My Experience of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident in 2011
Eleven years later, the disaster is still ongoing
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded us of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. I experienced the Fukushima accident 11 years ago, the worst nuclear accident in the world since Chernobyl accident. The Ukrainian people leaving their hometowns, separated from their families, reminds me of the evacuees of the Fukushima disaster. Many of them are still displaced 11 years after the accident.
Nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants are two sides of the same coin. Now that the nuclear threat is growing in Ukraine, I think everyone needs to face this issue. So, I put up the courage to make this post.
1. My family profile
I lived in Fukushima City, Fukushima Prefecture, which was devastated by the Great East Japan Earthquake and the nuclear power plant accident on March 11, 2011. Fukushima City was not a mandatory evacuation zone, but my family moved to Utsunomiya City, Tochigi Prefecture, a neighboring prefecture of Fukushima, in October 2011 for fear of health risks. So to speak, it was a voluntary evacuee.
My grandmother lived in Tomioka Town in Fukushima Prefecture, and many of my relatives on my mother’s side were forced to evacuate.
2. My perception of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident
Through my own experience of voluntary evacuation and witnessing the evacuation of people close to me, I have constantly thought about the issue of the nuclear accident for 11 years. I was in the second grade of elementary school student (age 8) at the time of the accident, and now I have completed my first year of college. In the 11 years that I have spent as a party to the Fukushima nuclear accident, I have observed the depth of the problem and the gap between the public’s perception and the actual situation. I’m not a scientist or a researcher, so I don’t know the technical details, However, I would like to point out that the nuclear accident is a special kind of accident that cannot be understood only in terms of engineering assessment. The nuclear accident has caused a wide range of social, economic, and humanitarian damages. And I have found that considering the nuclear accident and how to deal with nuclear power in the future is nothing less than a philosophical problem.
However, I am very concerned about the fact that the lessons of the accident have not been utilized, that people’s memories have faded over the past 11 years, and that there is a tendency to treat the accident as a sensitive issue and to consider it taboo to talk about it. Therefore, I would like to write my testimony as a person involved in the Fukushima nuclear accident in order to preserve it as a record.
First, I would like to share my awareness of the issue by looking back on my own experiences so far.
3. My life before the accident
The elementary school I attended until September 2011 was located in a very green area. I walked to school along the rice field road, picking snake strawberries, sucking nectar from flowers, dodging dried up worm carcasses, and cutting my fingers by touching the grass.
Once a month, I went home with my family to my maternal grandmother’s house in Tomioka. My grandmother’s house was in the mandatory evacuation zone. This grandmother’s house is one of the most memorable places in my life, but it has now disappeared.
In front of my grandmother’s house was a rice-field landscape, and the back of her house was surrounded by cedar trees.
My cousins who lived nearby would come to this house and we played together. In the large garden, we enjoyed playing with nature. We milled flower petals to make colored water, used yuzu (species of aromatic Asiatic citron, Citrus junos) leaves as money to play store, and played with water in the canal that ran in front of the house. I liked eating fresh fruits and vegetables from her fields and building a fire to burn garbage.
During the summer vacation, my relatives who lived far away would gather there. It was an annual tradition for us to participate in the Bon dance, barbecue in the garden, and have fireworks. At the end of the year and the beginning of the new year, we all enjoyed watching TV and playing Hanafuda (Japanese playing cards) under the kotatsu (Japanese traditional heating table covered with a blanket) with special home-made dishes.
The memories I spent with my relatives at my grandmother’s house are something I will treasure forever. I know now that the experience of playing with nature or sitting around the dinner table with many blood family members was extremely valuable, especially for a child.
3. After the accident
However, the nuclear power plant accident changed that life completely. As my grandmother’s evacuation prolonged, her well-kept fields and garden became overgrown with weeds, and the main house was finally demolished.
When I visited the place where my grandmother’s house used to be, I almost cried when I saw the changes and thought that the place where I used to enjoy those days was no longer there. I will never again be able to see my name scratched on the pillars of the house, smell the musty bedding in the closet, or hear the old organ.
Not only the physical things, but also the connections with my relatives were broken. I haven’t seen my cousin, who was my closest friend, for almost ten years now. The places and events where my relatives gather have been lost.
Even I, who used to visit her only once a month, felt a great sense of loss, so I wonder how depressed my grandmother must have been. Just imagining her mind is enough to break my heart.
Evacuees in the zone are often told that they are blessed because they can build a new house on a different piece of land with compensation from the government.
