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Fukushima evacuee Hiroshi Ueno does not want to return to his old house

FUKUSHIMA, JAPAN – Having settled into a new life with his family outside Fukushima prefecture, Mr Hiroshi Ueno has no intention of returning home.

The 51-year-old, who was a florist in Minamisoma city – around 30km north of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant – now handles data management at a support centre for other evacuees.

His son was 18 and about to start his first job when disaster struck on March 11, 2011. The extended family of 10, including Mr Ueno’s elderly parents and his sister’s family, decided to evacuate the very next day.

At that time, there was no official word from the Japanese government for mass evacuation but many residents feared the worst – a meltdown from the nuclear plant.

“Most of us left our houses without even tidying up our homes which were damaged by the earthquake,” Mr Ueno told The Straits Times.
“No one knew what would happen next.”

They packed only the bare essentials into their car and began their journey as evacuees. Over the next five days, they drove from one place to another before finally arriving at Yonezawa city where they now live. Their former home in Minamisoma had become a no-go zone.

It was only a year later that Mr Ueno and his wife were allowed a brief visit back to retrieve their important documents and other belongings.

“Wearing protective suits, we got on a bus with others who were from the same area,” he said. They were allowed to stay for only two hours and had to wear dosimeters to keep track of  radiation levels.

Five years on, he would rather not return home.

“There are many issues like housing, compensation and security that have yet to be fully resolved.”

Damaged and worn out, the house will soon be demolished for redevelopment. But Mr Ueno will not be returning.

“Even looking at it is painful,” he added. “But for my parents, the house is full of memories… it is something that they couldn’t bear to let go of.”

http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/fukushima-evacuee-hiroshi-ueno-does-not-want-to-return-to-his-old-house

March 28, 2016 Posted by dunrenard | Fukushima 2016 | Evacuees, Fukushima continuing | Leave a comment

Fukushima evacuee Miyuki Satou returns to ground zero – only to serve up piping hot bowls of ramen

FUKUSHIMA, JAPAN – It was about 2pm on a chilly Tuesday but there were no customers in Ms Miyuki Satou’s makeshift shop next to the Naraha town hall office, where she serves up piping hot bowls of ramen and udon.

The town was evacuated in the aftermath of the triple Tohoku disaster in 2011.

Although Naraha was the first town located entirely within a 20km radius of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 power plant to have its evacuation order lifted in September last year, people have been slow to return. Only 976 of its population of 7,700 have come home – mostly the elderly.

One key reason for this is that families have already rebuilt their lives and bought new homes elsewhere, including Ms Satou’s.

The 51-year-old was a former resident of the coastal town bordering the Pacific Ocean, but now lives with her two daughters who have full-time jobs in the neighbouring Iwaki city.

But her ties with Naraha have led her back to run a food business – one of only two eateries there. Both close at 3pm.

Every day she has about 70 customers – mostly workers tasked with rebuilding the town where black bags of contaminated soil still remain a common sight, or former residents who have come back to visit.

She estimates only 10 per cent of her customers are residents who have moved back home.

“There is really no demand and so there is no point opening late,” she said. “Naraha used to be a much livelier town before the disaster, but now it just feels very lonely.”

It makes no sense for young families to return, when it is more convenient to live near their new workplaces or schools, she added.

But despite the nuclear disaster having changed her life, she offered a moderate take on the use of nuclear power.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration has said that Japan “cannot do without nuclear power” and has set a target to have nuclear power make up as much as 22 per cent of the country’s energy needs. Recent attempts to restart reactors elsewhere in the country – halted over public safety concerns following the 2011 disaster – have become entangled in a web of lawsuits.

The use of nuclear energy has split popular opinion in Japan. Ms Satou acknowledged it was a difficult question.

“It is an industry that can create a lot of jobs,” she said. “It will of course be better to use other forms of energy but I don’t think we have found one yet.”

http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/fukushima-evacuee-miyuki-satou-returns-to-ground-zero-only-to-serve-up-piping-hot

March 28, 2016 Posted by dunrenard | Fukushima 2016 | Evacuees, Fukushima continuing | Leave a comment

High radiation keeps Fukushima evacuee Mitsue Masukura away from home

FUKUSHIMA, JAPAN – Retiree Mitsue Masukura, 63, who used to live in the coastal town of Namie, knows she will not be returning home anytime soon.

