A Reunion, of Sorts
This was not my first occasion to meet Kanda-san. That happened back in April, when we were both speakers at an event held at Brown University, along with Kiyama Keiko of the Japan Emergency NGO (JEN), to commemorate the passing of a year since the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami and provide some appreciation of what has – and hasn’t – been done in terms of reconstruction since. At that event, Kanda-san spoke powerfully about the loss of both her home and her community, of being forced to leave the area under government order before she even had a chance to search for her grandfather – who remains missing to this day. At that time, her voice shook under the emotional weight of the experiences she recounted. Many at the event were moved to tears.
Kanda-san has been changed by her experiences since 3/11 – who wouldn’t be in the same situation? – but she has not succumbed to despair. The experience urged her to establish an NGO of her own, “Power of Japan” (POJ), initially for the purpose of helping the refugees from Futaba cope with their situation. It has since taken on the cause of helping victims of the disaster for other parts of Tohoku as well. In talking with her both before and after the event at Brown, I found her to be a very easy-going person – the kind in whom you can sense an inner strength and sense of purpose that makes it possible for her to stay relaxed and positive while maintaining resilience and poise. She is one of the hisaisha who found themselves forced out of the ordinary by the disaster and its aftermath, and rose to the challenge to do extraordinary things, big and small.
I contacted Kanda-san soon after I got to Japan, and we arranged to meet on July 19th. This was not only the day before the anti-nuclear protest but, more significantly for Kanda-san and Futaba, a couple of days after the government announced a revised map of the various evacuation zones around the Fukushima Daiichi plant, in light of ongoing surveys of levels of radioactive contamination.
Map taken from the July 19th edition of The Daily Yomiuri newspaper
The rezoning didn’t really change much for the people of Futaba in the present – their homes and businesses had been off-limits for all but the briefest of visits (two hours at most – and permission for even that did not come until months after the evacuation) – but what it did make clear was, much as Kanda-san and others had feared, there would be no going back to live in Futaba for the foreseeable future.
“It’s not like we didn’t see this coming,” she said as we walked the short distance from the station where we arranged to meet to a nearby Chinese restaurant where her friend and fellow POJ member Yamanobe Hitoshi worked as head chef. “But to see Futaba marked as a ‘no entry zone,’ without any mention of when it might be opened…it makes it seem so final.”
Nuclear Co-dependence
Yamanobe-san’s restaurant is an upscale place in an equally posh part of the city on Tenōzū Isle. We arrive at the end of the lunchtime rush, so we are seated immediately. Kanda-san asks our server to inform Yamanobe-san of our arrival.
She begins to talk about Futaba and its relation to Fukushima Daiichi and TEPCO.
“The thing you have to understand about Futaba is that, before they built the power plant, there really wasn’t much there to support the town. There was fishing and farming, of course, but nobody was making a lot of money off of them. Coal mining in Fukushima was on the decline already by that point. So when TEPCO came in with plans to build a plant, the promise of jobs it would bring into the community and the money that TEPCO threw around locally in lobbying for it got them a lot of support. The proposal passed through the town assembly easily. No one in Futaba seemed all that concerned about radiation back then.”
TEPCO’s search for a location for a new nuclear power facility began in the late 1950s, with the selection of the Okuma site coming a few years later. By 1971, the first reactor of what would eventually be six at the plant was on line. The other five achieved the same status in short order across the remainder of the decade.
This sounded like a familiar industry scenario. When I lived in Fukui Prefecture years ago, I had heard similar tales of how Kansai Electric Power Co. won approval to build its facility in Ohi. There too, they selected a poor, out-of-the-way community as their prospective site, and swooped in with the promise of jobs and lots of cash to secure the support of the residents. People told me stories of villagers who blew this windfall on things like gaudy, fake crystal chandeliers to hang from the ceilings of rooms that were barely large enough to accommodate them.
If anything, TEPCO’s hold on Futaba might have been even tighter than KEPCO’s was on Ohi. Prior to the disaster, Kanda-san surmises that about 80% of the town’s working aged population, out of a population of only 8,000 residents in total, were employed by TEPCO or one of its many subcontractors. Work in the subcontracting firms was dirty and dangerous, compounded by the threat of exposure to radiation while engaging in cleaning and other routine maintenance jobs inside the plant. By law, nuclear industry workers are were not allowed to absorb more than 100 milliSieverts per year (that is, until the Japanese government requested this limited raised to 250 milliSiverts, in light of the mess at Fukushima Daiichi), so they have to wear dosimeters to keep track of their cumulative exposure while at work. (By sheer coincidence, a few days after our meeting, the Asahi shinbun broke a story about the tricks one of TEPCO’s subcontractors had used to deceive the dosimeters, involving lead covers that employees were urged to place in their breast pockets to cut down on the amount of radiation the device would register, thus allowing each worker to put in more time at the plant.) Be that as it may, the pay was excellent for such simple work; far more than one could make on any other jobs to be found in the area. A subcontract employee could make 15,000 yen (around $190 at current exchange rates) for just two hours of work. For employees of TEPCO proper, wages were even better, and came with other perks, such as housing. For young women in Futaba and their parents, “TEPCO men” were highly sought after marriage partners.
