THE scattered vehicles hastily abandoned by the side of the narrow
\nroad from Fukushima City to Iitate village offer the first clues that
\nwe probably shouldn’t be here. Ordinarily on such an early morning,
\nthis important agricultural area would be humming with activity. Now,
\nwe mostly see rumbling convoys of troop carriers and the armoured
\nvehicles of the Self Defence Forces. This is not a war zone, but it is
\nabandoned and eerie, like the aftermath of an invasion.
\nOccasionally an ambulance or police car, with red lights flashing,
\nroars past. The drivers are wearing surgical cover-ups – a look that
\nunsettles more than it reassures.
\nOn the March day the Fukushima Daiichi plant blew up there was a 60-
\nkilometre traffic jam on this road, and nothing moved for two days.
\nShin Yamada, a 60-year-old council manager and beef producer went with
\nhis wife, Noriko, along the line and offered noodles to the stranded,
\npanicked motorists.
\n”Everybody was exposed to the fallout,” says Yamada. ”In coastal
\ntowns the panic was dreadful. Cars crashed into each other in the rush
\nto escape, people who left their cars were run down. Snow was falling,
\nwomen and children fled in what they were wearing.”
\nThe narrow strip of hilly coastal country between Fukushima City – a
\nmetropolis of 2 million – and the crippled Daiichi nuclear plant on
\nJapan’s east coast, is a no-go zone occupied by an invisible enemy –
\npotentially life-threatening radiation. It is in the ground, in the
\natmosphere and in the sewerage.
\nThree months ago Iitate village was celebrated in tourist brochures
\nfor its fine Wagyu beef and its picturesque countryside. Today it is a
\nplace to avoid. On this still summer morning the once verdant rice
\nplots are choked with weeds, ancient farmhouses locked up, animals
\ngone. Even the frogs that thrived in the flooded paddies are vanishing.
\nOf the 6200 people who lived in Iitate, only 1200 remain and most of
\nthem will be gone within weeks. Pregnant women and children, the most
\nsusceptible to radiation-related cancers, left months ago.
\nNorio Kanno, Iitate’s elderly mayor, is overseeing a mass evacuation
\nof his village and the relocation of the council to well outside the
\n40 kilometres recommended by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
\n”Our town has been neglected and ignored by the government because it
\nis 35 kilometres away from the reactor, but we are in the direct path
\nof the prevailing winds. Radiation levels are much higher here than
\nvillages inside the 10-kilometre zone,” Kanno says.
\n”Our mountains will be contaminated for decades, our farmlands ruined
\nand the beef industry wiped out. TEPCO [plant operator Tokyo Electric
\nPower] is not keeping us informed about the radiation levels, and the
\nPrime Minister has never visited. By the end of the month we will be
\nall gone from here, we are not waiting to be told.”
\nFor those already evacuated, days pass in the grip of uncertainty. At
\nthe Haramachi junior high school about 50 people camp on the indoor
\nbasketball court, separated only by low cardboard panels. Signs of
\npost-traumatic stress are hard to miss. Yuji Horikoshi, a former
\ncompany employee, tells The Saturday Age constant arguments and fights
\nbetween evacuees make the place a nightmare. ”People are frightened,
\nthere is no privacy, they wonder when they will be relocated. Their
\nbusinesses have gone. They are turning on each other. There is nothing
\nto do but worry and remember what we have lost.”
\nAt Haramachi, located just outside the 20-kilometre exclusion zone,
\nradiation levels are said to be well above acceptable safety levels
\nfor long-term residents. Forty-year-old Horikoshi sleeps on the floor
\nof the stadium with his elderly parents. His seriously ill mother lies
\nmotionless under a blanket throughout the interview.
\nThe former company manager says he was at his home in Odaka, not far
\nfrom the power plant, when the earthquake struck on March 11 leaving
\nhim trapped under a bookshelf with three cracked ribs. When the plant
\nexploded the next day, he was told by local government authorities to
\nevacuate, but couldn’t because of his sick mother. ”Then the second
\nexplosion came. Self Defence Force helicopters few over the village,
\nordering everybody to stay inside. We were trapped in the 10-kilometre
\ndanger zone for a week, living on rice, water from the well and tinned
\nfruit. There were about 100 of us.”
