The Japanese government is trying to make more evacuees return to Fukushima, the site of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, saying it’s now safe to live there after decontamination work. But many evacuees are not convinced and still fear the health effects.
Tokyo and Yonezawa (dpa) – Following her retirement, Miyako Kumamoto finally moved to Fukushima to enjoy a laid-back, rural lifestyle away from Tokyo’s hectic pace.
Kumamoto and her husband purchased a 9000-square-metre block of land in the city of Tamura, where they started to grow fruit and vegetables including cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes and kiwifruit.
For the past seven years, however, she has been back in Tokyo, living in a small apartment.
In March 2011, her country life came to an abrupt halt, when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, located 30 kilometres east of her house, suffered a triple meltdown, spewing radioactive substances after a massive tsunami swept through the complex.
“At first, I evacuated to my son’s place in Tokyo,” Kumamoto recalls.
Then she moved to a one-room apartment which was provided for evacuees from Fukushima by the local Tokyo government.
But, a year ago, the Fukushima prefectural government ended its housing subsidies for about 26,000 so-called “voluntary evacuees” like Kumamoto who had lived outside the mandatory evacuation zones at the time of the accident.
That means Kumamoto has to either leave the apartment room in Tokyo or pay the rent if she continues to stay.
“The problem is that the central government has no housing policy for evacuees of the nuclear accident,” the retiree says.
Most evacuees have still not returned home due to their concerns about the health effects of long-lasting radiation, says Daisaku Seto, secretary general of the Cooperation Centre for 3.11, a citizens group that supports nuclear evacuees.
Many of them have struggled to make ends meet after losing housing support, Seto says.
“The government wants to say, ‘If you don’t like it, go back to Fukushima.’ They want no evacuees by the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.”
Greenpeace Japan said last week that unless the Japanese government ends its current policy of terminating housing support, tens of thousands of evacuees will continue to suffer from “unjustified financial coercion.”
In Kumamoto’s case, she was told decontamination work for her house had been completed. But high levels of radioactive caesium were still detected three metres from the entrance to her house.
“It is absolutely impossible to resume my life there,” Kumamoto says. Unlike a natural disaster, six or seven years do not bring an end to a nuclear accident, she adds.
Tokyo Electric Power, the operator of the crippled plant, said it would take at least four decades to decommission all the reactors.
In the city of Yonezawa, 250 kilometres north of Tokyo, Toru Takeda, a former high school teacher, and seven other families from Fukushima, continue to live in apartment rooms without paying the rent. The government has already filed a lawsuit against the evacuees, trying to evict them.
At a news conference in Tokyo last year, Takeda reminded reporters that they are the victims of a disaster that was caused by the government and Tokyo Electric. The government and the operator should provide housing for all evacuees, he said.
“Nobody was willing to leave our homes in Fukushima. The nuclear accident forced us to flee our home town,” says Takeda, who leads a group of residents who have evacuated to Yamagata prefecture.
The Fukushima government discontinued housing subsidies for evacuees like Takeda a year ago, “even though they did not listen to our opinions and take individual circumstances into account,” he says.
About 470 people from Fukushima still live in Yonezawa. Just after the 2011 disaster the city was home to as many as 3,900 evacuees.
“Some evacuees still commute to and from Fukushima, an hour-long drive away,” Takeda says. “They leave very early morning and come back late, so they are worn out, and have little time for their children.”
Citizen group leader Seto says the nuclear disaster has divided families that he speaks to. Some couples have become separated or divorced over differing opinions as to whether or not they should evacuate their home in Fukushima.
One of the mothers Seto had been talking to was a victim of domestic violence. She killed herself in May, he says.
“All of them told me their family would not have been broken up without a nuclear disaster,” Seto says.
#Japan
Takehiko Kambayashi 