Fukushima evacuee Yasuhiro Abe hopes to share same roof as wife and daughter

FUKUSHIMA, JAPAN – For Mr Yasuhiro Abe, 52, seeing his wife and daughter means an eight- to nine-hour drive south from Fukushima to Kyoto.

The mother and daughter have been living as evacuees for the past five years, since a massive earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear disaster in their hometown in Fukushima prefecture.

But unlike many others who were issued evacuation orders, they decided to uproot voluntarily because they are worried that harmful radioactive material could spread west with rain or snow.

His daughter was nine when the meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant happened, Mr Abe

The family first moved to the neighbouring prefecture of Yamagata before heading further away and finally settling down in the ancient city of Kyoto.

His wife and daughter now rent a home in Kyoto while Mr Abe has returned to his job as the general manager of a theatre where he has worked for almost 30 years. Now, he visits them twice every three months.

“Fukushima city and Koriyama city – inland areas within the prefecture – were never made evacuation zones despite heightened radiation levels right after the disaster,” said Mr Abe, who thinks that a factor could have been the higher population density in cities, compared to coastal towns.

He is skeptical that the heightened levels were still deemed safe.

“As far as possible, we want to raise our child in a place with lower radiation levels,” he said. “When she comes of age, she can choose whether or not to come back.” “As for myself, I’ll always be here.”

Five years on, he finds himself at a crossroads.
“In March next year (2017), the Government will be stopping housing assistance for voluntary evacuees and if we want to continue living elsewhere, it will cost more money,” he said.

While the cost of living will become an issue, he is more concerned about ensuring that his daughter completes high school without disruption. She will begin high school, likely in Kyoto, next year.

“Parents like ourselves have to consider the impact on our children’s lives before deciding if we should relocate,” said Mr Abe.

“Of course, a part of me wants them to come back – for us to live together again.”

http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/fukushima-evacuee-yasuhiro-abe-hopes-to-share-same-roof-as-wife-and-daughter

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the cutting room floor https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-on-the-cutting-room-floor/ By Thomas Gaulkin, August 5, 2019 Seventy-four years after nuclear weapons were first and last used in war, it can be challenging to conceive of the devastation they cause. But even in the immediate months after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, news accounts offered a view of ingenuity and destruction that often elided the human cost.

The newsreels below [on original] were mainly screened to audiences in 1946 and 1947 and detail the destructive force of the explosions almost entirely through excited accounts of the structural damage to the cities. There’s occasional mention of the lost city populations and the scientific knowledge to be gained from studying their casualties, but hardly any description of what people actually suffered, let alone personal accounts. It’s instructive to look at and listen to these reports today, and contemplate what is missing.

The 12-minute reel below was produced by the US War Department in 1946. “Tale of Two Cities” makes selective use of film that was confiscated from a Japanese filmmaker, Akira Iwasaki—though you wouldn’t know that from the narration, which boasts that “army cameramen have found and filmed pictorial evidence that tells in twisted steel and stone the effect of death-dealing atomic power.” (Some twenty years later, historian Eric Barnouw obtained more of Iwasaki’s footage and produced a remarkably different narrative that documented the horrible physical impact of the attacks on Hiroshima’s citizens.)

Contrasted with the triumphant tone of the news/propaganda made for 1940s audiences, silence changes everything. Made public only decades later, the two films below —one beginning with footage of wounded victims, the other, a full-color glimpse of survivors picking up the pieces of the ruined city—report what those above do not, without a single word.

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