It was November, the leaves turning, the glorious Japanese autumn all around us. It was a muted joy, though, to see the maple trees on fire, to see the little, innocent asters offer themselves to the last warm rays of the sun, inviting the last honeybees of the year, “Drink. Drink deep!” Watching beauty, I felt as if looking at something deeply unreal. I pitied the bees in their vain effort to gather the last few drops of nectar, “don’t you know it is poisoned?” and I even pitied the maple trees. “It is for nothing you show your brilliant colors! It is for nothing.” Everything was bleak; every effort to overcome the catastrophe was so obviously doomed. It made me feel like crying out in pain.
The bulldozers, the backhoes, the trucks, the shoveling men, working so hard, engaged in cleanup operations everywhere, clearing debris on the shoreline as well as in the village made me want to cry out in desperation. “You, who try so hard, who break your backs trying, don’t you know how useless all your doings are? Can’t you see what a charade all of it is? You busy yourselves just as if you could mend the broken, just as if you could make the world whole again – don’t you see it has cracked and will never be one again? How futile is all you do! You pile up enormous loads of rubble. To just look at all the trash our so-called civilization churns out in unmitigated ugliness makes me sick. The colorful plastic, the carcasses of motor vehicles, the cheap houses ripped through; their ridiculous “entrails” spilled open. Plywood, particleboard, windows, doors, furniture, everything is so nice, so convenient, but everything is fake. Everything is made of ticky tacky: it is all the same. All of it nothing but a monstrous effrontery, an attack on decency, a cry for mercy, an admission of defeat. A denouncement of the 21st century with all its trappings.”
“We live in luxury, we moderns – but, looking at all these giant piles of trash, I feel crushed with the meaninglessness of it all. The pretty house you are so proud of. The gorgeous car you just bought. It is nothing but rotting muck, believe me. It is so easy to see now! It is all around you, can’t you see? Don’t you understand? The shine, the glamour, the polish – all of it is just illusions. I have had a look at the backside of things. I can see through the facade now; I can’t help seeing the emptiness at the center of all we hold dear – why can’t you?”
“There is a giant hole lurking behind those surfaces; there is a hollowness that won’t go away once it has taken you in. You fall into the void once you have perceived it, and there is no way back – don’t you see that? Or is it only me (it can’t be only me, surely?) who woke up to the sickening understanding that all I see before my very eyes is so completely, so utterly unreal? Am I going crazy? Is it me – or is it possibly you?” “You, who are so busy cleaning up, who let engines hum and engines roar, who shovel and sweep and started so early to buy new trash, replacing the old that reveals its nature even as you go shopping for the new – how can you be so stupid? Can’t you see the emptiness behind those smooth surfaces? How can you ignore it? What gives you the insolence to live as nothing had happened? Will you never wake up?”
That summer and fall of 2011, I came to understand that we live in a fantasy world. All we do is futile; all we do is meaningless … “Well, Giorgio, looking back and taking stock, it seems you have not quite recovered from the shock of meeting reality?” “No, Ma’am, I haven’t.” Nevertheless, we were spared. I will never forget that, either, even if I can’t quite figure out why. If not for some courageous men and plenty of good luck, we would have died. We were given a warning; I often think: “Be prepared. Don’t forget you are building castles in the air.” I came to understand that our way of life is not resilient enough to weather a real catastrophe. After all, the Prefecture of Fukushima is just a “backwater,” and Dai-ichi, thankfully only a “local” problem. The long and short of all this is – I haven’t made it yet. The void was shown to me, and I was not strong enough to fill it with life. I failed. The void at the heart of things. It has a name in Buddhism; isn’t it called “Shunyata”? Emptiness being the place power resides, I think, is the idea: but it didn’t reveal itself to me. The power to LIVE – to give meaning to life – didn’t come to me.
