Guest blog by Aparna Datar

Hiroshima Hiroshima’s moral grip on our consciousness extends, beyond the Hiroshima Peace Dome, straight to the heart of India’s most urgent problem. The problem of balancing urbanization, growth, floods, and droughts in the face of climate change.

In the summer of 2018 devastating floods and landslides (blamed upon climate change) ravaged western Japan. With an unusually high death toll, for a nation that is used to counting the collateral damage more in terms of economic loss, than in terms of human lives, this one left a tragic number of people dead. Floods washed away large parts of Hiroshima, Kyoto, Okayama and Ehime. I joined Prof. Moe Nakazora, an anthropologist with the University of Hiroshima on a study tour of two of the worst affected villages in the eastern part of Hiroshima. These were the villages of Hachihonmatsu and Kouchi. Both the villages are located in Higashihiroshima which had more than 2000 landslides.[i] Continue reading “Western Japan floods 2018: Hiroshima and the Summer of the Deluge” →