 Thank you, Sam. Welcome. I've made a number of talks since the 11th of March 2011, following the disasters, and two of those talks I've started in the same way. If you've heard me in the past, please indulge me for using this refrain yet again. Monty Dixon and I went to the same high school. Monty Dixon, Monty's older brothers were two of my best friends. Monty, like me, studied Japanese in his high school year, university, and then after studying, he went back to Japan to teach. On the 11th of March, Monty was stationed as a jet teacher at an elementary school in Minami, Samuriku. After the earthquake and the warning bells went, he and the other teachers removed the students to the evacuation point, and then he went, per instructions, to the fifth floor of the municipal building in Minami, Samuriku. You'll know that the tsunami came soon thereafter and reached the sixth floor. Monty's body was found two weeks later, four kilometers from the site. Monty was 27. I hope that's an age that resonates with some of you. 23,000 people died on the 11th of March. That kind of devastation is one that's hard to get our heads around. And yet, we must. Japan is too big, too important, and too much humanity to only be defined by the disaster. As we've seen in the past, Japan is a country that very much can be defined by the rebuilding, by the resilience, and by the enthusiasm that comes with the living culture. Today, we're going to make a stab at that. Shortly, I think we're about 150 days, 130 days after. So we're still in early times, but we're going to, while recognizing and respecting those 23,000 people who have lost their lives, think about going forward and thinking about how Japan recovers. Japan is very important to Australia. Oftentimes, that's forgotten nowadays. Japan remains the third largest economy in the world. Japan remains the second largest trading partner of Australia. Japan is Australia's key partner in a Pacific security region, and the people-to-people links between Japan and Australia are perhaps only surpassed if surpassed by New Zealand. For all of those reasons, it should be keen to all policymakers as they look forward to how this relationship in this country will go forward. I actually had a paper I wanted to present, but we have so many fantastic speakers. I'm going to put that in my back pocket, and we're going to direct you to the East Asia Forum instead, where I've written a couple of articles that are up there. So rather than take my time to make the arguments again, I hope you visit that site. Instead, I want to, what we'll do is keep each speaker to about 10 minutes. We have a wealth, pun intended, of economists today, but they're all going to be speaking a bit more broadly than just the economy. I'll introduce them in order as they go through, and I will be cutting them off very sharply because of the limited amount of time. Our first speaker, though, is Professor Cissorah Jaya Syria. Cissorah used to be the head of the Asian Economic Center at University of Melbourne, but since 2008 has been at the trove. Someone who is well in this area, we're really lucky to tempt him up from the cold Melbourne to spend some time with us here in the wonderful camera winter day that it is. Cissorah. Thanks very much. It's a real pleasure for me to be invited out here. Meet such a vibrant group of people from all over the world. And then we talk about one of the biggest natural disasters that we have seen in recent history. I have a few slides that I'll try and get through quickly just in order to organize my ideas. I guess all of you are familiar with what happened in Japan, March 11th, in a huge earthquake followed by a tsunami, a bit like what happened in 2004, December in Asia. And the tsunami really was the most important source of destruction. There are massive numbers that if you compare that with what happened in Japan itself in 1995, there was a major earthquake in the city of Kobe, but this was what happened in Kobe quite substantially across all dimensions. And very importantly, unlike in most cases, it didn't end with the earthquake and the tsunami because it affected a major nuclear power generating plant at Fukushima Daiichi. And this has created problems which continue until today. I don't know how many economists, but I will stick to the economics, but one thing I want to stress here is the human cost, the human tragedy of this. You can't quantify, you can't put numbers on that. Also, the strength and resilience shown by the Japanese community in the face of the disaster, both those people who are directly affected and in the neighborhoods, it's amazing again. If you compare the scenes of what happened in Katrina during the U.S. disaster some years ago, when there was rioting, looting, shootings, and then you compare how the Japanese people stayed in queues all the time patiently to get their little passions of water and food, use of complete contrast, amazing sense of community strength, resilience, a sense of social responsibility. And that's the social capital of Japan that it will be using, hopefully, to build on. The magnitude of this disaster in economic terms is really massive. I wouldn't, because of the time constraint, don't want to dwell on it. But this is, if you just look at what happened directly in the affected areas, it's much bigger than what happened in COVID-1995. But if you take the total cost, that is, the effect directly affected areas plus the impact on the other areas because of the economic linkages between this region and other regions, then the total cost, different estimates of it, but could be as much as 6% of GDP, very large economic cost. And this is one of the natural disasters which has had a real global impact because it is the largest economy in the world. It plays a major role in currency markets, stock markets, all of this, and in international trade. So across many dimensions, there was a global impact. Even though in terms of human deaths and so on, the 2004 Asian tsunami was considerably bigger, the economic impact on the global scene was much bigger in the case of what happened in March in Japan. Some of my colleagues on the panel will be speaking more directly