\nHorikoshi hates TEPCO. ”There was no planning, the plant was not
\nprotected from the tsunami. People’s lives have been ruined. There
\nmust be consequences.” Although small business owners have received
\n\u00a51 million ($A11,800) in compensation from TEPCO, it is regarded as a
\npaltry amount that barely covers food and clothing over summer.
\nWhen asked if the compensation is sufficient, Horikoshi raises his
\nhands, then points to his father and mother in resignation. He says he
\nwould rather be living in his house, where the radiation levels are
\nlower than at the junior high. ”I don’t see the point of being here.”
\nA woman interrupts to unleash a tirade against long-dead local
\ngovernment officials who signed off in the 1950s on construction of
\nTEPCO’s Fukushima plant on such a vulnerable stretch of coast. ”I
\nworked for the council in those days,” she says. ”The councillors
\nwere bought off with bribes and prostitutes. Unfortunately they are
\nall dead and cannot be held accountable.”
\nInterviews by The Saturday Age with Fukushima survivors over two weeks
\nreveal an extraordinary picture of mayhem, death and destruction in
\nthe first week of Japan’s biggest nuclear calamity. People returned to
\npartially destroyed homes after the first tsunami wave to be
\nconfronted by the bodies of people they did not know; council workers
\nsent to evacuate the elderly ran away in terror.
\nInexplicably, others living within 10 kilometres of the exploding
\nplant were ordered from Self Defence Force helicopters to remain
\ninside their houses for up to seven days. Despite the immediate danger
\nfrom radiation illness, looting was widespread. The aged who could not
\nescape were left to cope as best they could.
\nYamada, who worked as a volunteer through the first weeks of the
\ncatastrophe, says nobody knows how many died on the coast where the
\nnuclear plant was located with minimal protection from the sea.
\nKatsunobo Sakurai, the caustic mayor of Minamisoma who posted an
\ninternational plea for help on YouTube, put the figures at 1200
\nmissing, but Yamada believes it may be closer to 2000. ”There are
\nbodies out there that will never be found.”
\nIt is almost 100 days since the first of three tsunami waves crashed
\nonto the coast of Japan on a wintry afternoon, some 40 minutes after
\nthe magnitude 8.9 earthquake sent a massive shudder through the nation
\nof 128 million. Twenty-metre mountains of black ocean swamped the 50-
\nyear-old Fukushima nuclear power plant – a plant that had outlived its
\nuse-by date by more than a decade and had been kept on stream to cut
\nJapan’s carbon emissions. The thunderous waves wrecked the cooling
\nsystem, triggering a meltdown in three reactors.
\nExploding clouds of radioactive steam and debris were swept by strong
\nwinds across a broad arch of countryside, including Iitate and
\nMinamisoma. Mountain forests, streams, rice fields, school grounds and
\nhouses were contaminated. This week officials revealed that twice as
\nmuch radiation had escaped as previously thought. Fukushima is the
\nworld’s second worst nuclear accident, after the 1986 Chernobyl
\ndisaster.
\nIt may be three months since the Japanese catastrophe, but in many
\nways the recovery has just begun. This week, dramatic images were
\nbroadcast from Japan’s coast of lines of police prodding the beach
\nsands with white sticks in search of bodies. Horrendous firsthand
\naccounts of needless death continue to emerge. One of the latest
\ninvolved primary school children who were swept into oblivion as
\nteachers lined them up for a roll-call. The only children who survived
\nwere those picked up by parents minutes before.
\nYukio Takahashi knows the pain those parents endured. He was returning
\nby bus to the fishing village of Rikuzentakata from Sendai when the
\nearthquake struck. He had just completed six months as a merchant
\nmarine seaman on an LNG tanker and was headed home to be reunited with
\nhis wife, mother and son.
\nHe called his 25-year-old son, Hiroki, from the swaying bus to make
\nsure all were safe. ”I told him to get out of the house, to go to the
\nevacuation point with his mother and grandmother. The phone went dead
\nbefore I could warn him about the tsunami. I lost all contact.”