How I wish I had found meaning in the events of 2011, and we had learned from the horror! We haven’t. That is why I grieve; that is why I denounce the lies, the shameless pretense of “everything is under control.” The smug “business as usual,” whereas nothing is as it was anymore. We were cut to the bone. Not much hope remained. Our lives were shown to be irrelevant. How could I have found meaning when all I heard around me was nothing but the roar of shallowness? “Under control!”
I can still see myself cycling through Yotsukura on my occasional forays. I see foundations where houses once stood. Foundations – with no meaning. Nothing rests on those foundations. There is sand blowing over the low concrete frame indicating hall, kitchen, two or three rooms, toilet, and bathroom – a pattern repeated thousands of times. Thousands of houses were torn down after the quake. The city of Iwaki sent experts to appraise earthquake damage and offer assistance. Our house was qualified as “half-destroyed” as it had sustained some structural damage (the kitchen floor had sunk a few centimeters towards the east, yes, it was fun to see a marble roll and pick up speed) and so the owners were given a voucher to have things repaired. Those numerous houses that were qualified as “beyond repair” could be torn down at no cost to the owners. The city of Iwaki was very generous. There are many old houses in Japan. Old people move out, never to return, and the empty shell of what once was a home remains abandoned. It is a nationwide problem.
So the city of Iwaki found a way to ameliorate it. “Now or never!” is what many homeowners understood and gratefully accepted the offer. These last years it has become quite expensive to destroy a house properly. All materials have to be carefully separated on-site before they are trucked off. It is amazing to see the last crew of wreckers sift out each, and every bent nail, each and every little shard of glass before the “For Sale” sign goes up. Cycling lazily, I saw this dusty work in progress, tough guys, and ladies, too, at work. Every one of them wearing those yellow helmets with its stenciled “Safety First” lettering – no one wearing masks. Didn’t they know they were dealing with hazardous waste? Weren’t they aware of the radioactivity (breathing in dust, day after day)? Why did nobody protect these poor wretches, those at the bottom of the pile? They are a proud lot, of course … but their supervisors? I couldn’t understand it.
Yotsukura is not part of the evacuated area, true, but radioactivity doesn’t care much about lines drawn on a map. Radiation hot spots and the mysterious “black stuff” aside, there certainly had to be danger in those roof tiles, those drains, and those sinks; nobody ever checked. Well, there was much to be done, and someone just had to do it, was the reasoning, I guess. As for us, after prolonged prodding, I finally got around to measure our garden trees. Radioactive cesium accumulates in their leaves, we knew. So I took out my old saw and pruned the trees, as I would do every year. This time I cut off rather more than ever before and got quite a heap of leafed branches as a result. This “golden crest” right in front of our front door measured at about 1 mSv/kg, which was more than what we had in the air. A radiation expert measured 0.8 mSv at the standard height of about one meter above the ground. Our landlord had given us the use of an open 1.5-ton truck for one day, and we used it to carry a few cartloads of stuff up to the giant garbage pit that had been established some months earlier in the hills overlooking Yotsukura. Leon, my son, was at home for a holiday and go it was. Mariko had gotten us a certificate that entitled us to take earthquake-related debris up to the dump, and so we were happy to throw in some other stuff that had been accumulating. My precious pile of boards and assorted timber remained untouched, of course. Only ten minutes up the hill, an ocean view. A little further up and you reach the House of Nature where Mariko spent the night when things at dark started to go kaboom thirty-three kilometers north of here. There was quite a queue of mainly professional trucks, the occasional private house owner, or tenant, thrown in. We registered – stunned that none of the girls at the reception (completing the paperwork amazingly fast) wore masks in spite of the dusty surroundings – and then slowly as if on hostile territory (land mines expected), drove up and entered the huge earthen grounds. The ground had been broken only recently, and there was dust everywhere. We tried not to inhale too deeply (had not brought masks ourselves, believing we wouldn’t need any). To work there all day, five or six days a week, though? We chucked our leafed branches and then were politely instructed where to leave our old tatami mats, our broken glass, and what else it was. I don’t remember in detail. I do remember the size of that dump, though, and its slightly acrid, slightly musty odor. Unloading our light truck took minutes only, but still, what a relief to drive off.
