‘THE WORLD IS heavy on us,” says Katsunobu Sakurai, recalling the day its weight almost crushed the life out of his city.
On the morning of March 11th last year, Minamisoma and its mayor were struggling with the same mundane problems as many other small rural cities across Japan: a declining, greying population, creaking public services and a faltering local economy. By nightfall an existential disaster had engulfed Mayor Sakurai’s office, one from which it has yet to re-emerge.
It began with the huge quake that struck off the coast of the city of 71,000 at 2.46pm. Less than an hour later Sakurai was on the roof of the city office, squinting towards the sea, 10km away. “We could see this huge cloud of dust rising into the air from the Pacific. I asked someone, ‘Is that a fire?’ Then we realised it was the tsunami.”
Even as he spoke the deluge was inundating hundreds of homes, drowning old people and children; sometimes whole families. By evening corpses were being brought to a makeshift morgue at a college.
The quake and tsunami took 630 lives, including 100 children, in Minamisoma. For days Sakurai wondered if his elderly parents were among the casualties. But instead of looking for them he was dealing with the crisis that would define his city.
On March 12th, 23km south of his office, an explosion blew apart the building housing Reactor 1 at the Daiichi nuclear plant. Its operator, Tokyo Electric Power, and the government were silent about what was happening. Public television said there was no need for panic. Minamisoma’s citizens made up their own minds and began to flee rumoured radiation.
Within days the town had almost emptied. Twenty-seven thousand residents – a third of the population – have yet to return. “They’re scattered all across Japan,” says Sakurai. “We know of some families in America too. Who knows if they will ever come back?”
About 150 of his city’s 830 employees are expected to quit this year, a “municipal meltdown” brought on by the stress of last year’s calamity. “We had to work everything out for ourselves, because there was no help from central government. We’re seeing the results of that now.”
Minamisoma's agony was replicated along the northeast coast, where the tsunami at some points topped 40m. Nineteen thousand people were eventually dead or missing. Among the terabytes of digital footage from Japan's disaster, one of the most heartbreaking shows fleeing refugees from Rikuzentakata, up the coast from Minamisoma, watching from a hill as a huge muddy wave slowly swallows up their picture-postcard town. Voices behind the shaky camera record the emotions of the crowd, from initial incredulity to horror, then keening despair. An elderly man keeps repeating " Tomete kure, tomete kure" ("Stop it, please stop it").
Memory and forgetting were life-or-death issues on March 11th, 2011. Akio Komukai, a 61-year-old factory worker, recalls speeding away from the coast in the city of Ofunato after the earthquake struck and meeting children on their way home from school. "They were walking towards the sea, and I rolled down the window of my car and shouted, ' Tsunami tendenko' " ("There's a tsunami coming! You need to run away!") The children looked at the 61-year-old Cassandra and kept walking, an episode one imagines being repeated through the centuries.
TSUNAMI WARNINGS ARE common in the Tohoku (northeast) region: there had been one a few days before March 11th. Komukai, who remembers a 1960 tsunami washing away houses, still wonders who among the children survived.
“They didn’t believe me,” he says. “We forget that the sea is close because we build next to it. Then the tsunami comes and washes away the houses and you can see the sea again. And we’re reminded.”
The tsunami roared through a huge floodgate in Rikuzentakata, sweeping away 45 young firemen trying to shut the gate, tearing the town of 23,000 people from its roots and leaving behind a gaping landscape that reminded survivors of post-second World War Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Journalists found car navigation systems still directing them to the post office, hospital and other landmarks that were no longer there. Survivors could often be seen picking through the mud for belongings, especially photo albums. In makeshift refugee centres, photographs plucked from the deluge were laid out at the entrances, in the hope that their owners would claim them – if they had survived.
Today only the skeletons of steel-structured buildings stand in many of these coastal towns in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures. Two-roomed prefab homes have sprung up in schools, parks and every available public space, housing the 340,000 or so people displaced by the disaster. The lucky ones, such as Makoto Mikamori and his wife, Megumi, have already started to rebuild.
“It’s tough, but our community has pulled together, so we’re managing,” says Yoshiko Oikawa, who lost her home near the coast in Ofunato. It will be several years before she and her three children get a new home, but she considers herself fortunate, because her kids are safe. Some of their friends were not so lucky.
History has shown that these communities can rebuild, often with remarkable speed. In 1933, waves up to 28m tall demolished much of this coastline, leaving more than 3,000 dead or missing. Another tsunami, up to 38m high, hit in 1896, killing 22,000. Ofunato, Minamisoma, Rikuzentakata and other towns have always bounced back, erecting stone monuments at the highest point of the tsunami that struck their homes, then forgetting their lessons, the faded stone lettering a metaphor for collective amnesia.
Recovery this time, however, is less easy to predict. Even before March 11th, 2011, communities such as Rikuzentakata, where more than a third of the population is 65 or older, were withering. Many fear the disaster will accelerate migration to the cities, further sapping them of the energy and taxes needed to rebuild.
Regeneration is also complicated by the radiation from the Daiichi plant, which has blanketed 8 per cent of the entire country. Nearly all of the 23 million tonnes of rubble from the tsunami and quake is still piled up around the coast, because it is widely believed to be contaminated and the government can’t persuade local authorities to dispose of it.
