A number of Japanese writers, including Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe have spoken out about the nuclear disaster at Fukushima that followed the horrific tsnuami that struck the country on March 11, but Haruki Murakami had, until late last week, made no public statement. Last Thursday Haruki Murakami was awarded the International Catalunya Prize at a ceremony in Barcelona. In his acceptance speech, Murakami delivered a harsh critique of his country’s reliance on nuclear power.

Describing the disaster as his country’s second nuclear disaster — the first, of course, being the atomic bombs that were dropped on the country during World War II — Murakami described the Fukushima disaster as an avoidable, self-inflicted disaster: “The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is the second major nuclear detriment that the Japanese people have experienced,” Mr. Murakami said, according to Kyodo News reports. “However, this time it was not a bomb being dropped upon us, but a mistake committed by our very own hands.” But Murakami, who has written extensively about people struggling to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of loss, concluded on a hopeful note: “We must not be afraid to dream,” he said, “We must be ‘unrealistic dreamers’ who charge forward taking bold steps.” Murakami donated the €80,000 ($117,000) prize to relief efforts.

Our own Max Rivlin-Nadler wrote an excellent essay about Fukushima and Hiroshima, “Forbidding Zones:” “We are amidst the peril of atomic energy, and no matter how urgent the reporting, no matter how dire the warnings, we, like the journalists, are bound to wander through its devastation.”

(H/T The Wall Street Journal)


 
 
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