12 Mothers and other Volunteers

And back to Fukushima once more. I keep getting carried away. What to do with all the low-level waste, an estimated 30 million tons of it, that had to be deposed of after 2011? Immediate action was required. It still is required. Parks, gardens, roofs, gutters, roads, and hillsides needed to be decontaminated all over Fukushima Prefecture. Decontamination efforts began to gain traction in late 2012. Japan is thorough in its efforts once a course has been decided on, once a roadmap has been laid out – but this, my friend, this is an impossible job. How could you possibly decontaminate a mountainous area the size of our prefecture (13,784 square kilometers), even if you would need to decontaminate only a fraction of that area? It is impossible. It was not tried. It was tried successfully, however, to make the evacuated villages fit for resettling. Public roads, access roads, and private properties, including their immediate surroundings, that is to say, spaces of ten to twenty meters around houses, were scrubbed. Topsoil was removed, trees were cut or pruned, and no stone left unturned: many Japanese homes have those beautiful stone gardens. We saw it happen plenty of times, stones neatly rearranged. Sure.

They came to our house, too: three years after the disaster. Mariko was quite outraged and told them no thank you in very clear words. The very first year, when people needed decontamination badly, nothing much happened. Schools and kindergartens all held their grounds closed to the children: no playing out of doors that hot, sad summer of 2011. School children were kept indoors all throughout that year. You could not see a single child outside anywhere. The poor kids and their equally suffering teachers were confined to their hot and humid classrooms. After school, their moms would pick them up so there would not be any walking on potentially dangerous stretches of road. The children, and their mothers, endured it.

How Satogaoka Kindergarten children suffered! It is one of the “barefoot-kindergartens” you will find here and there, as opposed to “education-minded” preschools, where children from age three on are prepared for a future career in one of Japan’s corporations or some other highly successful way of living. Not so in that barefoot-garden! “Play, eat, sleep.” Satogaoka’s motto sums it all up. In 2011 there was no playing outside. Barefoot on the grass, in the mud? No way. Children were indoors, like children all over Fukushima and many other regions, while their parents washed and scrubbed the buildings I forgot how many times. We are good friends with the owner, Seiko-sensei (quite by coincidence, we shared the ANA flight out of Fukushima on March 15, 2011), and she told us how stressful life was in that horrible year.

At first, she was quite resigned to close the kindergarten for good, but “where should the children have gone?” is the question that made her change her mind. Kindergarten teachers and parents joined forces to make things possible. Food was brought in from remote areas of the country, “remote” meaning up to a thousand kilometers away, and somehow Satogaoka pulled through.

Decontamination by the government? Not when it was needed most. Finally, in the autumn of 2012, the backhoes arrived, scraped off some twenty centimeters of topsoil, and replaced it with “clean” soil. Understandably late, maybe – so very much had to be done. It was only then that children were allowed outside for an hour each day. They brought three sets of clothes to school, changed after that one hour outside, and later once again – just to be safe.

Where did the topsoil go, you may ask? In most cases, it was buried on-site in a hurry, in more than 60,000 places all over Fukushima, until it was dug up years later and ferried to a “temporary” central storage near Dai-ichi plant. That site can hold 30 million tons of debris. The quotation marks are meant to express my doubts concerning the government’s promise of emptying the storage after 30 years. “Nothing of it will remain in Fukushima Prefecture!” Anyway, let’s try to believe it. It took the government such a lot of effort to establish that – if only temporary – site. Finally, and quite recently, too, the trucks began to roll. I saw them with my own eyes – and counted them as they rolled down the highway at a rate of two to five a minute, just on that one highway. It is not easy to deal with 30 million tons of radioactive soil.

Caring for their own children is not all parents and teachers did, though. Many groups formed after March 2011 to help persons in need, and some even tried to tackle the most difficult: the radiation problem. All kinds of ideas to get rid of cesium, the main danger, were floated that first crazy summer (the prettiest – growing sunflowers.) Sunflowers were sown on the grounds at Satogaoka, as in many places, and only a year later, it turned out that alas, sunflowers could not neutralize radioactive cesium, as had been believed. I, skeptic that I am, had smiled at the idea – but, in retrospect, I must say I should have admired the energy and the initiative.

Food safety was a general concern, too, with no one way to ascertain levels of radioactivity in those months. Later we would have it all: solar-powered consoles indicating ambient radioactivity (their accuracy sometimes doubted) and free checks of fruit and vegetables. During those first crucial months, however, there was very little information to rely on. Some scientists did admirable work, tirelessly collecting data, educating the frightened. We had been so guileless! Well, we were not clueless anymore. And a group of mothers, our old friend Keiko smiling her sweetest smile, began an admirable project.

Without any official sponsorship, relying on donations only, “Mothers’ Radiation Lab Fukushima” began to measure, to educate, and to heal. It is heartwarming to just look at their website! There is a 7-minute video with English subtitles, and, folks, in case you have never seen Iwaki Station: here’s your big, fat chance. You can also see and listen to our friend Keiko Kushida and see what Sakuranbo Kindergarten looks like. It is very similar to Satogaoka Kindergarten, as there are many threads connecting the two. Have a look at the little video! It is so full of hope.

