Looking around me, I sometimes feel like the only survivor of a shipwreck. I cling to a frail wooden plank and try not to think about the future, but then, there is nothing else to think about! All around, I see water, nothing but water. A bottomless ocean stretches east and west. Then, there is fog – and through the mist, I hear seagulls cry. There must be land somewhere near! Or are those gulls, I wonder in my dazed drifting, mocking me? Keeping a lazy eye on me, just in case? I’ve seen gulls in a feeding frenzy before and don’t want to remember the talons and beaks tearing into those long dead salmons that had no way to hide, no way to go in the shallow mouth of the Kido River north of here. Too close to the sea, too close to the monster. The tsunami? Yes, that, too.
All alone, I feel at times, trying not to go under in a deluge of people trying to forget their danger. We were cast adrift and are now caught in a flood of lies and deceptions. Nobody has the courage or the means to cut through the sordid web we, people of Fukushima, are trapped in. Nobody opens their hearts to cry out to their gods. Silence reigns supreme. It is almost five years after March 11 now, and the monster looming less than twenty miles north of here is just not mentioned where human voices are heard. It is the nameless fear; it is “that which must not be spoken of.” It is taboo. Only engineers and politicians talk Dai-ichi.
Deep down, we are all scared shitless. My elderly neighbors are. All our young mothers are. My wife is. I am. How could it be different when you know there are three molten-down cores of Uranium and Plutonium, weighing hundreds of tons, smoldering somewhere, in a completely unknown state, underneath the burned-out ruins of Dai-ichi?
We live in fear; that is a fact. Things have cooled down, for sure, but the nagging remains. Looking around me, I see Iwaki booming. Disaster is good business, man! Not for the victims, though. What can a poor boy like me do, then? I started to write. Not to go mad, I began to write down what I saw, what my wife of thirty years and I had to go through, just like countless fellow humans here. Animals fared even worse. I started to write down what I began to understand about this mess. The first year I was just stunned. After that, I grew angry. Now I am almost resigned to my fate. Resigned to be a victim. Worse than that – to be a victim of victims! Big fish eat little fish, yes, but this one little fish at least is not willing to go down in silence. Will it do Mariko and me any good? I don’t know. It is of secondary importance. Important is to speak out.
This is the chronicle of a man-made disaster. A disaster that was mercifully not the absolute catastrophe it could have been. A disaster unfolding over the decades. Chapter one: Chernobyl. Chapter two: Fukushima. Chapter three: Please select from a list of almost 450 nuclear power plants worldwide. There is one near you; you may be sure.
If not – there may be one planned. Better stop it, before it is too late.