Women’s Day, 3/11, Chernobyl, book

Hello subscribers!

This week two new Blog posts went up. The first one on Monday was to mark the fact that that date, 8 March, was International Women’s Day. So I posted photos of a number of big female statues, mostly from Soviet times, including the gigantic Rodina Mat sculptures in Volgograd (the former Stalingrad) and in Kiev, but also of the Statue of Liberty in New York, plus a few others.

Then on Thursday it was a very dark anniversary, 10 years since the triple disaster in Japan on 11 March 2011 (hence “3/11”, in American date writing convention, following the model of “9/11”): first the magnitude 9 earthquake off the coast of northern Honshu and the massive tsunami that was triggered by the quake, which in turn triggered a nuclear disaster: the triple reactor core meltdown at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant (NPP). And to mark that significant date I uploaded a rather long post featuring 20 photos that I had taken on my April 2019 return trip to Japan (my first trip had been in 2009), which included a two-day tour of Fukushima.

The NPP itself is off limits to the public; we only got a view of it from a nearby hill, but with an official permit we were granted access to one of the ghost towns in the inner part of the Fukushima Exclusion Zone (the so-called “Red Zone”), namely abandoned Okuma. I was able to take lots of very atmospheric photos, some of which I selected for that post. We also explored the reopened areas north of the Red Zone, including the town of Namie. Much recovery work was still ongoing then, including a new sea wall against future tsunamis, but there were also still a few tsunami ruins left standing. At one of them I took that still-life-like photo featured above, with a rusty teapot and a bottle of ginseng liqueur.

After the Fukushima tour I also made the pilgrimage to the Okawa Elementary School Memorial north of Ishinomaki. 74 Okawa schoolchildren perished there – while only one other child lost his or her life in the tsunami while in the care of teachers elsewhere. So the Okawa case is as exceptional as it is tragic (read all about it here).

I’ve meanwhile watched that “Inside Chernobyl” TV programme with Ben Fogle on the British Channel 5. I’m not quite sure about it. It was certainly visually stunning, but I also had some issues with it. I’d like to watch it again before passing judgement on it. First time I watched it was very late one evening just before going to bed, so probably not with the fullest attention. I’ll get back to this next Sunday.

Finally, I have to admit that I still can’t give you a preview/teaser of my forthcoming book, as I had announced already two weeks ago. That’s because I still haven’t had confirmation regarding the title page of the book from the publishers. However, I have been alerted to the fact that you can already pre-order my book (Atlas of Dark Destinations) on sites like Amazon (where no title page image is given yet either). To be frank, I’d rather you didn’t order it from that particular site, which is already too rich and powerful, and rather go for a smaller alternative or, ideally, the publishing house direct (Laurence King – where, strangely, my book is not yet listed). But that is your choice, of course. There’s no hurry in any case. The publication date stated on those online bookseller sites is 23 September 2021 (which, coincidentally, happens to be my wedding anniversary!) … so there’s still plenty of time.