and with more detail on some of these aspects including the impact on international trade. But I just want to say this is, you know, just to keep a big picture perspective, there's a huge impact both in Japan itself and globally. You know, in Japan, the response was very quick. You know, people actually, in Japan itself, if you go there now, a lot of people criticize what the government has done or hasn't done and so on, but the reality is compared to other natural disasters. The response in Japan was amazingly good. Most critical infrastructure was brought back into operation very soon after, including the bullet trains, the basic road network, etc. But huge numbers of people had to be evacuated and that is because of the radiation issue. What is happening now, because I might not get enough time to get to the end of my presentation, what is happening now is that there's a lot of debates about how to finance reconstruction, how to move ahead with issues such as nuclear energy, and you know, what's the way forward for the Japanese community and there are big debates happening in Japan at the moment. And to some extent, there's a degree of policy deadlock and even paralysis at some levels, which is part of the tragedy, I guess. Just to get one thing clear, there's a misconception spread partly through all kinds of commentators in the media and so on that Japan is a very highly indebted country and that it has huge problems financing the reconstruction necessary. That's a myth. Japan is not an indebted country. Japan has a government which is indebt to its own citizens. It has borrowed from its own citizens, but it is not a poor country. It's one of the most affluent countries in the world and even after 20 years of almost zero economic growth, it is a country with huge national savings. Government has a debt. The government has borrowed from its own people, but as a country, no. It's a net-sable country. It is one of the largest, it's the second largest stock of international savings, second only to China on a per capita basis, much bigger. Japanese government debt is very high, that's true, but if you look at net debt as opposed to gross debt, gross debt is what most people focus on. Again, it's large, but not absolutely massive. There's no real problem finding the money to finance reconstruction. The debates are about what are the mechanisms through which it should be financed, how should they undertake reconstruction, should people go back to the areas, should nuclear power be restored, what's the way to go. What is dominating debate at the moment is the whole issue of nuclear power. Japan is highly dependent on nuclear power, around 30% of all electricity generated comes from nuclear. And until last year, until this disaster, Japan was really looking forward to going even more nuclear. This is the strategic energy plan of Japan. They were planning to get to 50% nuclear by 2030. And now we have got a huge crisis. We find that safety measures were inadequate. There have been corrupt practices, attempts at cover-up, regulatory failure, and the government and the nuclear power industry have been very cozy, and this has really created a lot of issues. At the moment, the nuclear power issue dominates. The government itself is weak politically. It's a coalition, and the majority party in power itself is split into different factions. Public confidence in politicians has become very low, partly because of the nuclear thing, but it has been growing for a while, for other reasons as well. And there are issues about government spending. Government needs to spend, but they have a huge amount of weight to spending in the past, including bridges to nowhere. They were building bridges to go nowhere. So long-term recovery in Japan, 20 years of economic stagnation, so far two lost decades. And what is really important in Japan is to get people to spend. But what this disaster has done is it has shaken confidence further, consumer confidence is down, so spending is down, and people are worried about government spending, that this might also be wasteful and might not get you anywhere. So what is happening is that we are getting to a situation where, well beyond the actual disaster and reconstruction, the broader issue of Japanese economic recovery may be delayed even further. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. As he said, I was a student on the first year of this A&E, as I said, quick study. Back then, there were academics running through this program, which you can imagine in the program. But now I see this year's students running smoothly, so it's good for them. Especially, you know, when I came this morning, I saw in the building, you know, can the airport pick us up, you know, pick us up. I'm sure you learn much more in this program. So what I'm going to talk about today is the impact of what they call in Japan's March 11th as quick on Japan's trade and foreign investment. So Japanese firms investing to oversee. This is in line with what I do in my research project. So in this presentation, I just sort of divide into, you know, sort of immediate impact or short run impact on trade and investment on Japan, and they break up into sort of medium or long-term perspective on impact on trade and FDI for Japan. And just for the smaller, breaking up the discussion group, I just want to impose one question at the end. So what is the immediate impact on international trade on Japan? As you saw, some of the newspaper news, you know, is in a hugely, especially generally manufacturing hugely effective. Not only Japanese manufacturing itself affected globally, you see some story news telling, you know, US because Japanese supplier of the parts and components was a short supply of parts from Japan, the automobile production in US, Europe, and it has to be stopped for some time. So Japan applied quite a big role as an exporter of the providing parts and components of the motor vehicle, electronics and computers, maybe some parts of coming from Japan. So what happened after this, you know, earthquake and this whole production inside Japan came to hold for a couple of weeks. Now, only this month, they started to resume food production of