“Everything in the town seemed to have something to do with the plant and TEPCO,” Kanda-san recalled. “Even the local playgrounds had equipment donated by the company. It never really occurred to most people that the plant might pose a danger to the town.”
Evacuation and Exile
Within hours after the tsunami knocked out power to the plant’s cooling systems, it began to do just that. It was almost 10pm on the 11th when the residents of Futaba – those within a 2km radius of the plant, at least – first heard over the loud speakers installed in their neighborhoods for just such an unthinkable event as this that they should evacuate. Kanda-san had taken refuge from the tsunami in the gym of a local school along with many other survivors. They were puzzled by the terse and vague nature of the announcement, which merely told them that there was a situation developing at the power plant, and that they should “move further south.” In fact, she and other at the school ended up being bussed to a hinanjo in Kawamata – over 40 kilometers to the northwest of Futaba. Still, they were among the lucky ones. Others in Futaba weren’t so lucky; elderly bedridden patients in the municipal hospital, for example, were finally airlifted to safe hospitals on the 13th – but only after the hydrogen explosion that destroyed reactor building #1 had scattered radioactive material high into the air. On the ground, too, the disparity in information caused problems. Despite the rapid expansion of the evacuation zone around the plant from an initial radius of 2km out to 20km, residents of the town of Namie – just to the north of Futaba – didn’t receive the order to flee until March 14th.
For the people of Futaba, this was the beginning of the dispersal of their community. The shelter in Kawamata to which they were sent – another school gymnasium – was not large enough to accommodate everyone. The overflow was moved from here to other facilities even further away. For there, some residents booked flights out of Fukushima airport for Tokyo or destinations in western Japan. Some moved in with friends and relatives elsewhere in Fukushima Prefecture or in neighboring areas. Some managed to gain access to temporary housing in Fukushima city after a long wait. The remainder – mostly elderly folks with no connections they could rely on outside of Futaba and little money to spare – ended up in Kazo-city, Saitama Prefecture, where they managed to gain access to the building of a school that had been closed due to the decline in the number of children in the area. Kanda-san, who had eventually relocated to Chiba Prefecture in the aftermath, initially launched POJ to look after the needs of this community of Futaba exiles in Kazo.
The Persistence of Place
Our waitress informs us that Yamanobe-san is waiting for us in one of the banquet rooms, so we carry our conversation there. Yamanobe-san greet us in his chef’s tunic, unbuttoned as far down his chest as it will go in evidence of the rigors of the lunchtime rush, but spotless, in evidence of his skill as a chef under pressure.
Yamanobe Hitoshi, taken from among the pictures of him on Facebook without permission (sorry!)
I somehow failed to ask about how the two met – a stupid oversight on my part – but however it happened, Yamanobe-san has been involved with POJ from the very start, employing his expertise in preparing meals for the exiles in Kazo and hisaisha in other locations. He tells me that he began doing this on the night of March 11, 2011, when his restaurant became an impromptu shelter for people stranded on Tenōzū Isle by the loss of power and interruption of train service in Tokyo. “We had food we needed to get rid of because the refrigerators were out, and I wasn’t going anywhere myself, so I thought the least I could do was feed the people who were stuck here.” And they ate for free.
Kanda-san resumes her account of the Futaba exiles when I ask her what will become of them.
“They want to live together someplace, and preferably someplace like Futaba. By that I mean a place with a culture, accent, and scenery like home.”
This makes sense. Small communities are close knit, and there is no reason to assume that Futaba, as much as it was influenced by the wealth of TEPCO’s dangerous enterprise nearby, would be any different. I had heard of a section of temporary housing units in Fukushima-city known as “Little Namie” because it was occupied almost exclusively by evacuees from Futaba’s neighbor to the north. I ask Kanda-san if she has something similar in mind for her neighbors for Futaba.
“Well, in a way that kind of thing exists already – but not in an ideal situation. Really, that’s pretty much what we have in Nazo. The only problem is that Saitama and Fukushima are different. The climate and landscape are different, the accent is different, even the food is different. The older folks from Futaba would much rather live someplace in Fukushima Prefecture. We’ve been trying to see if we can reestablish Futaba in Iwaki-city.”
Iwaki is the largest city to the immediate south of the 20km perimeter. Kanda-san tells me that, in terms of all the differences she just listed in regard to Futaba and Kazo, Iwaki is a much closer match. I ask her what the prospects are for a “Little Futaba” in Iwaki.