On one of the consecutive trips, we were delighted to encounter a family of boars: not realizing what a pest these clever animals were to become. They populate the abandoned lands, crossbreeding with some of the surviving domestic pigs, to fan out and wreak havoc on farms all over northern Iwaki by now. A gang of boars plows through a rice field like some bulldozers, all in one night, as I saw right in front of our house. It was amazing.
To end this on a note of optimism – black as everything about “Fukushima” still feels –, let me relate one exhilarating day of that fateful 2011. The Dalai Lama came to Northern Japan. “Never give up” is one of his quotes. It is very well known in Japan and appropriate to the people I have had the good fortune to live with for more than thirty years now. Never give up – not in the face of typhoons, earthquakes, tsunamis, and not in the face of anything else. The Japanese are fighters, and you can’t help but admire them. The West tends to look down on people, not Caucasian, but, guys, let me tell you – you could learn a lot from the Japanese. I have been a student of the Japanese ways for a long time, and as you will have gathered by now, unfortunately, remain a complete failure.
No Japanese would continue to try and hold on to the past as I do, forever and ever ruminating like a tired, old cow. But, even if I can’t do as the Japanese do. I can admire them, although I see their weaknesses. Why do they always behave like they were fundamentally different from everybody else? We are all human! “Hello Japan: You are not out of this world! You belong! And – sorry to mention it – “Fukushima” is not your little domestic problem. It concerns the whole, wide world. You could do better than shrink away from it, I am sure. Don’t hide it anymore – live up to it, for everybody’s sake.”
And you, Giorgio, take heart, try to be a little stronger, a little better. “Never Give Up!” I called this book trilogy The Voice of Fukushima and now feel I am somewhat preposterous. Who am I to call myself the “Voice of Fukushima”? Me, being a foreigner. It was done in a moment of possibly (dumb) inspiration. The idea was to give those a voice who don’t have the means to reach out to the world. I want the story of “Fukushima” to be heard, desperately. “Fukushima” taught me a lesson the whole world needs to take. Someone from the region must speak out.
If I lived near Chernobyl – I’d do the same. Those who have suffered are obliged to warn. I went through March 11, 2011. I know what I’m talking about. So, here we go! “Well roared, lion”? It would make me happy to hear someone say so. The Prefecture of Fukushima is a provincial backwater, but it is at the center of a spotlight that was shone upon the whole world. I will never forget the one lonely campaigner for a seat on the Prefecture Assembly (he came in last) who spoke to a handful of listeners in front of Iwaki Station, right where I had met my wife Mariko one glorious June evening, many years ago. Speaking from the roof of an old station wagon, this man electrified me. He was alive like I have not seen an orator before or after. With him, it was not rhetoric, though; it was pure energy. It was something like the TRUTH that hit me. “You,” he said. “you shouldn’t think you are unimportant in the great scheme of things. Tokyo is ignoring you, but YOU, yes, YOU here in Fukushima, you are more important than Tokyo today. Believe in yourselves – and don’t let the world forget! Fukushima is everywhere!”
Able to write in English (not my mother tongue), I felt I was somehow called upon to try and reach out to you and others. As one of the few resident foreigners here, I felt it was something like an obligation to tell the outside world about the anguish, the fright, the damage those never surrendering people of Tohoku overcame. They did overcome! – Most of them did. Some – did not. Many did not if you want to know the sad truth. Those people don’t show their feelings easily, as is well known. They usually don’t complain, and they suffer in silence, which I think is a loss to the world.