this, you know, big automobile maker, Toyota Nissan in Japan. So it has a huge impact on global manufacturing and its disruption because the shortage of supplying parts and components, key parts and components from Japan and this was hugely far, strongly far, not only Japan but regional economy as well. And, you know, you come to the question why this is, you know, such huge impact on regional production process. That's because nowadays, you know, you don't see any, especially motor car, electronics production, it doesn't happen from, you know, start to end. It doesn't happen within our country but it's sort of whole production process spread around in a different country within the region. I give one example. Do you know a company called Boeing's? Yes. Where are you from? From Australia. U.S.? And do you know what they produced? What's their manufacture? From Australia. Airplane? Yeah. And would you call that, you know, Boeing's airplane is made in U.S.? No. But what do you call it? Where is it made from? What is it manufactured from? Japan. Japan. Actually, Bits and Bees come from all over the world. So this is sort of breakdown of the airplane, of the Boeing 787. Look, how many countries in the world is producing this one jet? U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea and some countries in Europe. So what we call, what we kind of call the barrier added. Most of the barrier added production coming from out of the U.S. They do assembling in Boeing in U.S. But several companies, several countries getting involved. Okay? So you see modern globalization while manufacturing production, it just, it just doesn't happen in one country, but just spread around, you know, many different countries. And Japan quite, apply quite significant role. So, for example, for this Boeing 787 Gymliner, Japanese company, they provide 35% of the barrier added going to this airplane. There's another example. For example, about one-fifth of the wire send conductor is produced by Japanese firm in Japan. And 40% of the electric component is produced also by Japanese firm. So some market analysts make a remark that Japan, if you go higher, higher up in the market share of the barrier chain, you see Japanese company. So what happened in the, so destruction of the manufacturing in northern part of Japan. Many world-class manufacturers, they couldn't produce car or Boeing because of, you know, shortage of supply from Japan. So that was imposing some problem for us. And the, what we can, so taking as an issue, what we can discuss about the future. So what is the impact on the medium-term, long-term business strategy for Japan and for Japanese company? So as you might have heard, Japanese firm, especially Toyota, inventing this, what is called, just-in-time logistics. So this production process, regional production, from parts and components produced in Japan, go to Malaysia, China, and bits and pieces, you know, get together, go to U.S., China Goods Assemble, as in ship, exported from China to U.S. And they have, you know, quite clearly, you know, configurated and to reduce, you know, extra inventory. But just-in-time logistics has a problem itself and is quite sensitive to, you know, annexed supply shop. So now the discussion now is whether Japanese firm or Japanese company is going to be considering this just-in-time logistics. And the much more, you know, lingering question is the location Japanese company from northern part, or actually some happen from northern part to south of Japan, but there's a problem happening in Japan. And the few firms, so this is a question I want to ask to your audience, with disruption of the production process, you know, what's happening with encouraging more Japanese firm into going to, you know, move away from out of Japan. That's a question I want to ask. And so I'm quite optimistic about this, you know, following out of, you know, there's quite debated discussion in 1990, they might come back again. And there's some, you know, some people say, you know, confidence in Japan has a reliable supply of key parts and components has had quite shaken. And, you know, I'm related to this disruption on last week. You know, definitely the firm is already going overseas. But I'm quite optimistic about this move away from, you know, move away from Japan and we can discuss and discuss. I have a longer paper and if anybody is interested, you can find it on the site that's on the screen now, Asia Rights. I'm going to reduce it in order to get into this in 10 minutes. This may be a little bit different from the other speakers. I'm going to be quite micro and I want to focus particularly on the Fukushima nuclear accident issue. Mainly because it's still happening and because I think there are really important things that should be being done right now in Japan and aren't being done and I'll come to those in a moment. So one of the important things is this is not something that happened on the 11th of March 2011. It's something that's still happening now. According to the relatively optimistic scenario that was put by the Fukushima nuclear plant operators, TEPCO, essentially the accident will go on happening until January next year. By January next year, they hope to have it under control and be able to move on to the next step which is moving towards decommissioning the reactors which is in itself an enormously long, difficult and expensive process. That if all goes well, it will be done by January next year but at the moment there is also a very dangerous risky process going on of keeping the reactors cool without causing nuclear water to flood out of the reactor system and that could break down and have been a numerous minor breakdowns already. Meanwhile, so far, nine workers at the Fukushima nuclear power plant dealing with the cleanup are known to have been exposed to over 250 million sieverts of radiation. I have learned about million sieverts in the last four months or so like most of my friends in Japan. That's a lot of radiation. That is about 12, more than 12 times the upper annual limit for nuclear workers in Germany. Of them, at least two have been exposed to doses more than 30 times the upper limit for nuclear