“Not good. Iwaki has it’s own problems to deal with from the tsunami and the influx of refugees from the nuclear situation. Also, there’s a problem with the logistics of setting up one municipality within the jurisdiction of another – I guess there’s really no precedent for that.”
The term she uses in Japanese for municipality is “jichitai” – literally “self-governing body” – but the sense I got was that what she had in mind was the preservation of Futaba as its own incorporated unit, no matter where its members happened to reside. I can see were this would present problems for the town to host such a community. Who would they pay taxes to, for example? I also found myself wondering – later – why Kanda-san was so focused of recreating Futaba as a municipality – and not just as an informal community – elsewhere. “Little Namie,” in Fukushima city, has not been incorporated as a new municipality in exile within the prefectural capital – The site of the Namie municipal government in exile is actually in Nihonmatsu, to the south. I get the sense that for Kanda-san and others, insuring the survival of the community in the face of such an unconventional situation calls for the assurance of official recognition. An informal “Little Futaba” will last for a generation at most; after that, descendants of the original residents will have at best a very thin – and possibly negative – sense of association with the abandoned town. As an incorporated municipality, of course, things might be different – but only if it comes to pass.
But if a community in any form is going to remain viable it needs people in it. I ask Kanda-san how many of the town’s residents are interested in returning to Futaba – wherever it is to be located.
“Most of the people who want to stay are elderly,” she says. “Only about 50% of the young people have expressed an interest in going back.”
Under the circumstances, 50% seems like a lot.
“But even the young people who aren’t interested in going back might change their minds in the future – if Futaba still exists, that is. They may not decide to move back and live there, but they’d probably go back and visit. If it’s there and it’s their hometown, they’ll go back. I think that’s just part of who you are.”
For Kanda-san herself, the Futaba she used to live in has become a truly important place – probably more important than it was to her prior to 3/11.
“To be honest, finding another place is just a substitute. I’d like to go back to Futaba to live someday, even if I have to decontaminate the area myself – actually, I’d rather do it that way. I think it would be better if the people who returned took part in decontaminating their hometown. But it’s not going to happen – at least not for a long, long time.”
Kanda-san then tells me of a man from Futaba in his 60s who committed suicide inside his abandoned home during one of the two-hour visits that he and others had been allowed to collect valuables.
Living “Fukushima”
In light of the growing size of the weekly demonstrations around the Diet, I ask what people from Futaba think about nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement. Surprisingly – or perhaps not so surprisingly – their feelings are mixed. The meltdowns took away their homes and livelihoods, but in some cases these were homes and livelihoods that TEPCO, or at least the presence of its plant in the area, had made possible in some way. It would be hard to ignore the importance of TEPCO money in supporting the local economy. She tells me this with no intention of excusing TEPCO for the disaster or suggesting that the residents of Futaba feel no resentment toward it. Resentment is strong, and in the case of some people from the town, it has convinced them to join the protests.
As for Kanda-san herself, though, while she agrees with the aims of the anti-nuclear movement, she is much too busy with POJ to get involved, and it would be a deviation from POJ’s mission to take it in a political direction. Furthermore, although she sympathizes with many protestors’ feelings, she admits to me that she feels a vague sense of annoyance whenever she sees pictures of protestors carrying placards that read “No More Fukushimas.” For her, Fukushima is more than just a nuclear worst-case scenario. To reduce its meaning to just that one dimension strikes her as very similar to the way of thinking that leads people to avoid having anything to do with Fukushima – its products and people – out of fear of nuclear contamination.
Although there are good reasons to be concerned about radiation exposure, as I’ve said before in this blog, the problem is that we don’t have a very clear, scientific understanding yet about what long-term low-level exposure can do. Instead, many people seem to react with a kind of “consciousness of defilement” (kegare ishiki) when they encounter something or someone from Fukushima. Fortunately, it appears that incidents of outright discrimination are less common than they were last summer. Schools into which children from the evacuated areas have transferred are doing a better job of educating the rest of the students on the nature of radioactive contamination, including an emphasis on the fact that you can’t “catch” it from someone, as a countermeasure against the kind of ostracism and bullying transferees faced in the early months. This seems to be having a positive impact. Likewise, although harder to grasp, it seems that adults too are less inclined than they were in the immediate aftermath to react to a Fukushima license plate in their parking lot with a sense of aversion.
But for Kanda-san and others, these changes, while appreciated, don’t do much to alleviate another emotionally taxing dimension of the nuclear exile situation: just as these people don’t want to be ostracized, neither do they wish to become objects of others’ pity. Yet in many ways the media’s portrayal of their plight in recent months, especially now that the media seems to have committed itself to criticizing TEPCO and the government’s handling of the crisis, has made them the poster children of the whole nation’s sense of sacrifice on the alter of corporate greed and administrative callousness. This is another reason why Kanda-san hopes to establish a “Little Futaba” somewhere in Fukushima Prefecture: at the very least, within Fukushima everyone bears the same association with a disaster that made the name of their home prefecture an international symbol of nuclear catastrophe; with one another, there’s no need to explain oneself or thank others for their inevitable words of sympathy.