However, for those who have kept their homes for a long time, leaving their attached land is painful because it means losing their purpose in life. It is not something that can be solved with money. This is because of the spiritual culture, which is unique to the Japanese, especially the elderly living in the countryside. It integrates their identities with the land, home, local community, blood relations, customs, traditions, natural landscapes, and everything else.
My grandmother, who used to work in the fields, rapidly developed dementia during the evacuation. Her doctor diagnosed that the cause of her dementia was not only aging but also the shock from the disaster.
My grandmother always repeats the same thing:
“I want to go back to Fukushima.”
All I can do is to say, “I’m sure you’ll get home.”
In reality, it is no longer possible for my aging grandmother to return home. For the elderly, there is nothing more valuable than continuing their ingrained habits of farming and cooking, staying in touch with their old neighbors, and ending their lives in a familiar place. Considering the psychological state of my grandmother, who was deprived of all these things, it was not surprising that she developed dementia. My grandmother now lives with my uncle in Chiba Prefecture, an unfamiliar place to her.
This was not only the case for my grandmother, but also for all the families who lived in the area. The community, the culture, the lives of the people who lived there, their souls, their spiritual refuges, everything was destroyed by the nuclear accident. It was truly horrible.
4. What the disaster taught me
Why did the innocent people have to be deprived of their precious daily lives?
Nuclear power plants are built in remote and lush green areas, and the electricity produced there is transported through long power lines to the cities. They are never built in cities because of the possibility of accidents. In other words, nuclear power is a system built on the sacrifice of the weak. This value standard that prioritizes short-term profits and the interests of the majority over the precious lives of humans is not only common to nuclear power plants, but to other social issues as well. The fact that the world is run by this value standard shows the low level of the sense of human rights.
Nuclear power plants are built when the probability of an accident is judged to be extremely low and the benefits outweigh the risks. We have been told that nuclear power plants are safe, but as we learn more about the panic that followed the Fukushima disaster and the irresponsible response of the nuclear authorities, it becomes clear how sloppy and thoughtless Japan’s nuclear program has been carried out.
Ulrich Beck, a German sociologist said,
“What Fukushima teaches us is the basic insight that even the most unlikely events can happen.”
While the earthquake and tsunami were the triggers, we can say that the nuclear accident was a man-made disaster, not a natural disaster, because the risk of a possible accident was recognized when the plant was built. Therefore, we should not conclude that the accident was just an “unfortunate” accident. It happened for a reason.
5. Why are we unwilling to learn the lessons of Fukushima?
For Japan, the country experienced the atomic bombing and the Fukushima nuclear accident, discussing how to think about and deal with nuclear power should be one of the major concerns of the people. In reality, however, many people seem to be indifferent to nuclear power. It is more difficult for people to understand the issue of nuclear power plants when they see unproductive arguments being exchanged on social networking sites between some extremely biased people who are pro-nuclear and those who are anti-nuclear. （The reason I am writing about nuclear power plants in English now is because I know that if I write in Japanese, I will be criticized.）
The main reason why people do not have a proper understanding of nuclear power is related to education.
In the textbooks used in Japanese junior high schools, “nuclear power” is only explained in terms of a binary opposition of advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are stated as high stability of supply, high resource efficiency, and environmentally friendly energy since it does not emit carbon dioxide, while the disadvantages are described as possibilities of enormous accidents and problems in disposing of spent nuclear fuel.
However, there is no mention of the essential points such as the ethical issues of nuclear power plants, the difficulty of risk assessment, the connection with the atomic bomb, the structure of the organization running the plant, and the political agenda. By simply memorizing a bullet list of the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear power plants, students will think they know everything. This is why the government’s irresponsible response has been overlooked without realizing the impressions gained by mass media operations.
6. What is true “recovery”?
In 2021, the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics were held under the slogan “Olympics for Recovery.” The starting point of the torch relay was the coastal area of Fukushima Prefecture, which was devastated by the nuclear accident. The people of Fukushima had mixed feelings about this event, as it sent a message to the world that Fukushima had already “recovered” and that the nuclear problem was a thing of the past. In the years since the nuclear accident, decontamination work has progressed, new train stations have been built, supermarkets have been renovated, and people are slowly starting to return.
However, no matter how much money is spent by the government, no matter how many new facilities are built, it is not possible to rebuild the life and community that existed before the accident.
I was strongly angered by the fact that the nuclear accident was portrayed as a beautiful story about recovering from the accident and starting the rebuilding process. I want people to understand that once something is lost, it can never be regained. The Japanese government and media have a responsibility to investigate the causes of the accident and resolve its fundamental issues, not just emphasize reconstruction.
The only way to achieve a real “recovery” is to have the government make a realistic choice to move away from nuclear power.
