Tokyo should jettison nuclear option once and for all

IT is five years almost exactly to the day since March 11, 2011 when a terrifying sequence of events - a devastating earthquake, a colossal tsunami and a nuclear meltdown - unfolded in rapid succession on Japan's north-east coast. Those events are in the past, yet the past lives on in sinister ways.

The world has largely forgotten the immediate horror of March 11 when 16,000 people died, crushed to death or swept out to sea like so many broken dolls with their homes, vehicles and possessions carried away with them and when tens of thousands more were injured and more than a hundred thousand evacuated.

Physical trauma such as that inflicted with particular savagery upon Japan's Tohoko region by the Magnitude 9 earthquake and the 15 metre-high tidal wave five years ago begins to fade with time, rebuilding takes place and people begin, slowly and painfully, to pick up their lives again.