from Sunday Herald, 12 October 2014, from Fukushima
Shortly after 3.30 in the afternoon of 11 March 2011, Yukiteru Naka watched from the window of his gleaming new hilltop house in Tomioka, Japan, as a tsunami broke over the roofs of the Fukushima Daini nuclear power station a kilometre down the coast. As a nuclear engineer, he knew just how serious this could be.
Last Saturday he stood forlornly outside his empty dream home with his Geiger counter in his hand, admitting that he had no idea when he would ever be allowed to return. Although his house survived the huge wave because of its altitude, it was badly contaminated by the subsequent nuclear accident at the sister plant of Fukushima Daiichi, 10 kilometres to the north.
Radiation levels in his garden are now about three microSieverts an hour, 37 times higher than in Tokyo 200 kilometres away. “The house is is not locked, there is nothing there,” he says with a sad laugh. “I’ve lost the key.”
Naka’s home is in the Japanese government’s designated restricted zone, which means he is allowed to return briefly during the daytime, but not to stay overnight. Just across the road, is the more contaminated “no return” zone where residents won’t be allowed home.
He has been forced to leave his contaminated car in the garage and the barbeque he built on the grass, and relocate with his wife 130 kilometres away to the city of Koriyama. He has also had to move his nuclear engineering firm, which has been contracted to work in the Fukushima plants.
Near his house, the town of Tomioka is deserted, patrolled only by solitary ghost-like officials in masks and bright white radiation coveralls. The tsunami smashed the railway station, gutted shops and wrecked homes – all still unrepaired because they’re contaminated.
Roads are barred by high fences, buildings taped off with warning signs and large red read-outs from solar-powered monitors constantly log the radiation levels. Visitors to the small stretch of the town’s famed cherry tree avenue that’s still open are warned to leave after 15 minutes because of radioactive hotspots.
All around, red plastic sticks mark the areas scheduled for decontamination and topsoil removal. Big black bags bulging with the radioactive earth that has already been dug up line the roadsides, with hundreds piling up at a huge shoreline construction site, awaiting a permanent storage solution.
Another Tomioka resident forced to leave by the nuclear accident is Tomuko Endo. She used to breed cows as a business but all six died of starvation after she was evacuated.
The stress has kept her husband in hospital for the last three years, she says. But she has managed to save her cat, Tama, which survived for 45 days on its own killing rats and birds - and has been decontaminated.
Now Endo lives in a one-room hut in a temporary government evacuation centre in Koriyama with 550 other households. When asked if she’ll ever go back home, she pauses for a few moments, grimaces and says “I’m not sure.”
Koriyama is 55 kilometres from Fukushima Daiichi and outside the official evacuation zones. But even here, parents are still worried about allowing their children to play outside.
Tokiko Noguchi decided to leave the city after the accident, but returned because her daughter was missing her friends. “We decided to go back and spend our life being careful to avoid radiation,” she says.
When her daughter, now 15, went to school, she had to wear protective clothing. The school banned outdoor play and kept the windows tight shut, even on hot sunny days. A large radiation monitor was installed in the playground.
Noguchi decided she had to do something. With the support of the environmental group, Green Cross International, she set up the 3a family centre to give children a place to play inside.
The centre also arranges medical check-ups for children and parents, lobbies central and local government and tests food for radioactive contamination. “I don’t trust local food and water,” she says. “We don’t trust the screening carried out by the government.”
Yohei Suzuki, a father who helps at the 3a centre, tells a similar story. He took his family away after the accident, but then returned so that his two children could be with their friends.
“I have to raise my children in an environment of radioactivity everywhere,” he says. “So I decided with a friend to measure radioactivity and decontaminate it.”
He has set up a GPS-linked monitoring network across the city, and recorded levels up to twice as high as the government’s monitors. That’s because, he says, the ground around the official monitors has been cleaned.
“As long as I live here and have to raise children, I have to deal with the contamination problem,” he says. “When I think deeply about the meaning and value of life, the most important thing to me is to raise children to have a good life.”
Further away from the site of the nuclear accident in the city of Fukushima, authorities have built a huge brightly coloured indoor play centre, complete with sand pit, to help children avoid the radioactivity outside. “I was haunted by the contamination after the accident,” says Miyuki Sano, who has a 6-year-old daughter.
“I fear the contamination will never disappear, that’s why I fear for her playing outside. As a mother, I don’t want my daughter to play outside.”
Comments