Poem « nuclear-news

“Amid invisible terror, we were witnesses”

From Mari Inoue

I would like to share a poem of Fukushima nuclear disaster by Arata MAEDA, which was published on July 18, 2011 in “Shimbun Noumin”, family farmers’ newspaper in Japan.

“Amid invisible terror, we were witnesses”

by Arata MAEDA*

(Tanslated into English by Andrew E. Barshay)**

Assaulted by an invisible terror

Even now, after four months

We remain driven from our own birthplace, our hometown

At Level 7, with no change in the situation at all

Tens of thousands of livestock, starved to death, all of them

In the deserted villages, only the stink from their corpses

Rises into the air

Across the mountains and rivers of our home country,

Stolen away by something that will not show itself,

The seasons change, as if nothing at all had happened

There where the cuckoo cries, can it be only in our dreams

That we toil and sweat?

There, where we cannot even set foot!

Once it was by our country’s policy that we were driven to Manchuria

By our country’s defeat to commit suicide together

And abandoning our little ones, to escape back home

And now as then, this home of ours

Is smashed to bits as our country’s grand plans collapse in ruin

And this time, it’s a painless death that takes its time in coming

Yet just as on that day, isn’t it collective suicide all over again?

Isn’t it the live experiments of Unit 731 all over again?

Friends, friends, we can’t just stand here grieving and crying

Over these four months, amid invisible terror

What we have seen with our own eyes

Is the true face of terror that says: no matter

For pro it’s sake, the reactors must stay on

All right then! If that’s how it is

We’re ready to take them on, for the sake of our children and theirs

Just like the Kwantung Army before them, these bastards

hid the facts and were the irst to run from danger

And now they put on an innocent face and prattle about safety and reconstruction

No way will we let them take these lives so easily!

Oh, but friends, my friends are dead

*MAEDA Arata: member of Fukushima Farmers’ Alliance, resident of Aizumisato, Fukushima Prefecture

**Andrew E.BARSHAY: Professor, University of California at Berkeley

(The name of “friend” mentioned at the end of the poem is Hisashi Tarukawa who was an organic farmer and a member of the Japan Family Farmers Movement living in Sukagawa, Fukushima. He had devoted himself to growing organic cabbages. On March 23, 2011, he received a fax from the Fukushima local government, which requested him to forbear the shipping of cabbages contaminated by radioactivity. The next day he committed suicide by hanging himself in despair at losing his whole future.)

September 14, 2019 Posted by dunrenard | fukushima 2019 | Fukushima Daiichi, Nuclear Disaster, Poem | Leave a comment