Japan Disaster: A Year Later: Without a blueprint

Reporting from Shichigahama, Japan

Five architects made presentations to a design jury, hoping for a chance to design a replacement for the local middle school, heavily damaged a year ago by the earthquake and tsunami that killed an estimated 19,000 people, including at least 58 here, and destroyed more than 120,000 buildings.

Kumiko Inui, a 42-year-old rising star of the Tokyo architecture scene, ultimately won the competition with an impressive design featuring tall glass-wrapped classroom wings paired with smaller wooden pavilions in a lush tree-covered landscape.

INTERACTIVE PHOTOS: Before and after tsunami cleanup

But an ugly reminder of the disaster loomed over the presentations: A three-story-high pile of tsunami debris, visible through large picture windows along the side of the room, that didn't so much mock the architectural discussion as dwarf it.

As Japan nears the anniversary of the disaster this Sunday, such scenes are playing out all over northeastern Japan. Huge, neatly sorted piles of debris dot the Tohoku region, symbols of a recovery that has stalled at the cleanup stage.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, his approval rating in danger of sinking below 30%, has faced wide criticism for failing to articulate a broad vision for rebuilding. The national Reconstruction Agency wasn't officially launched until February, 11 months after the disaster.

And though Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima and other leading Japanese architects have joined emerging talents like Inui in sketching out thoughtful plans for new housing and civic architecture, their efforts have so far garnered little support from politicians in Tokyo.

The most intractable issue is whether the hardest hit fishing villages, already losing population before the disaster, should be rebuilt as they were or consolidated. In a broader sense, the nation has struggled with basic issues at the core of reconstruction, particularly the way the tsunami has exposed gaps between rich and poor, young and old, rural and urban, and between the nation's technological haves and have-nots.

In much the same way that Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath gave Americans a discomfiting picture of their own society, the events of March 11 have laid bare a Japan more divided than the national discourse here lets on.

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Japan Disaster: A Year Later: Without a blueprint