Strong in the Rain

By Dr David McNeill and Lucy Birmingham                                                   

Published by Palgrave Macmillan 

Dr David McNeill, one of the authors of Strong in the Rain (co-authored with Time magazine’s Tokyo correspondent Lucy Birmingham), spoke at the Daiwa Foundation about his book. This book tells the story of the March 11 2011 triple disaster and its aftermath through the eyes of six people: a maintenance worker at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant who escapes – then returns to help bring it under control; the mayor of the largest big city near to the plant who must battle to save it from destruction; a fisherman who guns his boat into the tsunami while others flee, then watches as the radiation from Daiichi takes everything away from him; a housewife who loses her beloved husband to the tsunami; an American who becomes a hero after rescuing children from the deluge; a student who barely survives then must try to rebuild his life. Their stories illustrate the extraordinary bravery and heroism of ordinary Japanese people during the nation’s worst post-war disaster, but also some of Japan’s deep-rooted structural problems: the industrial and bureaucratic cronyism that allowed the nuclear disaster to occur, the complacency of the media in reporting it, and the moribund politics that holds up recovery. Despite the enormous problems facing the country’s northeast, however, the book is ultimately positive and hopeful that the 2011 tragedy offers a new way forward.

The video of this event can be found on YouTube below:

About the contributors