A few weeks ago, three years after the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986, the Japanese government finally allowed some Fukushima Prefecture residents to return to their homes.
Officials claim that Tamura City's Miyakoji district is decontaminated and safe. But is this truly a sign that things are getting better?
I visited Fukushima last month, and, from many conversations with citizens who live daily with the threat of contamination, it is clear that matters are far from over.
Fukushima's people face staggering present and future hurdles. Implications for us are unmistakable. Fukushima's plight offers further reason to critically and doggedly re-examine the complexities and risks imbedded in our dependency upon nuclear power.
My stay in Fukushima followed a long volunteer stint as part of my sabbatical research working in the coastal towns further north, still ravaged by the March 11, 2011, disaster that took over 19,000 lives.
Waves pulverized towns, reaching as far inland as six miles. Fukushima aches from a triple punch. In addition to earthquake and tsunami, the people face the invisible peril of radiation.
After meeting friends in Fukushima City, we drove to Minamisoma, 14 miles north of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. One of the hardest hit areas, it lies on the edge of the official 20km (12.4-mile) exclusion zone where only emergency crews are permitted.
En route to our destination, amidst stunningly wooded mountains, we passed the nuclear ghost town of Iitate where residents were told to evacuate.
A few days after Daiichi's hydrogen explosions and three reactor meltdowns, wind and snow carried lethal radiation to the village. To date, Iitate villagers and 138,000 other Fukushima Prefecture residents remain scattered in various settlement sites and temporary shelters (kasetsu jūtaku).
I met with Minamisoma's legendary mayor, Katsunobu Sakurai, a compact and confident figure who became one of Time's 2011 Top 100 Influential People after breaking bureaucratic rank and appealing to the world for help on YouTube (http://tinyurl.com/mzbc5p5). He is fully committed to the daunting task of reviving his city, a near-impossible undertaking given that his citizens were left to themselves with little food, water, fuel or information, and abandoned by media. His message to me was clear: Unless government officials can approach ground level and see and feel his people's suffering, there can be no recovery.
This anguish is palpable in Minamisoma's vacant Odaka district, an eerie scene of abandoned streets, homes, shops, schools, and office buildings. Bicycles are still lined up outside the high school where students left them hours before evacuating. Far enough from shore, some of Odaka's buildings are intact. But, as in Iitate, uninhabitable. Bicycles and empty streets coexist as grim reminders of Fukushima's uncertain future.
As in Tamura City, the government will no doubt declare more areas to be safe enough to return. But how safe is safe? At least three snapshots compel reasonable skepticism over official announcements of safety.
First, in Japan's "nuclear village" — a powerful collusion of Tokyo Electric Power Company, owner and operator of Fukushima Daiichi 1, government, and pro-nuclear academics — overseers like the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency also actively promote what they oversee. A dangerously incestuous brew results when, for instance, University of Tokyo Professor Haruki Madarame, an ardent nuclear advocate who had earlier downplayed seismic hazards of plants on vulnerable sites, chairs Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission on 3/11.
Second, media reporting soon after 3/11 ranged from soft-pedaling risks to outright hysteria. And mainstream newspaper reports seemed pretty much under the watchful eye of government and TEPCO. Tokyo-based correspondent David McNeill, in his co-authored Strong in the Rain, writes that, according to the Nikkei Advertising Research Institute, Japan's power industry prior to the disaster was the country's biggest advertiser, spending 88 billion yen (about $1 billion) a year.
Third, baseless rumors smear nearly anything associated with Fukushima, most poignantly the people, who, after surviving an earthquake, tsunami, and radiation, now endure a social stigma of being viewed as contaminated (http://tinyurl.com/ln7s8vc). Tomomi Kaneko, a volunteer with whom I worked, lives in Fukushima and studies civil engineering at Fukushima National College of Technology.
She fervently shared with me strong fears among her peers over this social contamination. Fukushima residents have become Japan's new hibakusha, those survivors of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who endured severe discrimination long after the Pacific War.
Looking back, events at the Daiichi complex during the disaster paint a chilling saga of operational blunders along with communication gaffes among TEPCO officials, their plant's emergency command post, Prime Minister Naoto Kan's office, and nuclear advisers. All of this transpired as thousands of bodies washed ashore.
Looking ahead, major challenges persist: considerable leaks of radioactive water into soil and sea; concerns about the skill level of the nuclear plant's repair crews; and the painstakingly long decontamination process lines contractors' pockets, not villagers'. Financial incentives for evacuees to return are dismal. Where are the jobs? Upon returning home, they will no longer receive government and TEPCO provisional stipends.
Meiji Gakuin University social anthropologist Tom Gill in his edited Japan Copes with Calamity tersely writes, "It suited the government and TEPCO to downplay radiation levels so that they could hold out the possibility of an early return and thereby delay or reduce compensation payments."
With fractured trust in authorities, communities are dying. Youth leave for jobs, families exit for children's safety, and the elderly, yearning to return home, wonder whether it's worth the risk. Mayor Sakurai tells me that Minamisoma's population is now less than a third of its pre-disaster 71,000.
Fukushima residents inhabit their limbo, not knowing who or what to believe about "safety." For the "2011 Tohoku-oki Earthquake," the betrayal and loss of public trust constitutes its most far-reaching tragedy.
Michael Brannigan is the Pfaff Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Values at The College of Saint Rose. His email address is michael.brannigan@strose.edu and his website is >www.michaelcbrannigan.com>.