THE scattered vehicles hastily abandoned by the side of the narrow
road from Fukushima City to Iitate village offer the first clues that
we probably shouldn’t be here. Ordinarily on such an early morning,
this important agricultural area would be humming with activity. Now,
we mostly see rumbling convoys of troop carriers and the armoured
vehicles of the Self Defence Forces. This is not a war zone, but it is
abandoned and eerie, like the aftermath of an invasion.
Occasionally an ambulance or police car, with red lights flashing,
roars past. The drivers are wearing surgical cover-ups – a look that
unsettles more than it reassures.
On the March day the Fukushima Daiichi plant blew up there was a 60-
kilometre traffic jam on this road, and nothing moved for two days.
Shin Yamada, a 60-year-old council manager and beef producer went with
his wife, Noriko, along the line and offered noodles to the stranded,
panicked motorists.
”Everybody was exposed to the fallout,” says Yamada. ”In coastal
towns the panic was dreadful. Cars crashed into each other in the rush
to escape, people who left their cars were run down. Snow was falling,
women and children fled in what they were wearing.”
The narrow strip of hilly coastal country between Fukushima City – a
metropolis of 2 million – and the crippled Daiichi nuclear plant on
Japan’s east coast, is a no-go zone occupied by an invisible enemy –
potentially life-threatening radiation. It is in the ground, in the
atmosphere and in the sewerage.
Three months ago Iitate village was celebrated in tourist brochures
for its fine Wagyu beef and its picturesque countryside. Today it is a
place to avoid. On this still summer morning the once verdant rice
plots are choked with weeds, ancient farmhouses locked up, animals
gone. Even the frogs that thrived in the flooded paddies are vanishing.
Of the 6200 people who lived in Iitate, only 1200 remain and most of
them will be gone within weeks. Pregnant women and children, the most
susceptible to radiation-related cancers, left months ago.
Norio Kanno, Iitate’s elderly mayor, is overseeing a mass evacuation
of his village and the relocation of the council to well outside the
40 kilometres recommended by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
”Our town has been neglected and ignored by the government because it
is 35 kilometres away from the reactor, but we are in the direct path
of the prevailing winds. Radiation levels are much higher here than
villages inside the 10-kilometre zone,” Kanno says.
”Our mountains will be contaminated for decades, our farmlands ruined
and the beef industry wiped out. TEPCO [plant operator Tokyo Electric
Power] is not keeping us informed about the radiation levels, and the
Prime Minister has never visited. By the end of the month we will be
all gone from here, we are not waiting to be told.”
For those already evacuated, days pass in the grip of uncertainty. At
the Haramachi junior high school about 50 people camp on the indoor
basketball court, separated only by low cardboard panels. Signs of
post-traumatic stress are hard to miss. Yuji Horikoshi, a former
company employee, tells The Saturday Age constant arguments and fights
between evacuees make the place a nightmare. ”People are frightened,
there is no privacy, they wonder when they will be relocated. Their
businesses have gone. They are turning on each other. There is nothing
to do but worry and remember what we have lost.”
At Haramachi, located just outside the 20-kilometre exclusion zone,
radiation levels are said to be well above acceptable safety levels
for long-term residents. Forty-year-old Horikoshi sleeps on the floor
of the stadium with his elderly parents. His seriously ill mother lies
motionless under a blanket throughout the interview.
The former company manager says he was at his home in Odaka, not far
from the power plant, when the earthquake struck on March 11 leaving
him trapped under a bookshelf with three cracked ribs. When the plant
exploded the next day, he was told by local government authorities to
evacuate, but couldn’t because of his sick mother. ”Then the second
explosion came. Self Defence Force helicopters few over the village,
ordering everybody to stay inside. We were trapped in the 10-kilometre
danger zone for a week, living on rice, water from the well and tinned
fruit. There were about 100 of us.”
Horikoshi hates TEPCO. ”There was no planning, the plant was not
protected from the tsunami. People’s lives have been ruined. There
must be consequences.” Although small business owners have received
¥1 million ($A11,800) in compensation from TEPCO, it is regarded as a
paltry amount that barely covers food and clothing over summer.
When asked if the compensation is sufficient, Horikoshi raises his
hands, then points to his father and mother in resignation. He says he
would rather be living in his house, where the radiation levels are
lower than at the junior high. ”I don’t see the point of being here.”
A woman interrupts to unleash a tirade against long-dead local
government officials who signed off in the 1950s on construction of
TEPCO’s Fukushima plant on such a vulnerable stretch of coast. ”I
worked for the council in those days,” she says. ”The councillors
were bought off with bribes and prostitutes. Unfortunately they are
all dead and cannot be held accountable.”
