Ten years have passed since the disaster of 11 March 2011, yet this chapter is far from closed. Travelling to Fukushima, one perceives both rebirth and destruction, at times separated by nothing more than a road.
"While the evacuation order was in force, I was living in temporary housing in another part of Fukushima. During that period we were only allowed to visit our homes during the day, and I started planting lots of flowers because everything was so sad. Now I realise that looking after those flowers was a way of rebuilding myself."
This is just one fragment of the story of Tomoko Kobayashi, who together with her husband runs a ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn, in Odaka, a district of the city of Minamisoma in Fukushima prefecture, Japan. Thanks to her and the other people I met in Hamadori, the eastern region of Fukushima facing the Pacific Ocean, I had the privilege of learning more closely about the consequences of the disaster of 11 March 2011 through the accounts of those who lived through it first-hand. And who continue to live through it, given that this chapter is still open, even ten years on.
The first time I visited Fukushima, in 2016, Odaka was still closed to residents. Very few businesses had tentatively begun to reopen, but the houses were still empty. Since the evacuation order was lifted the following year, 3,650 inhabitants have returned — only a fraction of the 13,000 people who lived here before 2011. Some have died, perhaps of old age — after all, a great deal of time has passed — and others, above all many young people and many families, have moved elsewhere. And to think that Odaka is one of the places where life has, in some way, seemed to restart. Other municipalities remain almost entirely abandoned, either by the choice of their (by now former) residents, or because radiation levels are still too high. Almost 37,000 people still cannot return home.
Odaka, today, is entirely new. Many buildings were swept away by the tsunami and the houses have been rebuilt. It is hard to imagine what it looked like during those terrible days when it was submerged under water. "The streets had completely lost their colour. The tsunami left nothing but greyness in its wake," Tomoko recalls.
On that 11 March — or 3/11, as the date is written in Japan — the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the country's history, of magnitude 9, struck with its epicentre 130 kilometres from the coast of Tōhoku, the north-eastern region comprising six prefectures, including that of Fukushima. The earthquake triggered a tsunami of terrifying proportions, a wall of water up to 16.7 metres high that flooded 500 square kilometres of land in the prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima, sweeping away 20,000 human lives.
The wave also overtopped the protective barriers of Fukushima Daiichi, at the time one of the largest nuclear power plants in the world. The flooding knocked out the emergency generators and, without power, the cooling systems of the plant's six reactors shut down. The release of hydrogen caused by the exposure of fuel rods to air triggered explosions in reactors 1, 2 and 3 and the release of large quantities of radiation that contaminated a vast area of northern Japan, and beyond.
The details of those hours and days are now well known. The nuclear disaster, which forced more than 100,000 of the people living within a twenty-kilometre radius (and beyond) of the plant to abandon their homes, had devastating effects on Japanese society, politics and the economy.
The nuclear industry froze, Prime Minister Naoto Kan resigned, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest against nuclear power, official inquiries such as the one chaired by Kiyoshi Kurokawa ruled against the Japanese government and Tepco, the electricity company that owns Fukushima Daiichi. Tepco's executives were taken to court and then acquitted. The disaster caused economic damage of 130 billion euros; 74 billion was paid by Tepco in compensation, and the decommissioning of the plant — a process the government aims to complete over the next 20 or 30 years — will cost 60 billion euros according to the government, and between 85 and 400 billion according to other estimates. There remain the still-unresolved problems of what to do with the contaminated soil removed to lower radiation levels and the radioactive water used to cool the reactors.
Making sense of the complexity of these events seems impossible, and especially in the eastern region of Fukushima — which is a large prefecture and so distinctions are important — this chain of events has not yet come to a halt. The worst of the tragedy of the earthquake and tsunami has passed, even though the spectre of death and destruction has not left these areas, nor those struck even harder by the natural disasters, such as the city of Ishinomaki in Miyagi. But in some parts of Hamadori, reconstruction has not even begun because these areas remain inaccessible due to radiation. Travelling along the roads — those that can be used — in the exclusion zones it is not possible to stop, let alone leave the road. All the buildings — houses, restaurants, shops — are sealed off by temporary gates and owners can only gain access with a permit.
In March, the trees still have few leaves and the rice has not yet been planted. The wintry tones of brown hills and golden fields are accompanied by the soft white and pink glow of plum trees in blossom — a sign that spring is just around the corner. Narrow valleys surrounded by wooded hills give way to broad plains as, descending from the mountains that divide the coastal area from the rest of the prefecture, one heads towards the sea.
