Reuters reported that disaster, abandonment and rebuilding are nothing new to Kamaishi, an ageing Japanese steel town in the northeast Japan, but the March 11th 2011 catastrophe has put its very survival at stake.
The 9.0 earthquake, Japan's strongest ever, spawned a tsunami towering nearly 10 meters at the town centre that left about 1,000 of its 40,000 residents dead or missing and destroyed almost a fifth of its homes.
Kamaishi was already shrinking, like so many other towns in rapidly ageing Japan. But now even the mayor wonders aloud if the town has a future. The steel industry that used to anchor the local economy has dwindled to an operation that employs only a couple hundred people. And the ruined town is not exactly a magnet for new business.
The fishing and industrial town nestled on the coast and along a winding valley has seen much better days.
Despite its isolation on Japan's mountainous northeast, Kamaishi in the late 19th century became home to Japan's first steel making blast furnace, thanks to its proximity to a large iron ore mine.
The town prospered as Japan modernized, rebuilding after a massive tsunami in 1896 killed more than half its 12,500 residents. Another tsunami in 1933 killed hundreds more townspeople, as did naval bombardments by US forces near the end of World War II that demolished the town centre.
Mr Kosei Shindo, an executive vice president of Nippon Steel Corporation, said that "In terms of location, it just wasn't competitive."
In its heyday in the early 1960s, the steel works employed more than 8,000 and included two blast furnaces, but it was beginning to lose money. The company decided to concentrate on a new mill in Nagoya, at the heart of Japan's booming auto industry in central Japan, and allowed its workers in Kamaishi to voluntarily transfer there.
Young workers especially were lured by training and career opportunities at Nagoya, and educational opportunities for their children in the big city. All told, in the first large scale, long distance transfer of blue collar workers in Japan, 1,678 mill workers, or one fifth the number at peak employment levels, moved to Nagoya.
Mr Shindo said that "Some people asked if they could take their horses. They would book entire rail carriages, although we asked them to leave the horses behind. It was a bigger deal than going to America is today."
It was also the start of a steady departure of Kamaishi's workers, spurred by successive rounds of retrenchment at Nippon Steel. By 1989, it went from hiring 30% of Kamaishi's high school graduates to a fraction of that. Even those it hires today are more likely to be sent to the flagship works near Tokyo than employed at home.
Company towns throughout Japan, dependent on declining industries from coal to textiles, have struggled to survive. Local governments have tried to reinvent themselves with new industries, often with help from their long term corporate benefactors.
Nippon Steel has maintained a cutting edge wire mill in Kamaishi that supplies more than 10% of the world's steel cord for radial tyres. It has also helped incubate new businesses inside the empty parts of the vast plant, ranging from cultivating orchids to producing meat free soy ham.
The town and the company have also worked to attract new employers, including SMC Corporation, a profitable maker of high tech components for automated factory equipment, which is now Kamaishi's biggest industrial employer.
(Sourced from www.reuters.com)
