Nearly three years after a major earthquake, tsunami and nuclear radiation leak devastated coastal and inland areas of Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture, 280km northeast of Tokyo, Namie has become a silent town of ghosts and absent lives.
Namie’s 21,000 residents remain evacuated because of continuing high radiation levels, the product of the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant 9.5km to the south. Homes, shops and streets are deserted except for the occasional police patrol or checkpoint.
Resembling the set of a Hollywood post-apocalypse movie, grass and weeds poke up through cracked pavement. At an abandoned garage, a rusting car sits on a raised ramp, waiting for a repair that will never be completed as a feral dog peers out from a wild, untended garden.
Illustration: Yusha
Namie is nobody’s town now. Nobody lives there and nobody visits for long. Even the looters have stopped bothering to come and no one knows when its former inhabitants may be allowed to return permanently — or if they will want to.
The 2011 catastrophe faded from world headlines long ago, but in Namie, Tomioka, Okuma, Futaba and other blighted towns in the 32km evacuation zone around the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, it is a disaster that never ends.
At the plant itself, recent leaks of contaminated water into the sea and a fraught operation to remove fuel rods from one of the damaged reactors have shown how critical the situation still is — and will remain during a decommissioning process that could take up to 40 years.
For Fukushima’s displaced population, the effects of the disaster continue to be deeply felt. The evacuation area was subdivided earlier this year into three zones of higher or lower radiation risk. In the worst-affected zone, residents will not be allowed to return before 2017 at the earliest.
In other areas, families and businesses face difficult decisions about whether to go back. At present, no one is allowed to stay overnight. Locals say that whatever happens, many younger people will not return.
There is little or no trust in official pronouncements, given the failure of Fukushima Dai-ichi operator Tokyo Electric Power Co to take adequate measures to protect the plant against the tsunami and the company’s unimpressive post-disaster record.
There are suspicions that the government knows some towns may never be safe to live in again, but refuses to admit it in a bid to protect Japan’s unpopular nuclear power industry. There is also a sense that the disaster victims have been forgotten.
That said, the painstaking cleanup continues and there has been some progress in adjoining, less badly affected areas, according to Hiroshi Murata, the head of the Odaka ward of Minamisoma, close to Namie.
As many as 18,000 people died or were declared missing in Fukushima Prefecture after the tsunami struck. The radiation plumes caused the forced evacuation of a further 154,000, according to the Japan Reconstruction Agency.
In Odaka, 148 people died, and there were more than 300 fatalities in Minamisoma as a whole. However, about 53 percent — 6,800 — of Odaka’s residents have since returned home, of a pre-disaster population of 12,800, Murata said.
Nobody has died directly as a result of the nuclear meltdown, but a close eye is being kept on the incidence of thyroid cancer in children, following the experience of Chernobyl.
Following the rehousing of residents in temporary accommodation, the biggest issues facing the local administration now are the demolition of unsafe houses; replacement of infrastructure and services — including roads and school playgrounds — and the decontamination and desalination of buildings, as well as land.
“To decontaminate one house and garden takes 10 to 14 days,” Murata said. “We have to remove surface soil, cut the trees, wash the roofs, clean the rain gutters. The house owners are responsible for cleaning inside. The city and the government help with the rest.”
Yet at least in Odaka, there is something to clean and repair. In Ukedo, the part of Namie municipality closest to the Pacific Ocean, the devastation is total.
Hardly a single house was left standing by the tsunami, which reached 17m in height in some places, Murata said.
Wrecked fishing boats still lie stranded kilometers inland and there are vast piles of scrap metal, smashed cars, bits of concrete bridges and broken wooden house frames where once a thriving village stood. An abandoned elementary school, 500m from the sea, looks as though it has been bombed.
However, even in Ukedo, a long line of displaced local resident volunteers can be seen picking up and sorting debris on wintry afternoons, gradually clearing the land where homes formerly stood.
With impressive organization, the local authorities are recycling everything they can, bagging it up in vast compounds erected amid the bleak, salty flatlands that were once rice paddy fields.
Minamisoma Deputy Mayor Tetsurou Eguchi said radiation-related cleanup was likely to take another five to six years and could cost as much as ￥350 billion (US$3.35 billion), much of which would come from the central government. Post-tsunami reconstruction could take up to 10 years. However, something intangible had been permanently lost, he said.
“When it comes to the economy and individual and social life, it is very difficult to recover this, compared with how it used to be,” he said, adding that the most challenging problem was decontamination. “Basically [the radioactive fallout] is not in the air any more. It’s in the soil.”
The area was dependent economically on small businesses, agriculture, fishing and tourism, including the famous annual Soma Nomaoi samurai festival, he said. All were seriously affected.
“People don’t believe it is safe to visit here. They won’t believe our produce, our livestock, our fish are safe. There is a blight. This will take a long time to change,” Eguchi said.
Much has been said by the central government about supporting Fukushima in its efforts to get back on its feet, but the reality is different, Eguchi said.
“It is a fact that we have received quite a lot of support, but is it sufficient? That is difficult, because it’s not just a question of reconstruction. Politicians in Tokyo say if Fukushima does not recover, Japan will not recover, but I’m not sure they really mean that,” he said. “I don’t think Fukushima is fully supported by the whole country and that’s what the citizens here think.”
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