Interviews by The Saturday Age with Fukushima survivors over two weeks
reveal an extraordinary picture of mayhem, death and destruction in
the first week of Japan’s biggest nuclear calamity. People returned to
partially destroyed homes after the first tsunami wave to be
confronted by the bodies of people they did not know; council workers
sent to evacuate the elderly ran away in terror.
Inexplicably, others living within 10 kilometres of the exploding
plant were ordered from Self Defence Force helicopters to remain
inside their houses for up to seven days. Despite the immediate danger
from radiation illness, looting was widespread. The aged who could not
escape were left to cope as best they could.
Yamada, who worked as a volunteer through the first weeks of the
catastrophe, says nobody knows how many died on the coast where the
nuclear plant was located with minimal protection from the sea.
Katsunobo Sakurai, the caustic mayor of Minamisoma who posted an
international plea for help on YouTube, put the figures at 1200
missing, but Yamada believes it may be closer to 2000. ”There are
bodies out there that will never be found.”
It is almost 100 days since the first of three tsunami waves crashed
onto the coast of Japan on a wintry afternoon, some 40 minutes after
the magnitude 8.9 earthquake sent a massive shudder through the nation
of 128 million. Twenty-metre mountains of black ocean swamped the 50-
year-old Fukushima nuclear power plant – a plant that had outlived its
use-by date by more than a decade and had been kept on stream to cut
Japan’s carbon emissions. The thunderous waves wrecked the cooling
system, triggering a meltdown in three reactors.
Exploding clouds of radioactive steam and debris were swept by strong
winds across a broad arch of countryside, including Iitate and
Minamisoma. Mountain forests, streams, rice fields, school grounds and
houses were contaminated. This week officials revealed that twice as
much radiation had escaped as previously thought. Fukushima is the
world’s second worst nuclear accident, after the 1986 Chernobyl
disaster.
It may be three months since the Japanese catastrophe, but in many
ways the recovery has just begun. This week, dramatic images were
broadcast from Japan’s coast of lines of police prodding the beach
sands with white sticks in search of bodies. Horrendous firsthand
accounts of needless death continue to emerge. One of the latest
involved primary school children who were swept into oblivion as
teachers lined them up for a roll-call. The only children who survived
were those picked up by parents minutes before.
Yukio Takahashi knows the pain those parents endured. He was returning
by bus to the fishing village of Rikuzentakata from Sendai when the
earthquake struck. He had just completed six months as a merchant
marine seaman on an LNG tanker and was headed home to be reunited with
his wife, mother and son.
He called his 25-year-old son, Hiroki, from the swaying bus to make
sure all were safe. ”I told him to get out of the house, to go to the
evacuation point with his mother and grandmother. The phone went dead
before I could warn him about the tsunami. I lost all contact.”
When Takahashi reached Rikuzentakata the next day, he was shocked to
find the entire fishing port had been washed away, including the
evacuation point where Hiroki would have carried his elderly and
infirm grandmother. Such was the devastation Takahashi was hard
pressed to find the street where his house had been.
Grief stricken, he searched for days among the twisted remains of the
once thriving fishing port and scoured other evacuation points. ”He
came home to be reunited with his family,” his sister-in-law Mutsuko
Ozawa told The Saturday Age ”but ended up searching for their bodies.”
Takahashi says he did not stop crying throughout his ordeal. He was
unable to share his grief with family and friends because the
telephone networks had also been destroyed. After nine days of
searching he was called to the makeshift morgue to identify his wife’s
body.
With basic services destroyed he borrowed a friend’s truck to take her
body for cremation. It was the day Prime Minister Naoto Kan came to
survey the destruction. ”I drove past the municipal offices where he
was being welcomed. I thought he was pathetic, it’s taken him too long
to come.”
Takahashi says Takata is a town caught in a state of profound shock
and grief. ”Everybody here has lost two or three loved ones.
Fortunately I have a son and a daughter who were not in Takata that I
can visit.”
The stories are everywhere.
Takata mayor Futoshi Toba watched helplessly from the roof of the
municipal offices as his wife and house were swept away by the
tsunami. Video footage shows a wall of black water surging around the
fourth floor where he and staff took refuge. Miraculously, his two
sons who were at school survived.
When The Saturday Age visited Takata this week, 31 per cent of the
clean-up had been completed and 1950 temporary houses had been built
or were under construction. ”Our biggest problem is jobs, finding
work for the survivors, re-establishing business,” says Toba. Apart
from the logistical and material aspects of the recovery, there are
serious social issues confronting his council and the deeply
distressed community. Takata has 27 orphaned children and Toba lost 68
members of his staff.
An Okinawa doctor attached to one of the mobile health teams operating
in area says trauma – especially post-traumatic stress – is a big
emerging problem. ”We get many suicide calls especially from middle-
aged men. Some feel guilty because they have survived, others cannot
cope with losing everything. They cannot see a future for themselves.”