“Fukushima” is not an accident; it is not so much out of the extraordinary as the Atomic Village (this hideout of “gangsters” is sometimes euphemistically called) would like the world to believe. Murphy’s law is valid. Nuclear power plants are inherently unstable. They are a peril. It just takes a short series of unfortunate events, and everything is thrown off-kilter. This doesn’t necessarily have to be an earthquake magnitude M 9.0 or a giant tsunami. It could be just a moment of lost concentration, a malfunctioning gauge, or even a huge solar storm (not so rare at all). Several major of those so-called coronal mass ejections (CME) hit the Earth recently. Twenty hours to prepare for absolute mayhem, should a solar storm like 1859 strike us. In 1989 large parts of Canada went dark, as power transmitters were fried. The Earth was lucky to have escaped the storm of July 23, 2012. Estimates put the cost of recovery at above a trillion U.S. dollars (for the United States problems only) had it hit the Earth. So, I deduce that nuclear plant problems were not adequately factored in. Station blackouts in most of the one hundred US reactors? No way chaos would come that cheap. Without backup power, a nuclear plant is as helpless and defenseless as a garden snail and will begin to hiss and bubble after a couple of hours. We have been through that. No nuclear power plant anywhere is secure. That is why “Fukushima” concerns the whole world. It is everybody’s fate to come. There are 450 nuclear power stations now, and there are several under construction: let’s try to put an end to that madness.
“Nuclear” is based on false assumptions and always was. It is tainted with the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it is an offspring of (and is still tinged with ambitions towards) the atomic bomb. It is all lies and deceit. It is human greed made visible, and it is miscalculations at its most grotesque. The hidden cost was made visible in the township of Okuma. 12-year-old Yuji Onuma’s vision of a “bright future” turned into a destroyed future after only 25 years. Well, enough of this now!
Mariko just entered; the cat is meowing and getting ready to jump on her lap for a pet. The sun shines, and how troublesome this whole business is and will be for many, many years. There is more to life than wallowing in the mud. I have to realize that! I hoped Japan would rise from the ashes and seize the unique opportunity the disaster of 2011 presented, but can’t bring myself to come to terms with the sad events of 2011? How can that be? Isn’t there a way for me to overcome my own ceaseless hollering and howling at the moon? The Dalai Lama would just smile at me, I think. Full of understanding, but also full of his famous, mischievous humor. That twinkle in his eyes. “Don’t take yourself all too seriously!” he would say. Alright, I will try to heed this mischievous twinkle, be optimistic, and do my part without complaining. I will try it.
Remembering a certain day in November of 2011 helps. That was the day I met the Dalai Lama. Our eyes met, if only for the briefest of moments. The Dalai Lama – what a man! He is an “Ocean of Wisdom,” as some translate his title, a “living Buddha,” incarnation of the all-compassionate Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, Chenrezig in Tibetan. Exiled since 1959 (when he fled Lhasa to avoid capture by the Chinese), he has been living in India but travels and teaches the world. Many admire him; many are fond of him. A “man,” I said, but not someone like you or me, I believe. I had the opportunity to look into his eyes, and I experienced a depth I have never met before. It is held that the Dalai Lamas, like certain other lamas, too, remember their previous incarnations. So this man called Tenzin Gyatso (born July 6, 1935) is not only Tenzin Gyatso, but at the same time all his predecessors (and who knows how many past individuals), before rising to the heights of his present spiritual elevation. My understanding here is very limited, but I felt without a doubt, without the shadow of a doubt, that it was no ordinary human being into whose eyes I looked. Did he let me look into his soul? He did not hide anything, that much I certainly felt. It was up to me to try and fathom his depth. I was completely overwhelmed, without even knowing by what exactly. This moment, this encounter will stay with me.
The Dalai Lama came to bring hope and strength to Northern Japan. In Koriyama, an hour and a half from here, he spoke to a large crowd. I didn’t have an admission ticket to the venue and waited outside to at least see him, if possible at all. I waited, one of a small group, near a side entrance. Suddenly a door opened, and several dark red-robed lamas exited. They walked down a flight of stairs, carefully supporting a rather frail old man in their midst. This was His Excellency, the 14th Dalai Lama. He was ushered into a car, a white Lexus, and the chauffeur slowly accelerated. The window was rolled down, and as he passed me, he looked at me. I could do nothing but stammer, “Thank you …”
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