Fukushima and Tokyo (dpa) – Katsutaka Idogawa heard the explosion 3 kilometres from a nuclear power plant in Fukushima prefecture, one day after it was struck by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011.
Soon, bits of insulation began falling from the sky like snow. “It was just like a scene straight out of a movie,” he said.
“We were in the middle of evacuation,” the then-mayor of Futaba town said. “Police, troops, residents and hospital staff – we were all exposed to radiation.”
Idogawa said he did not believe he could rely on prime minister Naoto Kan, so one week after the disaster, he decided to relocate about 1,200 residents and the town’s office to Saitama city, 210 kilometres south-west of the disaster site.
The nuclear plant suffered meltdowns at three of its six reactors and about 160,000 people were forced to leave their homes.
Idogawa said some Futaba residents and about half the town’s officials are now in poor health. He suspected exposure to radiation and exhaustion after their relocation.
Idogawa himself lost his hair and occasionally had a bloody nose soon after the disaster and was hospitalized twice, he said: “I felt so dizzy that I almost lost consciousness in the office.”
“My eyes hurt, and I constantly have pain in my throat,” he said. “I think that is because of my exposure to radiation.”
Idogawa said he would not return to Fukushima because of high levels of radiation there.
“I have repeatedly asked government officials to move to Fukushima if they think it is a safe place to live,” he said. “They have never responded to the question.”
“Children should not live in Fukushima prefecture. I believe they should be evacuated no matter how expensive it would be,” Idogawa said. “When I talked about this in front of newspaper and television reporters, they never published it.”
A local government panel reported in mid-February that three people had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and seven others are suffering from suspected forms of cancer. They are undergoing examinations at Fukushima Medical University.
But Kazuo Sakai at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences denied that the cases of thyroid cancer were caused by radiation from the nuclear plant.
“The amount of radiation doses which people in Fukushima have been exposed to has been low,” he said. “It takes at least several years to detect cancer if it is caused by radiation. We have not seen any radiation-related damage or effect.”
But in Fukushima, many parents are concerned about the health effects of radiation. Tens of thousands of people have already moved out of the prefecture.
“We are plagued with anxiety every day,” said Toshio Urasawa, a resident of Fukushima city. “Once our grandchildren come home from school, they never go out. I have seldom seen children play outside.”
“My daughter, who is a junior high school student, told me the other day that she would never get married outside Fukushima” because people outside the prefecture would think she has been exposed to radiation, said Yoshihiko Kanno, a father of two.
But their concerns are downplayed by the government and media, critics said.
“I wonder whether Fukushima has been forgotten,” Urasawa said. “The media don’t come here to report” residents’ concerns.
Idogawa criticized the central government for spending about 1.1 billion dollars on facilities for radiation medicine at Fukushima Medical University rather than evacuate the area and take care of the refugees.
The government lets “people continue to live in Fukushima and they have become guinea pigs in an experimentation of radiation exposure,” he charged.
Takehiko Kambayashi 