workers. Now, in a disaster of this magnitude, the radiation of nine workers might not sound all that bad really but one of the alarming facts is that we know that these workers have been exposed to that level of radiation because their radiation levels have been properly monitored. As of mid-June, there were about 1,400 workers brought in to help with the cleanup as radiation levels hadn't been properly monitored so we don't know what level of radiation they've been exposed to. Even more surprisingly to me, there were or are at least 60 workers who were brought in to help with the cleanup and nobody can follow up their whole situation because nobody recorded their names and addresses properly. That reflects the fact that some of these people are recruited from the kind of day labour system in Japan, they are the latest in what are known as the nuclear gypsies in Japan. Eighty thousand people have been evacuated from the 20 kilometre danger zone around the Fukushima nuclear plant. Voluntary evacuations of those living in radiation hotspots further away from the plant are now going on and some people suggest that as many as 70,000 more people will need to be evacuated. The first detailed survey of radiation levels in Namiya-Machi which is one of the terms that scuttles the danger zone was carried out about three months after the accident and that was just because everybody was servicing everybody else for them to deal with. What it showed was something that we know about nuclear radiation. It doesn't spread out evenly from the centre, it kind of pools in hotspots. So some of the places really need to the plant don't have very high radiation levels. Some places quite a long way away do. This was Namiya-Machi kind of in happier times. This is a porgy which is part of Namiya-Machi and that's one of the hotspots. It has radiation levels which over a year would probably be about eight times the level that nuclear workers in Germany are allowed to be exposed to. And that's a problem if you're a child because radiation has much more serious effects on children. What does this mean for people living around the nuclear plant in Fukushima prefecture? It's mostly Fukushima prefecture, the eastern side that's affected. The answer to that question is nobody knows and that's really the thing that I find most troubling. Human beings have the ability to release paratonic vision, but we don't yet have the scientific knowledge to determine the effect of low to medium levels of radiation on human health. 25 years after the Chernobyl disaster, nobody knows how many people died or will die or some will still die as a result of that disaster. Plausible estimates range from a low of about 9,000 people to a high of about 90,000. You'll find estimates outside on both sides of the scale, but that's a fairly, you know, that's arranged by a lot of scientists. Now, of course, the amount of radiation released from the Fukushima plant is a lot less than Chernobyl. It's about 14%, 13%. So you could do a crude extrapolation from, say, the 9,000 figure and get a figure of possibly about 1,200 deaths from radiation in Japan over a long period, but of course you can't do that because nobody knows if the 9,000 figure is correct and you can't extrapolate directly to Japan because there are many differences between the two places. Of course, what we do know is that many people in Chernobyl suffered greatly from the process of evacuation, the social effects of the disaster, particularly older people, and that is going to be true in Fukushima. So, to put it in practical terms, if you live in a porgy or similar areas and you go to the experts and you say, what should I do? Should I give up my community, my house, my job? Should I move my kids to another school? And of course I won't be able to sell my house because nobody's going to buy it. I might not be able to get another job. My kids may be shunned by their classmates in other parts of Japan because they're seen as being radioactive. If you ask the experts, the answer is, search us, we have no idea what this is going to do to your health. You've got to make the decision. Basically, that's the answer again. There are of course a whole lot of other issues. There's the issue of radioactivity, particularly radioactive cesium entering the food chain and that is affecting areas of Fukushima further away. There's also radioactive cesium, which has a half-life of 30 years, entering the sewage system over northeastern Japan. And that's kind of on top of the radiation that people absorb from the air around them. Now, the levels of radiation in places like Tokyo are much above that kind of radiation at the moment. But the food issue is significant, it's possibly. And certainly in the eastern Fukushima, the radiation levels are possibly quite significant. The evacuation zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant was known after the accident in 1986 as zonavichugenia, which means the zone of alienation. And I think that's a remarkably provocative term. So I'm just going to go back one, even though it's time. It's time, but I just wanted to say one thing at the end. There are things that should be being done now around Fukushima plant, particularly, not just the Japanese government, but the World Health Community, the World Health Organization should be coming in and monitoring people's health and doing epidemiological studies of the effect of radiation, because that's the best way to help the people on the ground and to increase our scientific knowledge of the effect of radiation. That's not happening yet. The Japanese government's struggling with this, but it's a huge task. So I think, you know, I'd like to end with a little part of the world community that there's much more to be done about this. And if I have to give you a question to discuss, I would like to ask the really basic question. As students in Australia, or maybe from somewhere else, if you come from somewhere else, are the things that you should be doing to help Japan, help people in Japan get back on track? Well, hello. I haven't had an opportunity yet to be involved very much with the program, because there are so many conferences going on across