Why its doubly tough for Japan

Sid J. Steven Picou,a sociologist at the University of South Alabama: The script for a purely natural disaster is: impact,then rescue,then inventory,then recovery. But with technical crises like these nuclear leaks,it can go quickly from impact,rescuestraight to blame. The story line is contested,theres no clear-cut resolution. To move past a catastrophe,people usually need to be able to tell themselves a clear story about what happened. And in this case the story is not so clear.

Many people in Japan have begun to doubt the official version of events. The mistrust of the government and TEPCO was already there before the crisis, said Susumu Hirakawa,a psychologist at Taisho University,in Tokyo,referring to the Tokyo Electric Power Company,which owns the leaking nuclear plant. Now people are even angrier because of the inaccurate information theyre getting.

The only country ever hit by a nuclear attack,Japan has a visceral appreciation of the uncertainties of radiation exposure,how it can spare some people in its wake and poison others silently,causing disease years later. It is caught in the middle: The story has a contested beginning and an uncertain ending.

Compounding the problem,Japanese psychologists say,is that many of their countrymen will attempt to manage their anger,grief and anxiety alone. In the older generations especially,people tend to be very reluctant to admit to mental and emotional problems,even to friends.

Its simply more socially acceptable to talk about these physical symptoms, said Dr Anthony Ng,a psychiatrist at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda,Maryland,US. Not that medicine can repair the deepest losses. The quake,tsunami and radiation have destroyed or defiled what may be the islands most precious commodity,land,dealing a psychological blow that for many will be existentially disorienting.

In rural communities especially,theres a very strong feeling that the land belongs to you and you belong to it, said Kai Erikson,a sociologist at Yale who studied mining towns of the Buffalo Creek hollow in West Virginia,where more than a dozen towns were destroyed and at least 118 people killed when a dam burst in 1972,unleashing a wall of water as high as 30 feet that swept down the hollow. And if you lose that,youre not just dislocated physically,but you start to lose a sense of who you are.

There are some reasons for optimism. After purely natural disasters,about 95 per cent of those directly affected typically shake off disabling feelings of sadness or grief in the first year,experts say; just eight months after Hurricane Ivan levelled Orange Beach,Alabama,US,in 2004,about three-quarters of people thought the town was back on track,researchers found. And psychologists in Japan say they may get an unprecedented chance to reach out to survivors as many of them gather in schools,gyms and other places that have been set up as evacuation shelters.

Yet one-on-one therapy and crisis counselling efforts are not without their risks,either. We have to be careful that we dont create a whole class of victims,that we dont put people into some diagnostic box that makes them permanently dependent, said Joshua Breslau,a medical anthropologist and psychiatric epidemiologist at the University of California,Davis,who worked in Japan during the Kobe quake.

Once victimisation becomes a part of a persons identity,the disaster story may never end. Researchers led by Picou have regularly surveyed the residents of Cordova,Alaska,since the town was devastated by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Even today,about half of those in the community report feeling angry,frustrated,or cheated by Exxonand by the court system,after drawn-out litigation.

More than 20 years later, Picou said,and many of those people still havent gotten over it. BENEDICT CAREY