Japan is not only businessmen in suits, you know. It is mainly a country of mothers! Really! The businessmen and smart office ladies are Japan’s outside face, a surface. Seen from the inside, Japan looks much more like what you will be able to find should you give the “Mothers’ Lab” a try!” You won’t regret it. The children are adorable! And, as I said, you will probably be able to gain some insights into the female side of Japan. It is often underrepresented in the media. Those model mothers deserve our sympathy and our support.

I wish I had been active and hopeful! Again, Mariko was way ahead of me. She got in touch with a group of doctors and educators from Fujino Rudolf Steiner School near Tokyo, who used traditional methods to help traumatized children overcome their fears. There was little or no government-provided psychological help for children, I learned, let alone for adults.

It’s not the Japanese way: lawyers and psychologists are a scourge elsewhere, but not in this country. They are a rarity. I met one lady psychologist hired by the Prefecture of Fukushima on a temporary base: that was it. Volunteer work (“just roll up your sleeves”), on the other hand, was widespread. It was really extraordinary how much help the tsunami-stricken prefectures received! Students arrived with no expertise but the overwhelming urge to help. Young people shoveling muck, clearing away debris, and even painting some of what had remained standing in colorful designs. In Hisanohama, the village next to ours, they let a thousand blossoms bloom on ruined and abandoned houses and burnt-out cars… As unlikely as it sounds, it lifted our spirits a little. Mariko and I drove through stricken Hisanohama once or twice, holding back our tears – and were consoled by those flowers painted on those few slabs of concrete that had withstood the flood.

The Rudolf Steiner School doctors and educators Mariko had gotten to know performed a play in Satogaoka Kindergarten. Little handmade dolls, some background decoration, and a lyre (Mariko’s) were all they needed. The story was about danger, loss, and deliverance in “Dwarf Village.” It was told in a quiet tone of voice, and the children listened as if transfixed. It even moved me deeply. The young nursery school teachers, every single one of them a hero in their never-ending devotion to the health and wellbeing of their charges, received special relaxation massages. Mariko, alert as ever, learned how to do these – and soon, I was treated the same way. It felt like I was in heaven.

I remember an old Albert Ayler song “Music is the Healing Force of the Universe”. Indeed, music and art are the true healing forces of the universe, aren’t they? Now, throw in massage – any time – and we are set.

As for music and art, we had many artists visit our prefecture. We missed out on most of those but were fortunate enough to make friends with one group of performers. They were Marcos, Eduardo, and Emilio from Guimaraes in Portugal and had been invited on some project or other to help us cope with the disaster. (There were many projects like this one, and I am deeply grateful for the spiritual help they provided!) On the surface of it, these three theater professionals did not achieve much, it could be said. Their one and only performance – in the surviving old, moldy citizen’s center of ruined Hisanohama – did not attract more than a few elderly ladies and one or two men, but, believe me, their reenactment of the tsunami was powerful.

They, and their Japanese collaborators, stood motionless at the far end of the room, dressed in black, fully concentrated as if waiting for something. Then, all of a sudden, they began to move. Moving across the room, they swept up everything in front of them, be it boats, seawalls, houses, cars, people … there was no doubt about it. It made my hair stand on end. Once they had reached our side of the room, they invited us to join in, even trying to drag me out of the rickety chair I sat on; I did not budge. Nailed to the spot, too deep in memories, I just could not move. Feeling as cold and dead as a barnacled rock in the surf, I just sat there and watched the tsunami roll away again.

As my wife was friends with one of the supporting team, we were invited to a victory party that night: there was a barbeque, there were beer and wine, and we all were friends. It doesn’t happen too often, but some occasions stick in somebody’s memory for ever. They – strangers from far away from Europe – , we, here, stuck in the poisoned heart of Japan: what did all these differences matter? We are humans! We shared that night, as we share our lives, however difficult they may be from time to time, and there will always be nights of lighthearted talking, eating, and drinking. What a fulfilling night we all had. A party! A real party after so many months of existing zombie-like in a dreary, colorless twilight zone. Were we still alive at all? We didn’t really know. Isn’t this a cliché out of horror movies? The dead who think they are still alive? Who believes they eat and drink – but in reality, are no more than mere shadows. That was us! Add to this the nagging urge, “survivor’s guilt” is the term of doubting one’s own right to exist when so many others have perished.

Oh yes, it was a triple disaster! The tsunami took 20,000 lives, but not us. What made us better than so many others? Again, it was Mariko who suffered acutely from this burning question inside her own soul. As for me – I continued to be stunned. Nothing could lift me out of my lethargy. And even now, so many years after it all happened, I have no t recovered. I feel it so very painfully even as I write. I know that I am fighting a losing battle, trying to convey the danger, and the horror triggered by the inevitable: the crash. Not the tsunami.