\nWhen Takahashi reached Rikuzentakata the next day, he was shocked to
\nfind the entire fishing port had been washed away, including the
\nevacuation point where Hiroki would have carried his elderly and
\ninfirm grandmother. Such was the devastation Takahashi was hard
\npressed to find the street where his house had been.
\nGrief stricken, he searched for days among the twisted remains of the
\nonce thriving fishing port and scoured other evacuation points. ”He
\ncame home to be reunited with his family,” his sister-in-law Mutsuko
\nOzawa told The Saturday Age ”but ended up searching for their bodies.”
\nTakahashi says he did not stop crying throughout his ordeal. He was
\nunable to share his grief with family and friends because the
\ntelephone networks had also been destroyed. After nine days of
\nsearching he was called to the makeshift morgue to identify his wife’s
\nbody.
\nWith basic services destroyed he borrowed a friend’s truck to take her
\nbody for cremation. It was the day Prime Minister Naoto Kan came to
\nsurvey the destruction. ”I drove past the municipal offices where he
\nwas being welcomed. I thought he was pathetic, it’s taken him too long
\nto come.”
\nTakahashi says Takata is a town caught in a state of profound shock
\nand grief. ”Everybody here has lost two or three loved ones.
\nFortunately I have a son and a daughter who were not in Takata that I
\ncan visit.”
\nThe stories are everywhere.
\nTakata mayor Futoshi Toba watched helplessly from the roof of the
\nmunicipal offices as his wife and house were swept away by the
\ntsunami. Video footage shows a wall of black water surging around the
\nfourth floor where he and staff took refuge. Miraculously, his two
\nsons who were at school survived.
\nWhen The Saturday Age visited Takata this week, 31 per cent of the
\nclean-up had been completed and 1950 temporary houses had been built
\nor were under construction. ”Our biggest problem is jobs, finding
\nwork for the survivors, re-establishing business,” says Toba. Apart
\nfrom the logistical and material aspects of the recovery, there are
\nserious social issues confronting his council and the deeply
\ndistressed community. Takata has 27 orphaned children and Toba lost 68
\nmembers of his staff.
\nAn Okinawa doctor attached to one of the mobile health teams operating
\nin area says trauma – especially post-traumatic stress – is a big
\nemerging problem. ”We get many suicide calls especially from middle-
\naged men. Some feel guilty because they have survived, others cannot
\ncope with losing everything. They cannot see a future for themselves.”
\nThe doctor says communication between health service providers from
\nvarious prefectures has been virtually non-existent. Another problem
\nhas been the constant turnover of mobile teams, making it hard for
\ncaseworkers to establish trust with angry, grieving people.
\nThe death toll for the entire Iwate prefecture, which includes the
\nfishing ports of Takata, Ofunato and Kesennuma, is 4519, with a
\nfurther 2832 listed as missing probably dead. In Takata alone, 2150
\nperished. At Kesennuma, where the clean-up is only 15 per cent
\ncompleted, police have recovered scores of rotting corpses from the
\nflattened port area where cargo boats and fishing trawlers sit among
\ncrushed houses and restaurants. Although the stench is overpowering it
\ndoes not discourage scores of tourists from moving among the ruins
\ntaking photos.
\nEmotions towards the government and some local authorities vary from
\nfury to resignation. People are incensed by dithering politicians, and
\nlast week’s challenge to Prime Minister Kan’s leadership was seen as
\ndisplaying callous disregard for the national recovery effort. There
\nis widespread contempt for the mostly anonymous, seemingly slippery
\nand always secretive management of TEPCO. The company has a long
\nhistory of dodgy auditing and cover-ups at the Fukushima plant.
\nSince the nuclear meltdown, some 80,000 people have been evacuated
\nfrom the towns and villages surrounding the crippled power station.
\nNobody interviewed by The Saturday Age within 200 kilometres of the
\nreactor feels safe or has confidence in the government to effectively
\nmanage the recovery and reconstruction.
\nAt first, the dithering Democratic Party government set the evacuation
\nzone around the Fukushima plant at 10 kilometres, then 20 and by the
\nend of this month it will be extended to a recommended but voluntary
\n30 kilometres. The International Atomic Energy Agency has said the
\nexclusion zone should be 40 kilometres, and Australia’s radiation
\nprotection authority has suggested a precautionary zone of 80
\nkilometres.
