Seven years after the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, Fukushima evacuees say that the lesson they have learned is that their government is not prepared to tell them the truth.
Tokyo (dpa) – Kenichi Hasegawa has decided to return to his hometown in Fukushima to start farming despite radioactive contamination following the 2011 nuclear fallout.
“I cannot tolerate to see my hometown getting run-down,” says Hasegawa, a resident of Iitate Village.
The Japanese government lifted evacuation orders for Iitate in March 2017 as officials said it had finished decontamination work in the village. But only 9 per cent of its residents have resumed their lives there, according to local officials.
“Only older people have returned home,” Hasegawa, in his 60s, admits, adding that his children and grandchildren will not follow him because of radiation contamination there.
Hasegawa was a dairy farmer in Iitate before one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents struck his area on March 11, 2011.
Following an earthquake and tsunami, the Fukushima Daiichi plant suffered meltdowns at three of its six reactors, releasing radioactive material into the environment.
“We had to dump all the milk from our cows,” he recalls at a symposium in Tokyo on Friday organized by Friends of the Earth Japan, an environmental group.
Seven years on, the suffering of local people, as well as the disaster itself, are “forgotten and hidden” says Hasegawa.
“Japan does not tell you the truth and it hides the truth completely,” he says.
The village of Iitate, which lies around 40 kilometres north-west of Fukushima Daiichi, was not within the 20-kilometre radiation exclusion zone set up soon after the accident.
But some scientific experts and environmentalists have warned that Iitate was heavily contaminated, as prevailing winds blew directly towards the mountainous village, carrying radioactive substances into the area.
More than one month after the nuclear emergency, the government finally conceded Iitate was so contaminated that its residents had to leave.
The “only thing” that reached Iitate was radiation, the farmer says, though it did not get any of the “perks and subsidies” handed out to other nearby towns.
But, other evacuees echo Hasegawa’s frustration, saying authorities have continued to downplay the magnitude of the disaster.
“We suffered unnecessary exposure to radiation as our evacuation was delayed,” says Noriko Matsumoto, who was then in the city of Koriyama, 30 kilometres west of the plant.
Matsumoto evacuated to the city of Kawasaki near Tokyo with her daughter in May 2011 after the teenager complained of nosebleeds and stomachache following the accident.
“Fukushima residents like me relied on information from central and local authorities without any doubt,” Matsumoto says. “It was an about-face after I saw the footage of a blast at the plant on the website of a US media.”
Kanna Mitsuta, from Friends of the Earth Japan, says central and Fukushima authorities are seemingly aiming to reduce the number of evacuees to zero.
Mitsuta says she believes the government has been trying to make the damage and the victims of the nuclear disaster “invisible,” while Japanese media reports have continued to stress the advancement of the reconstruction in Fukushima.
As Japan marked the seventh anniversary of the tsunami and nuclear disasters on Sunday, “what we need to do is never forget the nuclear accident,” says Mitsuta.
For Hasegawa, who has also written a book about his experiences, called “Fukushima’s Stolen Lives: A Dairy Farmer’s Story,” his return to Iitate serves two purposes.
It is not only to start farming, he says, but also “to disseminate what is taking place in our hometown.”
Takehiko Kambayashi 