the campus that some of us are running between different ones. Although, I did get to see some of you at the world podium. Yeah, thanks. So, and because of running back and forth between conferences, I haven't put together a PowerPoint slide, but, you know, I'm an economist and mostly what economists do with PowerPoints so it's really... You're probably better off. So let me just throw out some ideas for you and then lead you to go away and think about them. I'm a macro-economist, you know, so I'm sort of interested in what's the big picture likely to be as a result of the earthquake and the nuclear disaster that followed. When we had panels on this in March, just after the events, I think most macro-economists were saying, well, let's say, not at least, but at least we're saying, look, the scale of this event is not in macro-economic terms, and I'm not now talking about the humanitarian issues, which are very severe, but in macro terms it doesn't look like such a big shock that it's going to set Japan back a great deal. I think that the consensus view has evolved slightly since then, since March, things are in some ways more optimistic and in some ways more pessimistic. So the more optimistic side is that production has actually come back on stream more rapidly than people expected in March. And so recent government surveys about how much of productive capacity has been put back in place suggest that most industries are fairly optimistic by the end of the summer, something like 90% of industries think by the end of the summer they're going to be back on track, and I'm not sure how much of this has been covered already, I apologize for coming in a bit late. So what has been remarkable is that the rebuilding of just productive capacity or the relocation of it in a way that was stored functioning to production has been carried out more rapidly than people had feared. There is about a 10% of the manufacturing and service sectors, mostly manufacturing, that were affected still thinking that it will take them possibly a year to get back to speed, but that's a small share. Now what that means is that the estimates for where Japan's growth will be have improved for the year 2011. So most people thought that there'd probably be a bit of a negative effect on growth in 2011. Most estimates have now gone so then they were in April. So most of the estimates are now in the range of, some of these figures come from a government presentation that I listened to a couple of weeks ago in Tokyo, and for those of you who want to see the slides they're available on our conference website that I can refer you to. So estimates for growth forecasts for the present fiscal year 2011 are now around about 1.6% per year. So the Bank of Japan, the OCD, the IMF have all increased their forecasts of growth rate and indeed that's been born out by real performance in the most recent form. But they have also downgraded their forecasts for next year. So there are some dampening factors that are going to kick in and by next year probably growth will be between 1.5% and 2% probably lower than 2%. So now what does that mean overall? Well it partly means that Japan is it's obviously doing better than it was just after the global financial crisis when growth fell was in a negative territory. But it does mean that Japan is still in that rather low growth scenario that it has been struggling with on and off for 20 years. And while there are always short term factors that help explain that what's really critical is what's happening to the underlying productivity growth of the Japanese economy because the longer you're growing more slowly than the potential of your economy the more likely it is that you're undermining and sort of wasting the capacity that your economy has to generate growth. So you actually lose productive capacity the longer you're away from potential. And that comes because new capital investment doesn't take place and it comes because people are unemployed they lose skills and so on. So there's a slight danger that every time there's one of these shocks that keeps Japan at 1.5% growth instead of 2.5 or 3 but that prolongs the period before you get back to productive potential. There are two other things that I throw out as being worth thinking about for the economy. One is what's going to happen to energy. I mean obviously the big question now is what's the future of the nuclear industry in Japan and what are the alternatives. So the future for the nuclear industry I think now looks considerably more doubtful than it did even immediately after the events immediately after everybody was full of we've got to get on and be energetic and optimistic and do things. Now what we've seen of course is that as plants have been closed down in order to check their safety local communities are fighting very strongly against opening them up again. Now since 30% of Japan's energy comes from the nuclear sector that's a very big chunk of your power generation that you have to find from somewhere else. Well what are the alternatives for Japan? Alternative energy, green energy that kind of you know solar, hydro all of those things have pretty much been pushed to their currently feasible limits for reading. Japan has done quite a lot. Okay, so there's not a lot of action that can come from that. Those who are advising the government on this in Japan are saying realistically this means Japan is going to switch more heavily into fossil fuels as a source of energy. There will be a greater reliance on coal and oil as a source of energy and that comes with a bunch of problems. It's adding to global pressure on prices this is a period when prices of these fuels is rising and it's obviously has implications for the planet and environment. So one thing that we have to ask ourselves I mean this may be temporarily good news for Australia and buy some of these things from Australia but you know there will be an issue about Japan facing things like carbon tax will that become a debate in Japan? So I suggest to you that you start thinking about what are the alternative energy futures for Japan and what do they mean? The final one is fiscal policy. We all said Japan can afford to pay