From a hill above Kamaishi it is easy to see the Japanese port city’s famous tsunami breakwater. Completed just three years ago, it is a world-record 63m deep in places and cost a mind-boggling Y120bn ($1.5bn) – and it is broken.
From the same vantage point, the consequences of that failure are also easily visible. Much of the town has been erased by the devastating surge of water that was triggered by the huge earthquake on March 11.
It might be tempting to conclude that the lesson of Kamaishi – and of the crisis at a quake-crippled nuclear plant down the coast – is of the futility and counterproductivity of human efforts to tame nature with technology and science.
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