The Japanese government’s target is to declare all areas around the crippled Fukushima No. 1 power plant livable by March next year (2017), except for three towns. Namie is one of the three. Certain parts of the town remain off limits because decontamination works have been suspended given the high radiation dosages.

Residents like Ms Masukura, a former fishmonger, are already allowed to return for only short periods during the day. They are not allowed to stay overnight.

Not that she has any plans to return.

She said: “Even if we move home, there will hardly be any amenities because many of the former merchants have moved out and started new businesses elsewhere.
“Besides, people still do not really feel safe about returning to a town so badly affected by the nuclear fallout.”

Despite official assurances of the contrary, her unwillingness to trust the authorities stems from a case of ‘once bitten, twice shy’.

In the immediate aftermath of the March 11, 2011, disaster, there was poor communication of the situation, and conflicting instructions, which led to a lot of speculation, she said.

“We didn’t know who said what or where we should go,” she said.

As a result, her family of five moved five times from town to town, ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn) to ryokan, before settling in their current temporary living quarters in Fukushima city.  Each unit is smaller than the size of a one-room flat in Singapore. Her family used to live together under one roof, but now stay next door to one another across three units.

She looks forward to the family buying a house and moving to Minamisoma  next year, after her grand-daughter graduates from senior high school.

When asked how she felt about not being able to return home to Namie, she said: “It’s been already five years since we left. There are all these memories of the past, which will continue to live on in the mind.”

http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/high-radiation-keeps-fukushima-evacuee-mitsue-masukura-away-from-home

March 28, 2016 Posted by dunrenard | Fukushima 2016 | Evacuees, Fukushima continuing | Leave a comment

Fukushima Special Report: When is it safe to go home?

FUKUSHIMA, JAPAN – For 72-year-old Mr Nobuyoshi Ito, home is an isolated village with only 40 other residents. Once considered among the most beautiful villages in Japan, Iitate is today a shell of its former self before a nuclear disaster five years ago.

Most of the homes, left behind by around 6,000 residents, are empty. Farmers have been replaced with masked workers tasked with filling up black bags of contaminated soil. Only parts of the village, about an hour’s drive inland from the crippled Fukushima No 1 power plant, have been deemed safe for visitors, and they cannot stay overnight.

But that has not stopped Mr Ito, a former IT engineer-turned-farmer, from returning and staying in open defiance to study the effects of the radioactive plume that hit after the nuclear plant on the east coast of the main island Honshu was destroyed by a tsunami.

“When the government asked us to evacuate … I asked if there would be criminal charges if I continued to live here,” he said. “They said no.”

“I am a test subject, making use of the environment,” added Mr Ito, now a lobbyist opposing nuclear energy. He carries a hand-held meter to record the radiation he is exposed to daily, at his own expense.

Readings in Iitate now can range between 1.1 and 1.9 microsieverts per hour, according to government monitoring posts, which is more than 10 times those in places such as Tokyo, 250km south, where readings are around the globally accepted norm of 0.1 microsieverts per hour. This translates to a benchmark for safe radiation absorption of 1 millisievert (1,000 microsieverts) per year, although the International Atomic Energy Agency and others say anything up to 20 millisieverts per year poses no immediate danger to human health.

Mr Ito spends most of his time in the village but once a month drives three hours to Niigata prefecture on the west coast where some of his grandchildren live.

But many others from Iitate have had to evacuate to cramped temporary housing – smaller than a one-room flat in Singapore.

It is a bitter pill to swallow, said Mr Ito.  “For older people like me, a slight exposure to radiation is all right, compared to the stress of living in temporary housing,” he  said.

On the wall in his office is a 2011 calendar, which he has not taken down because “the female model is cute”. But it is a sombre reminder of the lives that were lost or upended at 2.46pm local time on March 11 when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake triggered a 10m wall of water that ravaged the northeastern coast of Japan and caused meltdowns in three reactors at the Fukushima  plant. It was the world’s worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

Some 16,000 people died, most by drowning, 2,500 are still missing, and another 100,000 evacuees have not returned home.  About 60 per cent of them still live within Fukushima prefecture. After the disaster, residents within a 20km radius of the No. 1 nuclear plant were evacuated, and some areas 30km away such as Iitate were cleared because of high radiation levels.