This serene landscape is interrupted, in what appears a random fashion, by piles of tens to thousands of large black bags. This is the (temporary) solution for storing the soil that has been removed from fields and residential areas as the principal decontamination operation for the environment. A new major undertaking is now under way — one I had seen no trace of in 2016 — namely the reconstruction of fields using soil brought in from other parts of the prefecture. Among the brown expanses dotted with diggers and workers, the shape and appearance of rice paddy terraces is beginning to take form.
Remediation, however, cannot be carried out in forests and mountainous areas. Here, radiation levels remain high, and indeed when driving along a road through a narrow valley with forest on both sides, the Geiger counter begins to sound as radiation rises exponentially. Radioactive isotopes, such as those of caesium-137, remain trapped in the natural cycle in which the decomposition of dead organisms feeds the birth and growth of living ones. It is strongly inadvisable to eat mushrooms, wild plants and game, such as the wild boar that are hunted to keep in check the population explosion caused by human depopulation.
The contrast with the zones that have been reopened and at least partially repopulated could not be starker. In towns such as Odaka, farming has resumed, and Fukushima's farmers — the region is famous for its rice, peaches and much else — assure consumers that their products are safe. The radioactivity limits adopted in Japan following the disaster are strict, stricter than European ones, and the food monitoring system in this and 16 other prefectures is highly advanced. Test results are published daily. Since 2012, for instance, every sack of rice produced in Fukushima has been tested — around 10 million sacks a year. Since 2015, not one of them has revealed significant levels of contamination.
Ryoichi Sato, born and raised in Odaka into a farming family, was forced to leave his home for six years. After his return in 2017, he founded the farm Kohbai Yume Farm (kohbai in Japanese means pink plum blossom, yume means dream) to revitalise the area. He did it for the friends and relatives who died, and for the residents who are still undecided about whether to come back, he says. He employs mainly very young people and, to make up for the lack of labour, has adopted precision farming systems and machinery, with support from the Ministry of Agriculture. "I never imagined I would work with such young people and found a company, let alone with the aim of getting the area back on its feet. In that sense, my life has changed drastically."
And then there is Tomoko, who welcomed me, along with all her other guests, with open arms. At ryokan Futabaya we are a colourful group: international journalists — two Italians (myself included), one French, one American and several Japanese — and two people from Tokyo who are here to take part in craft workshops to raise funds for the community.
Thanks to the network of contacts of my travelling companion, Pio d'Emilia, SkyTg24's East Asia correspondent, who has been visiting the area for a decade and has many friends here by now, there is always someone joining us for dinner. Sitting around a table and talking about life in the former evacuation zone — and therefore inevitably about the tragic events that have marked it — sometimes with gravity and melancholy, at other times with irony and laughter, instils a strong sense of community here at "Tomoko's home".
"One lovely and unexpected thing about reopening this ryokan," after the evacuation period, "is that it has become a meeting point for so many different people," says the owner, proud of what she has built. And indeed, she has no intention of stopping. She wants to turn a small patch of lawn next to the hotel into a vegetable garden and open a shop selling flowers and herbal teas from her land. "There is still a lot to do, but we move forward one step at a time," she says. "I spent years with nothing to do — now I'm always busy."
The story of Yoshiki Konno, a retired former representative of an electronics company who miraculously survived the tsunami and returned to live in Odaka, his home town, is darker. "I tell people to do what we did — that is, to study and not believe that nuclear power is safe." The restart of Japan's nuclear industry therefore represents a defeat for Konno and a public opinion that is increasingly opposed to this form of energy, even if not unequivocally. "History always repeats itself," Konno concludes, sombrely.
Alongside Japan's climate ambitions — the country wants to reach net zero emissions by 2050 — the government's plan calls for nuclear power to contribute 20–22 per cent of national energy by 2030. Much the same share assigned to renewables, which are growing at national level, albeit slowly, especially compared to Fukushima, which aims to run on 100 per cent renewable energy by 2040.
The words of Hideyuki Ban, co-director of the Citizens' nuclear information center based in Tokyo, put things in perspective. "Yes, the government wants to restart some plants, but it does not want to build new ones. The restart of 39 reactors is planned, but only nine of these have been approved and only three are actually operating right now. The restart is very slow because there are a lot of lawsuits under way to block it. Nuclear power simply makes no sense and is destined for inexorable decline."
The restart of reactors may look like a return to the past, to a dysfunctional system that let down the Japanese people — who trusted assurances that nuclear power was safe — and above all the people of Fukushima, a poor part of the country where Tepco's plants, for years, were synonymous with jobs and prosperity. But beneath this apparent inertia, major changes are under way.
