Backup Tokyo

Six months after Tōhoku and the country was still digging out. Nearly sixteen thousand dead, a 9.0 quake, tsunami destroying the eastern coast, Fukushima threatening another meltdown. The government kept saying everything would be fine, that things would stabilize. They wouldn’t. So they announced a plan: if Tokyo gets destroyed in the next disaster, Parliament and the ministries relocate to a backup city.

IRTBBC—Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business and Backup City—is what they called it. Government acronyms always sound like that. Five hundred kilometers west of Tokyo, near Itami Airport and close to Osaka. Room for 250,000 people with offices, restaurants, parks, casinos. When the next disaster hits, the machinery of government just keeps running somewhere else.

Hajime Ishii from the ruling party called it a replacement battery. His logic: as long as the nation’s core functions were backed up, the system survives. He didn’t explain what happens to the other thirteen million people still in Tokyo. Maybe the next earthquake won’t be as bad. Maybe the backup city never gets used.