The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 13 | Issue 42 | Number 3 | Article ID 4389 | Oct 19, 2015

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Inside Fukushima's Potemkin Village: Naraha

David McNeill, Androniki Christodoulou

Twice a year, journalists are taken on guidedtours of the ruined Daiichi nuclear plant,operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO).The drive there from the southern outskirts ofthe 20-kilometer exclusion zone imposed in2011 took them through the nearly emptytowns of Hirono, Naraha, Tomioka, Okuma andFutaba. The state of neglect could be measuredby the encroachment of weeds and wildanimals, and the slow decrepitude of housingand infrastructure.

Despite the decline and the still urgent beepingof Geiger counters nearer the plant, there hasnever been any official talk of abandoning thearea. Instead, it was divided up into threezones with awkward euphemisms to suggestjust the opposite: communities with radiation of20 millisieverts (mSv) or less (the typicalworldwide limit for workers in nuclear plants)are “being prepared for lifting of evacuationorder;” 20-50 mSv are “no-residence zones;”the most heavily contaminated (50mSv) are“difficult-to-return.”

A vast public-works project was started threeyears ago to decontaminate an area roughlyhalf the size of Rhode Island, at an estimatedcost of $50 billion. Compensation by TEPCOwas explicitly linked to the possibility thatmany of the 160,000 nuclear refugees wouldreturn , and any h in t o therwise wascontroversial: When new trade and industryminister Hachiro Yoshio called the abandonedcommunities “towns of death” in September2011, he was forced to quit a week later.

Cheerful poster that was recently placed near thepublic welfare office in Naraha Town which is tryingto revive its pre-2011 life (All photos by Androniki

Chistodoulou)

In September 2015, Naraha, 15km south of theplant, became the first town in FukushimaPrefecture to completely lift the evacuationorder imposed after the Daiichi plant's triplemeltdown. At a ceremony to mark the town’sreopening, Mayor Matsumoto Yukiei declaredthe nightmare that had descended nearly fiveyears ago officially over. “The clock thatstopped has now begun to tick”, he said.Explaining the decision, Takagi Yosuke, stateminister of economy, trade and industry, saidcontamination was “not dangerous enough tocontinue forcing evacuation on residents whowant to return home.”

That explanation somewhat inverts reality. AReconstruction Agency survey conducted lastyear of evacuees from Okuma, Tomioka, Futabaand the town of Namie, northwest of the plant,found that just one-fifth wanted to go back totheir homes. Thousands of refugees havereluctantly made lives elsewhere and fear that

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their nuclear compensation, amounting to amonthly stipend of 100,000 yen ($837), will beterminated if they refuse to go back to areasdeclared safe. Many feel they’re being pushedback, not invited.

Naraha is almost entirely state-funded. It has apublicly built shopping centre, a newkindergarten and a secondary school underconstruction. A new factory on the outskirts oftown will design and test robots for use indecommissioning the ruined plant. A team ofdecontamination workers has been sent toevery house – in some cases several times. Freedosimeters are distributed to residents whoreturn, so they can measure airbone radiation.Water at the local water filtration plant istested hourly, says Igari Yusuke, a localgovernment spokesman. “We probably have thesafest tap water in Japan,” he says.

Igari Yusuke: spokesman for Naraha Town Office

All that’s missing are people: fewer than 200 ofthe town’s 7,400 residents have returned,admits Igari. Locals say the real number ismuch smaller. “Some came and left again,”says Yamauchi Kazuo, who is visiting relativesnearby. “There’s nothing here for them.” Thetown is bustling with men in uniform, mostlyconstruction workers or local governmentofficials who will eventually move on. Thereturnees include a single young local family,says Igari, but he declines to introduce them,citing privacy issues. Instead, we find thefarmhouse of Yamauchi Kohei (79) and Tomoko(75), who say they have come back for good.

Yamauchi Kohei and Tomoko, elderly couple whoreturned to Naraha after the evacuation order was

lifted, inside their house

Like thousands of other evacuees, the elderlycouple fled on the freezing night of March 11,2011. In the subsequent months, they changedaddress six times, living for a while with theirdaughter in Nagano Prefecture , southwest ofTokyo before eventually – like many localpeople – ending up in temporary housing inIwaki City about 30km south of Naraha. It wasa difficult experience, they recall: apart fromthe disruption, the walls of their temporary-housing unit were paper thin and they couldhear everything said and done by the noisy

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family next door.

They returned to their home periodically ongovernment-sanctioned visits, wearing masks,gloves and Hazmat suits, eyeing in despair theimpact of the elements on their beloved house.Last year, they were allowed to return duringthe daylight hours to work on making it livableagain. Months of backbreaking work anddecontamination later, the weeds are gone andthe radiation is down to livable levels – about0.1 mSv per hour, they say.

The Yamauchi home has been in the family forseven generations. In the room off the genkanor foyer, portraits of Kohei’s ancestors decoratethe walls. “I couldn’t just abandon it”, he says.In any case, he adds, he and his wife are too oldto care about cancer. Life is not the same asbefore, of course, but perhaps, little by little itwill return to normal, he says. “It we return,perhaps the children will see that everything isalright and they will follow us.”

Local policeman wearing a dosimeter to measure theradiation that he receives during his work

A few miles up the road, closer to the Daiichiplant, communities are still considereduninhabitable. Local police officers weardosimeters pinned to their chests in case theystray into danger zones.