The health consequences of the leaking radiation are still unclear but more than 300,000 people aged below 18 have been screened for thyroid cancer. About 150 have tested positive, although some attribute this to more rigorous testing rather than the direct impact of radiation.

Last October, Japan confirmed the first case of radiation-linked cancer for a former Fukushima nuclear plant worker. Among evacuees, factors like stress, poor diet and a lack of exercise have also taken a toll.

Japan is halfway through a 10-year reconstruction master plan. Some 26.3 trillion yen (S$319 billion) has been budgeted since 2011 and another 6.5 trillion yen was approved this month to speed up the construction of public housing for evacuees, and for other projects such as medical care and infrastructure.

Decontamination process
Japan Ministry of Environment official Hitoshi Aoki said the government expects to lift evacuation orders by March next year in all but three areas – Namie, Futaba and Ookuma – where decontamination efforts have been suspended because of high air dose radiation. It has not yet been decided when these areas, which are closer to the plant, will be cleaned up.

The cleanup process involves removing topsoil, since cesium – a radioactive byproduct of the Fukushima meltdown – falls to the ground  when it rains or snows, said Mr Aoki.

The disaster forced all of Japan’s dozens of reactors offline in the face of public worries over safety but Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said this month that Japan “cannot do without nuclear power”.

This has split public opinion and most of the country’s reactors remain shut down.

Population drain
Iitate village is expected to be one of the areas to reopen next March.

But contamination, and a general mistrust of the Government for not being upfront or transparent about the extent of the nuclear disaster in the immediate aftermath, are among reasons former Iitate residents like Mr Hideji Suzuki, 78, are reluctant to return home.

Once a farmer, he now lives with his wife in temporary housing quarters an hour by car from their old house.
“We can’t go back to Iitate anymore, even if we want to,” he said.

Residents like him will not be able to return to their former lifestyles and jobs in the mountains – which cannot be decontaminated easily – even if they moved back.

The disaster has accelerated a demographic shift away from affected cities within Fukushima prefecture.

Minamisoma city, 30km north of the plant where lower radiation levels have allowed evacuated residents to return, has seen “rapid aging”, said city official Mr Tokio Hayama. Offices have reopened but the working population – over the age of 15 and below 65 – has yet to recover.

“We need to dispel the fear of radiation, which has become a major factor that prevents their return,” said Mr Hayama.

The disaster has also split families, like Mr Yasuhiro Abe’s. The 52-year-old moved his wife and 14-year-old daughter to Kyoto, concerned about their health in the wake of the nuclear fallout.

But he stayed behind in Fukushima City – 90km from the power plant and unaffected by the exclusion order – to continue running a movie theatre he has worked at for almost 30 years.

“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 to come back.”
Former residents have been slow to return to the seaside town of Naraha also, which was the first within the exclusion zone to have the evacuation order lifted in September last year. Many families have already rebuilt their lives elsewhere and in the six months since, only 976 of the town’s 7,700 original inhabitants have come home – mostly the elderly.

Former residents like Ms Shinoda Tomoko, 78, have chosen to move out – and move on with their lives. She now lives 60km south of the Fukushima plant in Iwaki city with her children and grandchildren who have new jobs and are attending new schools.

But retiree Tomiko Igari, 69, intends to buck the trend. On one of her regular trips back to Naraha, she said she will return in October this year, after the lease on the flat where she now lives runs out.

Her home is just across the road from a vast field that is still full of black bags with contaminated soil.

“My only hope is that when I come home, all of that will be gone,” she said. “It’s really an ugly reminder of the accident.”

http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/fukushima-special-report-when-is-it-safe-to-go-home

March 28, 2016 Posted by dunrenard | Fukushima 2016 | Evacuees, Fukushima continuing | Leave a comment

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

March 28, 2016 Posted by dunrenard | Fukushima 2016 | Evacuees, Fukushima continuing | Leave a comment