The doctor says communication between health service providers from
various prefectures has been virtually non-existent. Another problem
has been the constant turnover of mobile teams, making it hard for
caseworkers to establish trust with angry, grieving people.
The death toll for the entire Iwate prefecture, which includes the
fishing ports of Takata, Ofunato and Kesennuma, is 4519, with a
further 2832 listed as missing probably dead. In Takata alone, 2150
perished. At Kesennuma, where the clean-up is only 15 per cent
completed, police have recovered scores of rotting corpses from the
flattened port area where cargo boats and fishing trawlers sit among
crushed houses and restaurants. Although the stench is overpowering it
does not discourage scores of tourists from moving among the ruins
taking photos.
Emotions towards the government and some local authorities vary from
fury to resignation. People are incensed by dithering politicians, and
last week’s challenge to Prime Minister Kan’s leadership was seen as
displaying callous disregard for the national recovery effort. There
is widespread contempt for the mostly anonymous, seemingly slippery
and always secretive management of TEPCO. The company has a long
history of dodgy auditing and cover-ups at the Fukushima plant.
Since the nuclear meltdown, some 80,000 people have been evacuated
from the towns and villages surrounding the crippled power station.
Nobody interviewed by The Saturday Age within 200 kilometres of the
reactor feels safe or has confidence in the government to effectively
manage the recovery and reconstruction.
At first, the dithering Democratic Party government set the evacuation
zone around the Fukushima plant at 10 kilometres, then 20 and by the
end of this month it will be extended to a recommended but voluntary
30 kilometres. The International Atomic Energy Agency has said the
exclusion zone should be 40 kilometres, and Australia’s radiation
protection authority has suggested a precautionary zone of 80
kilometres.
Yoshida Yasumasa, a 40-year-old owner of Namie’s only karaoke bar, is
the vice-president of a self-help group for relocated residents of the
village. He lives with 70 others at the Numajiri Onsen (hot springs),
a mountain resort safely out of range of the Fukushima plant. Last
week he borrowed a protective suit and radiation monitor and secretly
returned to his home to collect his valuables. Amazingly, he says,
Self Defence Forces did not stop him.
Yasumasa was astonished to find the radiation levels in Namie low,
with a reading of about two micro-sieverts inside his home, compared
with seven micro-sieverts – a reading taken inside his car – in the
mountains 30 kilometres away. ”The further away from the reactor I
got, the higher it went.”
Radiation is measured in micro-sieverts. A rating of one is considered
dangerous for babies and children, but not adults. Documents issued to
Red Cross teams show the highest levels recorded were about 45 micro-
sieverts immediately north-west of the reactor within the 30-kilometre
zone. The longer adults remain exposed to high levels of radiation,
the greater the chances of developing related illnesses.
Yasumasa assumes Self Defence Forces ignored him as he was wearing
TEPCO protective gear. ”It is easy to see how many people have had
houses looted. Fortunately my business was OK.”
Levels of stress and anxiety are rising among the evacuees living in
the apparent comfort of the onsen, according to Red Cross doctor
Tsutomu Someya. People want to know if and when they can go home. They
also worry that new temporary housing may not be a significant
improvement and they will be split up again.
Taeko Ninomiya lived in Namie for 23 years and is married to a TEPCO
inspector who was working at the plant when the earthquake struck. The
mother of three sons says her husband has told her that nobody will be
returning to Namie, ever. The plant continues to leak radiation and
cannot be shut down until January.
Murray McLean, Australia’s outgoing ambassador to Japan, says harsh
critics of Japan’s response forget the enormous scale of what has
happened. ”This has been a disaster of untold proportions. Japan was
well prepared for the earthquake, but not the scale of destruction
caused by the tsunami including Fukushima … That should be the
starting point for people rushing to judgment, for deciding if the
government failed to perform or is doing its best in exceptional
circumstances.”
This week the number of dead and missing was posted at 23,636
nationally. Some 20 million tonnes of debris remain to be cleared away
and hundreds of thousands of people live in temporary accommodation.
In the Miyagi prefecture, an estimated 146,000 motor vehicles were
destroyed. In Tokyo, a recent survey showed about 20 per cent of
people suffering from acute anxiety, worrying when the next earthquake
will come.
For his part, Shin Yamada and his wife, Noriko, say they will stay in
Iitate because the thought of living with strangers in a cramped
relocation centre without their golden retriever and cat is worse than
living with low-level radiation. “The risks have been exaggerated by
the media. It may be 20 years before anything turns up, and I could be
dead by then.”
For the grieving Yukio Takahashi, who, unlike many other tsunami
survivors is embarrassed to have more money than he can spend, his
feelings are of ”shoganai” – a sense of resignation and acceptance
of life’s misfortunes. ”I know how dangerous the sea can be, but I
feel no grudge or anger.”
