Today we mark the 10th anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Ten years since that fateful day when a large earthquake shattered the norms for all of us, most acutely for those people living along the coast of Northeast Japan. It is worth remembering how fragile are our lives, our technologies, and our expectations of normal life.

March 11, 2012, on the first anniversary of the disasters, the East Asia Program convened a multi-disciplinary, transnational conference and produced several video interviews with experts in Japan. And, in the years that followed, along with the Mario Einaudi Center we brought to Cornell and into publication the recollections of Naoto Kan, Prime Minister of Japan at the time of the 2011 disasters.

On this tenth anniversary, former EAP director Hiro Miyazaki writes in an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of the continuing need for more democratic ways of handling the costs. And, Miyazaki, along with former EAP faculty Annelise Riles, current director of the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies Rebecca Slayton, and several other international scholars, have just released the book Nuclear Compensation: Lessons from Fukushima.