for this but it's beginning to look less comfortable for Japan to be able to pay for this and that might mean that interest rates do begin to go up because you have to borrow to pay for this and that might mean that exchange rates go up so in addition to the other risks that nobody has mentioned I think there is probably upward pressure on the exchange rate and just a very slight increase in the risk that Japan becomes part of another global financial crisis where you can't finance government borrowing. It's a very small risk but it's slightly more than a cost. My presentation has become shorter and shorter as the other presentations have gone on because these guys have said pretty well everything that I would want to say so what I'm going to say is reinforce some of the things that they've already said but perhaps bring out some other aspects some of the dynamic that were social behavioural aspects of the response to the earthquake and I know that a lot of you are going to be suffering power point deprivation because Jenny didn't put up a power point so I'm going to put up a power point and I'm going to flash through it very quickly because as I said many of the points have already been made. Getting the Tohoku thing in perspective is what the first two presentations did. It's a huge thing it's a huge thing in terms of a human and physical devastation. Of course the tsunami impact is much bigger than the earthquake impact. This thing as many of you will know had its biggest effect on human life through the tsunami. Over 90% 92% of the casualties in the earthquake were a consequence of a tsunami and to make you guys all feel good and me feel a little bit uncomfortable over 60% of the casualties were over 65 years old so it really hit old people who couldn't run very fast or couldn't fly to the stairs very quickly it was a pretty devastating effect on all the communities in Tohoku. It was a triple disaster and it's important to emphasise the three prom nature of the disaster and as others have said the longer term impact of the disaster really feeds through the Fukushima nuclear power station thing. I've got 13 graduates in TECO one of them the first one we had under the training program we have with TECO and the ANU came at the beginning of the big trade in energy resources gas in particular between Australia and Japan and he is now one of the eight managing directors of TECO responsible for the import of all the fuels uranium, gas, coal, oil and a lot for the TECO company and I've talked to him since the crisis I should say of course as you can imagine the company is visibly shocked the personnel in the company are visibly shaken my friend who is quite young really is aged considerably in the last few months as you can imagine the responsibility of what they have to deal with is enormous among the most costly natural disasters in history not the biggest the Sichuan earthquake in China recently the Tansheng earthquake in China much bigger in terms of loss of human life and all the rest of it the core bear was the biggest most costly one until this one as Novo and Cicero have said is now the most costly the scale of the Fukushima accident as has been said is also still unfolding we haven't got a complete bead on it so that's not a thing that we can actually get into a quantitative perspective yet and I want to come back to that in a moment in terms of its impact on where Japan goes next and compared with the great Hanshin earthquake the one in the core bear the Tohoku earthquake and the tsunami and so on is bigger but in fact it impacted on a much smaller part of the Japanese economy it's bigger mainly because of the impact on energy and nuclear power in particular and of course as Kent reminded us for all of us who had long associations with Japan had a deep personal impact because we didn't have friends involved in the earthquake and about whom we had many anxieties for some time trying to get March the 11th in perspective then in proportion is what I'm one of them but I think it's useful because I don't know what it was like for you from other parts of the world in Australia but one of the indications of the depth of the relationship the automatic attention we give to Japan and Australia now was the extent to which people on in Australian communities and households everywhere in Australia watched the thing unfold and were mesmerised I suppose and shocked by the thing as it unfolded on television and radio in Australia sort of nonstop as somebody who's actively participating in the country on these things of course the extent to which you're pressured to be engaged in that through that process was quite amazing so it's useful to throw up with few slides which basically just remind us of what the enormity of the scale of. I don't think you understand it until you sort of stood in and this is a sort of long distance way of standing in it these pictures of the devastation and the recovery and of course the unexpected consequences of Fukushima thing and the impact on energy in Japan are just visual images of what it all meant How does Tohoku compare? I don't want to spend too much time on this because that's been dealt with very nicely by the first two panellists so I'll skip through these things very quickly and come to the last presentation that can manage the aftermath and what I want to say a few words about is the psychological effect of the disaster. I don't mean personal psychological effect is quite profound if you go to Japan and now as you know I've done frequently I'll be going there next week again and Jenny's been and Tessa's been and so on one of the things of course that's palpable is the sense there is not only have been part of a fairly long funeral and that's part of it but also the sense there is of unstated anxiety about these things and what they mean the sense that even in Tokyo which could a really big shock in Tokyo you're sort of living on borrowed time there's that psychological impact is there and it's a social thing it's a personal thing but it's also a social thing and inevitably impacts upon social even policy thinking and behaviour and so on and it relates to all aspects of this especially the nuclear