[LINK] "Quake-hit towns may never recover"

[rfmcdonald]

I profiled the quake- and tsunami-hit Tōhoku region at Demography Matters last month, pointing out that the region was already lagging behind the rest of the country and that the disaster isn't helping. This Bloomberg news article backs me up.

A week before becoming ground zero for the world's biggest nuclear crisis since 1986, the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant offered $11 an hour for full-time maintenance work in an area of Japan that was lagging even before last month's earthquake and tsunami struck.
The wage, the same as McDonald's pays for part-time work in Tokyo, shows the scale of the northern Tohoku region's economic blight and indicates that many towns there may never recover from the disaster.

Nearly 28,000 people are dead or missing and 160,000 are homeless in Tohoku, where 25 percent of the population is 65 and older, and job seekers outnumber jobs, 2-1.

Once the rescue and clean-up is over, Prime Minister Naoto Kan's government will have to decide whether to rebuild homes, roads and businesses or relocate tens of thousands of people. The challenge is how to structure investment to bring private jobs that would last beyond the short-term bump from public works.

"To put it very crudely, there won't be a lot of people left in these communities," Takayoshi Igarashi, Kan's special adviser on addressing population decline and rural decay, said in an interview. "Old people will pass away, and the young will surely leave for Tokyo. The government now faces this awful choice of whether to invest in rebuilding these areas or leaving them behind."

The 9-magnitude quake March 11 and tsunami waves as high as 49 feet damaged or destroyed 200,000 buildings and leveled towns in Japan's northeast.

Sony Corp., Toyota Motor Corp. and Sapporo Holdings Ltd. are among the companies that have shut down factories from damage that the government estimates at $295 billion.

The disaster struck an economy already mired in its second decade of stagnation and deflation. Japan's national debt is twice the size of gross domestic product, the result of soaring welfare costs and falling revenue.

Tohoku's six prefectures, with a population of nine million, have a per-capita income 15 percent less than the national figure. In the northernmost prefecture, Aomori, the population fell 4.4 percent between 2005 and 2010, the second-biggest drop in the country, as young Japanese left to find work in bigger cities.

Go, read.