuzentakata," Toba said, adding that the population in the city has decrease by about 4,000 including those who passed away in the five years since the disaster.

"A number of sufferers in the city are in their 70s and 80s. Is it possible for them to wait another 10 years to return to their homes? In the past five years, to the best of my knowledge, at least 50 disaster sufferers committed suicide or died of growing health issues," said the mayor, "This is the so-called disaster-related death. They hardly died in the disaster, but didn't survive in the post-disaster time."

Rikuzentakata's economy also faces huge challenges due to a lack of manpower. Toba said that the job availability right now in his city stand at about 1.99, meaning two jobs are for one seeker. In other words, this also means that half of all companies cannot get enough employees. "Many enterprises have had to reduce their production or cancel their orders."

Toba said that a lot of problems popped up in the five-year intensive reconstruction period and he hopes that the central government will reflect on the issue and stop changing the reconstruction minister so as to compose a long-term revitalization strategy for the Tohoku region. Endit