As cold northerly winds sprinkle the first snow on the mountains surrounding the medieval Japanese city of Okuma, those who fled the city after last year’s disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant are losing hope of ever returning to their homes.
Okuma lies close to the power plant and was hastily evacuated when a huge earthquake and tsunami crippled the power plant on March 11 last year.
Okuma Mayor Toshitsuna Watanabe has vowed to lead residents back home as soon as radiation levels are low enough. Yet the slow pace of the Japanese government’s cleanup efforts and the risk of another leak from the plant’s reactors has forced city officials to admit in September that resettlement might not happen for at least a decade.
Photo: Reuters
A growing number of Okuma evacuees are pessimistic about ever living there again. At a temporary housing complex in Aizu-Wakamatsu, a city 97km west of the plant, the mostly elderly residents say they do not have much time or energy left to rebuild their town.
Many said they preferred plans that got them out of temporary housing, but helped them maintain the friendships and communal bonds built over a lifetime, such as rebuilding the town farther away from the plant.
“I was one of those who kept saying: ‘We will go back, we will go back!’” said Toshiko Iida, 78, who left her rice farm behind. “Now, they are saying it will be years before we can go back. I’ll be dead then.”
Such feelings of resignation are shared by many of the 159,000 people who fled their towns after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima plant.
After first being reassured by the authorities that the accident was not so bad, then encouraged as the costly decontamination effort began, many evacuees are finally accepting that it may take decades, perhaps generations, before their town could be anything like it was before the disaster.
“We all want to go back, but we have to face the obvious,” said Koichi Soga, 75, a retired carpenter.
Such sentiments have led to a very public loss of hope by the 11,350 displaced residents of Okuma, one of nine communities within 19.3km of the stricken plant that were evacuated.
After living shelters for about a month, Okuma Town Hall officials and about 4,300 of its residents relocated to temporary sites in Aizu-Wakamatsu, with the rest scattered as far as Tokyo.
Watanabe, 65, immediately began drawing up plans for returning to Okuma that called for a group to resettle a small corner of the town where radiation levels were relatively low. The settlers would then slowly expand the livable areas, decontaminating one street or building at a time, like colonists reclaiming a post-apocalyptic wilderness.
In fall last year, the plan won de facto approval when Okuma residents re-elected Watanabe over a challenger who had called for building a new town at a safer location. Hopes were still high early this year when the Japanese Ministry of the Environment began a decontamination program — with a budget of US$4.8 billion for this year alone — that employed a small army of workers to scrape away top soil, denude trees of branches and scrub down buildings in Okuma and other evacuated communities.
However, the ministry said this summer that an experimental effort to decontaminate a 17 hectare area in Okuma had failed to reduce radiation dosages by as much as had been hoped, leading officials to declare most of the town uninhabitable for at least another five years. That forced Okuma’s officials to change the target date of their “road map” for repopulating the town to 2022, instead of 2014.
“People are giving up because we have been hit by negative news after negative news,” said Watanabe, who set up a temporary town hall in a former girls’ high school on a corner of Aizu-Wakamatsu’s six-century-old castle. “Keeping our road map is the only way to hold onto hope and prevent the town from disappearing.”
Watanabe admits that his plan has a dwindling number of adherents. A questionnaire sent to Okuma’s evacuees by the town hall in September found that only 11 percent of the 3,424 households that responded said they wanted to go back, while 45.6 percent said they had no intention of ever returning, mostly because of radiation fears.
Hopes for a return took another blow early this month when ministry officials told Watanabe that they planned to build as many as nine temporary storage facilities in Okuma for dirt and other debris from the cleanup. Many evacuees said they did not want to go back if their town was to be used as a dumping ground for radioactive refuse.
At the temporary housing site, where prefabricated apartments stood in rows like barracks on a former soccer field, many evacuees said they had been allowed to return to their homes in Okuma wearing hazmat suits and masks on tightly monitored, one-hour visits to retrieve some belongings. Many said that as the months passed, it was becoming more emotionally difficult to think about spending the time and energy to rebuild.
“Every time I go back, it feels less and less like my home,” 85-year-old Hiroko Izumi said.
Many others said the town needed to move fast to keep its relatively small number of working-age residents, who were already beginning to find jobs and start new lives in places like Aizu-Wakamatsu.
“If too much time passes, Okuma could just disappear,” healthcare worker Harue Soga, 63, said.
For those who do not want to move back, Okuma drew up an alternative plan in September that calls for building a new town on vacant land safely outside the evacuation zone around the plant. The new town would be built within five years.
Watanabe admits that he is now among a minority of former residents who are still determined to go back to the original Okuma.
He describes an almost spiritual attachment to the land where his family has grown rice for at least 19 generations and that holds the family graves that Confucian tradition forbids him from abandoning.
“We have been living there for 1,000 years,” he said. “I have promised myself that one day, I will again eat my own rice grown on my ancestral farm.”
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
Two former Chilean ministers are among four candidates competing this weekend for the presidential nomination of the left ahead of November elections dominated by rising levels of violent crime. More than 15 million voters are eligible to choose today between former minister of labor Jeannette Jara, former minister of the interior Carolina Toha and two members of parliament, Gonzalo Winter and Jaime Mulet, to represent the left against a resurgent right. The primary is open to members of the parties within Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s ruling left-wing coalition and other voters who are not affiliated with specific parties. A recent poll by the
TENSIONS HIGH: For more than half a year, students have organized protests around the country, while the Serbian presaident said they are part of a foreign plot About 140,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade, the largest turnout over the past few months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government to call early elections. The rally was one of the largest in more than half a year student-led actions, which began in November last year after the roof of a train station collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on entrenched corruption. On Saturday, a sea of protesters filled Belgrade’s largest square and poured into several surrounding streets. The independent protest monitor Archive of Public Gatherings estimated the
Irish-language rap group Kneecap on Saturday gave an impassioned performance for tens of thousands of fans at the Glastonbury Festival despite criticism by British politicians and a terror charge for one of the trio. Liam Og O hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, has been charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act with supporting a proscribed organization for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London in November last year. The rapper, who was charged under the anglicized version of his name, Liam O’Hanna, is on unconditional bail before a further court hearing in August. “Glastonbury,
RSS