Bags with radioactive soil that was collected in thearea can be seen in several areas around Naraha

town

Hundreds of fields around the prefecture hoststacked rows of black 100-kg bags ofcontaminated earth, stripped from the ground;Naraha alone generated 58,000 such bags, saysIgari. Many locals are skeptical that the earthwill ever be removed. Though the radiationlevels are technically low, mothers aredetermined to keep their children away, saysKanai Naoko, an evacuee.

The goal of all this work is normalisation.Naraha is a showcase for post-FukushimaJapan, says Igari. “If people won’t return to livehere, they won’t return anywhere. We feel aheavy sense of responsibility”. Nobody wantsFukushima mentioned in the same breath asChernobyl: almost three decades after theworld’s worst nuclear accident, life there is stillfrozen in time, a snapshot of the mid-1980sSoviet Union, complete with posters of VladimirLenin on school walls. “The key objective is tocommunicate to the public that Japan canovercome a nuclear accident,” says Jan VandePutte , a radiat ion specia l is t for theenvironmental watchdog GreenpeaceInternational. “It’s not economical; it would bea lot cheaper to give people enough money toleave and buy new houses. The goal ispolitical.”

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So far, most former residents are not buying it.One element of doubt is radiation. The bestresult of decontamination is a 50-percentreduction in contamination levels, “sometimesless,” says Vande Putte. The other issue islinked to infrastructure, particularly hospitals,doctors and shops. Within a year, Naraha willhave a new government-funded clinic, the newschool will have opened; radiation in mostplaces will have fallen to near-normal levels.But wil l families return? Igari smilesuncomfortably. “We like to think they will,” hesays. “Perhaps it will take five or ten years. Wehope it will happen sooner but it’s difficult totell.” There’s no question of forcing peopleback by cutting off their compensation, heinsists. But without an extension, the trickle ofmoney is due to end in 2018.

Following the 2011 triple disaster, Japan closedall 53 of its nuclear reactors. A month beforeNaraha reopened, it fired up a reactor inKyushu - the first under tougher safety rulesintroduced after Fukushima. Operators ofanother two-dozen reactors have applied torestart — the government’s latest energy planassumes they will eventually provide more than20 per cent of the nation’s energy mix. But therestarts are unpopular and virtually every oneis the focus of a potentially long-drawn outlegal dispute over safety. A survey by Reuters,published after the Kyushu restart said that ofthe other 42 operable reactors in Japan, “justseven are likely to be turned on in the next fewyears.” Nine reactors are likely to stay off forgood and the future of the rest is “uncertain.”

Many of the roughly 120,000 remaining nuclearevacuees, meanwhile, have built new liveselsewhere and are reluctant to return tocommunities that have fallen into ruin. Worriesover radiation complicate an already difficultdecision, particularly for those with youngchildren. Though scientists have repeatedlysaid the decontaminated areas are safe, manydistrust those reassurances, says Kanai. Suchworries are highlighted by a hotly contested

report claiming that rates of thyroid cancer inFukushima since March 2011 are 20 to 50times the national level.

Small signs of life give the returnees hope:newspaper deliveries recently restarted and thepost office will reopen shortly. Trains arearriving at the local station again – a digitalreadout displays the radiation level over theticket counter.

Do locals bear a grudge about what happened?No, says Watanabe Seijun, who manages a localrestaurant. When he was a boy, he recalls, hisfather worked in the summer but had to travelall the way to Tokyo for seasonal work in thewinter. The power plant came along in the1970s and provided a living for many localpeople. “There’s no point in blaming anyone forwhat happened, he says.” Yamauchi Koheiagrees. “We just have to look ahead and try toimprove our lot. What else can we do.”

David McNeill writes for The Independent(http://www.independent.co.uk/) and otherpublications, including The Irish Times(http://www.irishtimes.com/) and TheEconomist (http://www.economist.com/). AnAsia-Pacific Journal editor, he is a coauthor ofS t r o n g i n t h e R a i n(http://amzn.com/0230341861/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20): Surviving Japan's Earthquake,Tsunami and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster(Palgrave Macmillan).

Androniki Christodoulouis a Tokyo-basedfreelance photographer whose work hasappeared in such international media as TheTimes (http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/),T h e I n d e p e n d e n t(http://www.independent.co.uk/) and theTelegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/)(UK),D e r S p i e g e l(h t tp : / /www.sp iege l .de / in ternat iona l / )( G e r m a n y ) , B u s i n e s s w e e k(http://www.bloomberg.com/businessweek)( U S ) , a n d S h u k a n A s a h i(http://publications.asahi.com/ecs/24.shtml)

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(Japan). She is the author of a book, OtakuS p a c e s(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0984457658/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20). Her home page can be foundhere (http://www.androniki.com/).

Recommended citation: David McNeill andAndroniki Christodoulou, "Inside Fukushima'sPotemkin Village: Naraha", The Asia-PacificJournal, Vol. 13, Issue 42, No. 3, October 19,2015.

See the accompanying article by Arjkadiusz

Podniesiński, Fukushima: The View FromG r o u n d Z e r o(https://apjjf.org/-Arkadiusz-Podniesi__ski/4388/article.html).

Related article

The Economist, Back to the Nuclear Zone(http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21676828-lack-trust-authorities-hindering-resettlement-n e a r - f u k u s h i m a - b a c k - n u c l e a r -zone?cid1=cust/noenew/n/n/n/20151026n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/n/email), Oct 26,2015.