This is where Yamanobe-san comes in. He feels that if people really want to show their empathy with the plight of the people in Fukushima, they should make a point of buying things from there, in order to help farmers and manufacturers in Fukushima save their businesses. “There’s a strong NIMBY component to the anti-nuclear movement. People may feel bad for the folks in places like Futaba, but the real point of their concern is a fear of radiation in their neighborhood, in their food, and in their bodies. This makes sense on one level, of course, but it seems unfair to me to use Fukushima as a kind of slogan to rally around, but at the same time to make no effort to help those who suffer the adverse effects of that association.”
Since the disaster and the discovery of hot spots well outside of the perimeter, agricultural produce from Fukushima has been all but impossible to sell to wholesalers and distributors. The reason for such avoidance is easy to understand, but it is also misguided. The government now allows Fukushima produce to be sold on the market, as long as at is screened for radiation first and found to be at or below the level of 100 Becquerel per kilogram. The government distributed screening machines to towns and cities, and local agricultural associations have acquired their own to run tests on their produce. Furthermore, producers have decided to lower the admissible levels of radiation to well under 100 Bq per kilogram. This produce may in fact be safer that foodstuffs produced outside of the prefecture, due to the far-flung and insidious nature of hot spot formation.
Just telling people this wouldn’t be enough to restore their trust and peace of mind, of course. As a restaurateur, however, Yamanobe-san is in a perfect position to do something about this. At his own restaurant, he has been using only vegetables produced in Fukushima, and he is working to get other restaurateurs to join him. The menu informs customers of the source of the vegetables and the fact that they have been judged safe under stricter standards than the government requires. So far, he says, there’s been no appreciable drop in business, nor have his colleagues promoting “grown in Fukushima” produce noticed any detrimental impact on their turnover.
“Our hope is to get a major producers of food products to sign on and advertise the fact. Maybe the cafeteria at the national Diet could sign on as well,” he adds, with a touch of irony. “That would be one thing they could do to help.”
Conviction
I am impressed by the sincerity of both of these people. They may be fighting an impossible battle in some ways, but I hope not. It’s a horrible thing to forsake an entire region and its way of life – consigning all of these things to the trash heap of history for something entirely beyond the responsibility or control of those living there. But it is also an all too easy thing to do – without even really thinking about – if you have no connection to such places to begin with. As I consider this, I can’t help but feel that these areas are being treated in much the same was as the conveniently evasive military term “collateral damage” treats the lives of innocents caught in the crossfire.
Kanda-san and Yamanobe-san have risen above any bitterness they might be entitled to feel – at least as far as I can tell. Far from focusing only on the plight of folks in Fukushima, moreover, through POJ they have reached out to help hisaisha in other parts of Tohoku, for whom the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi is a much less pressing concern. Despite the particularity of the experience of back-to-back natural and man-made disasters, Kanda-san prefers to focus on the bonds among fellow hisaisha, and between hisaisha and others, and to turn that empathy into a motive force for action. For his part, Yamanobe-san has found a great sense of fulfillment in being able to do something he has a true talent for to help others. “You hear stories sometimes about volunteers burning out because what they are doing is so different from their everyday lives,” he observes. “When you’re doing something you love and you’re good at, it makes it easier to keep at it over the long term.”
Less than an hour after I say farewell to both, I find myself in a bookstore somewhere within the frenetic transit hub of Shinjuku. I’m still thinking about what I’ve learned about the Futaba experience of 3/11 and its aftermath, when the following book on the new releases shelf catches my eye:
People of Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba, Ibaragi, and Gunma!
Are you and your family safe?
Escape from Kantō! The Serious Moving Manual
You should be concerned about the coming great earthquake and radiation!! Where should you escape to?? When you do, what about work?? Money?? A place to live? Companies? Schools?
It strikes me that the people of the towns around Fukushima Daiichi might have appreciated as similar manual, had one been available prior to 3/11. In light of the continued threat of internal exposure due to the prevalence of hot spots, and the uncertainties about the effects of long term, low dose exposure (to leave the threat of the next Great Kantō Earthquake aside), I can’t say I’m unsympathetic. Still, something about this strikes me as almost farcical, in light of the involuntary, sudden, and seemingly final dislocation forced upon the people of the communities immediately surrounding Fukushima Daiichi.
I didn’t flip through the book since I had to run to catch my train, but I can’t help but wonder whether it recommends any of the hisaichi areas up north as possible places of refuge from the next “Big One to hit Tokyo.” My guess is no.