aspect of it and how that will be managed over time and how it plays into the political process and the policy process in Japan so the nuclear power and energy conundrum is the biggest thing confronting Japan today and it's now feeding in directly to the political process not just the management of the whole disaster and especially the TETCO Fukushima disaster but now how Japanese politics is going to be played out we've got political leaders standing up Mahara today, four years today stood up essentially and said we've got contemplate a non-nuclear future for Japan and we know that the polls suggest that there are more than a majority of the electorate that believe in transitioning to a non-nuclear future and this is a huge thing if it ever is going to be affected certainly if it's going to be affected reasonably quickly in TETCO you can get gas-powered capacity coal-powered capacity up quickly to deal with the immediate impacts of the crisis because those things run at about 50% of capacity all the time so you can fire them up to generate more electricity to cover the immediate gap from nuclear and so on but actually getting much further than that in terms of putting in place the capacity to bring in natural gas and so on they're at limit so you have to bring a big tanker full of natural gas into Tokyo every day if you fire the whole place up with natural gas to capacity so there's a limit to it and getting that capacity in place it doesn't take six months it doesn't take one year it takes ten years or so all these things have a sort of gestation period of five to ten years and my friend here is getting nervous so I'll just conclude with a few other remarks and take another minute and then finish up. So the thing raised a lot of questions about Japan-style crisis management what it showed was the strengths of that but what it also showed were the weaknesses of dealing with unexpected events in a strategic way with unexpected events and that is the management of the Fukushima thing although there are some fantastic lessons about how the grassroots Japanese ingenuity and Japanese custardness responded to the management of that crisis in a way that overthrew all the differences of the systems of governance in Japan. At the plant in Fukushima the guy who was pouring seawater and the plant was told sort of vaguely from above that he shouldn't be pouring seawater in there because there's a possibly bad catalytic reaction as you know if you're a nuclear scientist to pouring seawater in one of these things and essentially took no notice of that and said well if they're sort of vaguely thinking that they might start pouring seawater in there as you tell them to come out here and not pour seawater in another I'll leave the scene and he kept on pouring seawater into it and of course saved Japan from an even more disastrous nuclear process than they presently have. The important and final things I want to say really are that there are quite significant impacts of this happening on Japanese government and politics and I think how that pans out even the next six to nine months or so will be fascinating to watch and it all has to do with the psychology of nervousness and anxiety about the management of nuclear plants it has to do with the way in which Japan responded to the crisis not only demystically but contrast this with COVID when the government was frozen in terms of sending the troops in there was no basis upon which to send the troops in they all dealing with the situation in a decisive way this crisis was managed extremely well but also in terms of you know how to deal with the Fukushima thing and how to respond to the relationship between the government and the private company and the bureaucracy and dealing with that and the final thing to ask is a question that Kent has asked draw him into the conversation so he feels a part of this and he doesn't want to get me off the stage is whether or not this whole thing means some sort of decisive watershed in Japanese affairs one sense well it's got to mean something in terms of way in which Japan manages to sort down the track but in another sense I think a share can spew that really reinforces the traditional sort of values institutions and strengths of Japanese society in which Japan can be extremely proud which stood Japan extremely good sense as it was faced with this crisis and that really is what ultimately shines through in the management of the crisis and so what we have is a reinforcement of the competence, resilience of order that characterizes Japanese society a testament to the fortitude of the Japanese people Japanese institutions and traditions and that's a reinforcing thing so that's a positive aspect a positive outcome of the crisis despite a little nervousness and anxiety that persists because of its impact at an individual level on the social level and at a big sort of national security level all around the final thing is that really what this crisis did quite differently from the Corbett crisis too to show how connected Japan has become with the international community when Corbett happened there was an incredible shyness about allowing foreigners to come into help it was an immediate response to bring foreign help in relationship between Japan and the United States through the security dimension the response to the crisis has become stronger at the same time as Nobu was showing us very clearly the links with the international economic community and the international community through the economics has become stronger too so in one sense this thing has reinforced or intensified the policies schizophrenia in Japan's foreign policy which sees you know the links with the US through the security community and the links with China through the economic community thrown into highlight once again in the management of this crisis as it is in highlight in every day of days in Japan Thank you Peter I was going to make a couple of extra comments but I think Peter picked them up but just to make sure that when we go into questions they're not lost also recognize we have an economic emphasis but recognize the political dimensions and we now have a Prime Minister who has said