\nYoshida Yasumasa, a 40-year-old owner of Namie’s only karaoke bar, is
\nthe vice-president of a self-help group for relocated residents of the
\nvillage. He lives with 70 others at the Numajiri Onsen (hot springs),
\na mountain resort safely out of range of the Fukushima plant. Last
\nweek he borrowed a protective suit and radiation monitor and secretly
\nreturned to his home to collect his valuables. Amazingly, he says,
\nSelf Defence Forces did not stop him.
\nYasumasa was astonished to find the radiation levels in Namie low,
\nwith a reading of about two micro-sieverts inside his home, compared
\nwith seven micro-sieverts – a reading taken inside his car – in the
\nmountains 30 kilometres away. ”The further away from the reactor I
\ngot, the higher it went.”
\nRadiation is measured in micro-sieverts. A rating of one is considered
\ndangerous for babies and children, but not adults. Documents issued to
\nRed Cross teams show the highest levels recorded were about 45 micro-
\nsieverts immediately north-west of the reactor within the 30-kilometre
\nzone. The longer adults remain exposed to high levels of radiation,
\nthe greater the chances of developing related illnesses.
\nYasumasa assumes Self Defence Forces ignored him as he was wearing
\nTEPCO protective gear. ”It is easy to see how many people have had
\nhouses looted. Fortunately my business was OK.”
\nLevels of stress and anxiety are rising among the evacuees living in
\nthe apparent comfort of the onsen, according to Red Cross doctor
\nTsutomu Someya. People want to know if and when they can go home. They
\nalso worry that new temporary housing may not be a significant
\nimprovement and they will be split up again.
\nTaeko Ninomiya lived in Namie for 23 years and is married to a TEPCO
\ninspector who was working at the plant when the earthquake struck. The
\nmother of three sons says her husband has told her that nobody will be
\nreturning to Namie, ever. The plant continues to leak radiation and
\ncannot be shut down until January.
\nMurray McLean, Australia’s outgoing ambassador to Japan, says harsh
\ncritics of Japan’s response forget the enormous scale of what has
\nhappened. ”This has been a disaster of untold proportions. Japan was
\nwell prepared for the earthquake, but not the scale of destruction
\ncaused by the tsunami including Fukushima \u2026 That should be the
\nstarting point for people rushing to judgment, for deciding if the
\ngovernment failed to perform or is doing its best in exceptional
\ncircumstances.”
\nThis week the number of dead and missing was posted at 23,636
\nnationally. Some 20 million tonnes of debris remain to be cleared away
\nand hundreds of thousands of people live in temporary accommodation.
\nIn the Miyagi prefecture, an estimated 146,000 motor vehicles were
\ndestroyed. In Tokyo, a recent survey showed about 20 per cent of
\npeople suffering from acute anxiety, worrying when the next earthquake
\nwill come.
\nFor his part, Shin Yamada and his wife, Noriko, say they will stay in
\nIitate because the thought of living with strangers in a cramped
\nrelocation centre without their golden retriever and cat is worse than
\nliving with low-level radiation. “The risks have been exaggerated by
\nthe media. It may be 20 years before anything turns up, and I could be
\ndead by then.”
\nFor the grieving Yukio Takahashi, who, unlike many other tsunami
\nsurvivors is embarrassed to have more money than he can spend, his
\nfeelings are of ”shoganai” – a sense of resignation and acceptance
\nof life’s misfortunes. ”I know how dangerous the sea can be, but I
\nfeel no grudge or anger.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
THE scattered vehicles hastily abandoned by the side of the narrow road from Fukushima City to Iitate village […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6859","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-kirby-blogs"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/go-naminori.com\/kirby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/go-naminori.com\/kirby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/go-naminori.com\/kirby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/go-naminori.com\/kirby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/go-naminori.com\/kirby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/go-naminori.com\/kirby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6859\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/go-naminori.com\/kirby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/go-naminori.com\/kirby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/go-naminori.com\/kirby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}