Much of the worst radiation damage was inflicted on March 14th and 15th, when a plume from the plant was carried by winds northwest of the Daiichi plant and over pristine farming land in Fukushima, one of Japan’s key food baskets. “It rained on those nights, and the rain brought the radiation down on top of us,” says Nobuyoshi Ito, a farmer in the mountain village of Iitate, 40km from the plant and a scenic half-hour drive from Minamisoma.
For reasons that remain murky, the government delayed releasing data that would have shown the radiation’s path and saved many from heavy exposure. Hundreds of families unknowingly evacuated into the most irradiated areas. “It was a crime, and the people in government who made that decision should go to jail,” says Ito.
He is among a tiny number of farmers who have ignored a government directive to evacuate from this area. The directive has emptied once-thriving towns around the plant of 114,000 people, including more than 6,000 from Iitate. An unknown additional number – anywhere from 50,000 to 120,000, according to observers – have moved voluntarily because of radiation fears, ignoring official claims that life inside or around Fukushima prefecture is safe. Mothers have taken their children and started new lives elsewhere, splitting up families, often in the teeth of protesting fathers and in-laws.
“My husband didn’t agree to the move and tells us to come back home,” says Akemi Sato, a housewife from Fukushima City, about 60km from the nuclear plant, who now lives in Tokyo with her two children, aged nine and seven. “I have to pay my bills in Tokyo and travel to Fukushima to see my husband three or four times a month. It’s very expensive and stressful, but I didn’t see a choice.” Compensation for the victims of the nuclear disaster has dribbled in: most have received less than €20,000. Sato, who moved voluntarily, is not currently entitled to a penny, as the government insists that her home is safe.
Across the region, workers in boiler suits and masks have descended on dozens of towns with power hoses, trying to scour the Daiichi plant’s toxic payload from playgrounds, parks and other public areas. The workers have removed most of the most dangerous contaminant – caesium – from the grounds of Minamisoma Middle High School, says its principal, Shinichi Hamano. Like other public buildings here, the school has planted a large dosimeter outside its front gates, showing the radiation in large digital letters, to reassure local parents – with limited success. Only half of its 360 students have returned since last year, Hamano admits. “I don’t know if we will ever recover to what we were before March 11th, but we are certainly improving,” he says, pointing to the flashing red dosimeter outside, which reads 0.2 microsieverts.
Last March the radiation was 10 times that, a level that exceeded central-government guidelines of a millisievert of radiation a year. In response, the government raised the limit to 20 millisieverts, sparking bitter protests. Many children have since reported low immunity and other health problems, though nobody has proved a link to the nuclear plant. Hamano says that his students are still limited to two hours’ play outside a day and are told to stay on the main roads home and avoid “hot spots”. By April he expects the radiation to have fallen enough to allow unlimited outside play. “We will survive this horrible event, I believe.”
A FEW KILOMETRES from the school, National Route 6, which runs right by its gates and down the Pacific coast, hits the 20km exclusion zone around the crippled plant. Police officers with dosimeters pinned to their chests prevent locals from entering, even Mayor Sakurai, who has a farm just on the other side. Reporters and citizens who venture inside through back roads can be arrested. Inside the zone, life has frozen in time. Homes have been abandoned and reclaimed by weeds. Thousands of farm animals and pets have been left to die. The 80,000 people who once lived here have not been told when, if ever, they can return.
Outside the zone the government is decontaminating hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland and forest by scraping off a 5cm-layer of topsoil, an operation it estimates will leave a pile of nuclear waste of almost 29 million cubic metres – enough to fill one of Tokyo’s largest stadiums 80 times.
Across the Fukushima countryside, trucks trundle to “temporary” dumps with their cargo of poisoned clay past mask-wearing security guards, a plan Ito and others insist is doomed to failure. “They’re just moving the radiation from once place to another,” he says. “Who is going to take it when they’re finished? Fukushima will stay poisoned for decades to come.”
Cleaning up and compensating for the triple disaster will add to Japan’s already groaning debt burden. Although its powerful economy is showing signs of life after, predictably, contracting last year, the nation faces profound long-term structural problems, notably a looming demographic crisis.
Last month the health ministry forecast that the population of 128 million will fall by 30 per cent in the next half-century, while soaring life expectancy will further burden the state. The shrinking and ageing population means the government will struggle to cope with ballooning social-welfare costs and the aftermath of March 11th while trying to pay off Japan’s public debt – at €9 trillion the worst in the industrialised world.
Mayor Sakurai and other observers fear that the central government may have backed off from the more radical changes needed to guide the country through what its former prime minister Naoto Kan called Japan’s worst crisis since the second World War. Kan’s successor, Yoshihiko Noda, has signalled business as usual for nuclear power and little else in the way of new initiatives except for a hike in taxes to pay for recovery.
“I think we can recover, but we need leadership, and I see little of that,” says Sakurai. Still, he is optimistic that good will come from the tragedy that erupted with such awful suddenness from underneath the Pacific a year ago. He wants to turn his city into a global centre for renewables and believes the crisis will galvanise a nation that has seemed adrift for two decades.
Thousands of young people have volunteered for work in Tohoku, farmers are experimenting with crops, school children have begun thinking about new approaches to the country’s problems. “Those are the energies we have to draw on,” he says. “That’s our future.”