he will step down on the basis of an interesting coalition and the second is for Australia the security relationships the fact that the self defense forces were able to deploy as Peter said within five minutes and the cooperation with the United States has given a a refound sense of the role that the SCF the self defense forces might play in Japan and the cooperation with the United States so politics and security are two different dimensions I want to get you out to lunch or excuse me 2.40 I think that gives me about five minutes for questions and then we'll break into groups and I think most of the speakers will be circulating among the groups but I'm just a five minutes worth of questions if you want to take this plenary session but your first, second, third and that's it this please I have a motion to approve Peter's question so it's a wonderfully fascinating election that you use several words on psychology because I would especially appreciate that but I couldn't understand the basis of the word that you have used here in the last century in this very important policy, schizophrenia by schizophrenia what do you mean paranoia or something else no, not paranoia the difficulty the situation in Japan and many other countries in the region is put in terms of the relationships security relationships with the United States and the very powerful economic relationships with China and marrying those two things together is difficult because China is a security challenge potentially which came at the same time without the deep connections economically with China the Japanese economy wouldn't be in the strong even though it's got a few weaknesses in terms of growth performance wouldn't be the strong and international competitive economy of this today over 40% of the output of Japanese manufacturing firms is produced in Asia most of it in China and that's what makes them of course international competitive this following out process that Norma mentioned of short it goes to competitive locations drawings, supply lines reprocessing or assembling elsewhere that's the strength of the Japanese production system internationalised and of course it's deeply linking with China Asia so you can't have a friend only in the United States for security purposes or a friend only in China for economic purposes and that politically is what I call a sort of schizophrenic problem okay so we're going to do the last two speakers I'm going to ask you not to put all the preparatory thank you very much that was the best thing I've ever heard I'm going to ask the respondents to keep it really short and sharp so there was one here in the middle out of here I'm going to say my question you said you were sorry in that case you can go on as long as you want you said a lot of commentators have made and you thought this was a mistake to this very bad natural disaster and build a narrative around it and perhaps this is a mistake but you've noticed you wanted to the traditionally apathetic Japanese they've been really re-energised of this disaster of volunteerism and like politically apathetic but they're really trying to help those who have been affected by the disaster so do you see perhaps that this is this earthquake as an tsunami has been the job stuff that Japanese youth need to engage with Japanese in the political scene or is it just an aberration? so I'll make a very quick response but then turn to Tessa so my quick response is I disagree with the traditional analysis that says Japan's apathetic I think at the local level Japan has always said will remain very active and engaged but it's been very localised it's just now that we see that spring to a higher level Tessa just very briefly similar to Kent I think what's come out of the disaster has been some amazing activity at the local level and a lot of communities responding absolutely remarkably and also young people as you say I think there's a huge disjunction between national politics and at the same time that that's happening there's been intense and increasing disillusionment about national politics and the really interesting thing to see is going to be how that divide plays out this energy at the local level but the disillusionment about the national politics last question my question is about whether the disaster is going to change Japan's foreign policy and as Dr Kana Shikun talked about Japan's heavy violence on nuclear power however the public's confidence in the safety of nuclear energy is seriously shaken and also Professor Jenny Cobb has mentioned that Japan will have to turn to oil and coal as substitutes but I'm wondering whether this will make Japan adopt more aggressive foreign policy so as to compete for more strategic interests in the world Professor I'm just answering kind of out of your question so I'm also a businessman and I know how people feel about nuclear power and everything so we have a belief that nuclear energy is quite safe so what happens when you destroy the whole of the event nobody could imagine how big a technology is but if you go back to the history of Japan's energy policy Japan as a country doesn't have any resources unlike in Australia so we always have to pay the foreign country to supply us the energy and we sort of in a few of the trigger statistics 6% huge amount of the oil from the sea and the oil show happening in 1970 and the government also is saving the lives on this power problem that's why this great scheme on this nuclear power session came into but we always have a belief that this is a very safe way of generating energy and now what happens at large levels people as a government is convinced that now we have to move away from nuclear energy and I was in Japan two weeks ago and I commented that discussing about how about we have nuclear energy underground that's what we need we can call it a nuclear program and obviously government is trying to do renewable energy there's something Jenny has mentioned for me I think next 10 to 20 years we still have to rely on this nuclear power things but eventually my kids or my grandkids generation will see more renewable energy shipping so unfortunately I'm going to call it there please join me in thanking the speaker