Chapter Two
Those on the Ground

BEFORE GOING TO Fukushima to talk to people firsthand about the disaster, I wanted to hear what others, including evacuees from Tōhoku and those living in other parts of Japan, had to say about the situation. This chapter is their record.

As a student in anthropology at Melbourne University, Darren Gubbins was fascinated by the transformation of Japan from the Tokugawa to the modern era. He decided to learn Japanese and go to Japan to teach. After an examination and interview at the Japanese consulate in Melbourne, he was selected for the Japan Exchange and Teaching program (JET), and in August 2008, along with around 40 other young Australians, he left Melbourne for Tokyo. It was the middle of the northern summer holidays. Darren was assigned to teach at Kohnan Senior High School in Yabuki, a medium-sized truck-stop town, about 80 kilometres south of Fukushima city in Nishishirakawa district on the main shinkansen railway line between Tokyo and Aomori prefecture. It was the kind of place that might have contributed to Tōhoku’s reputation in Japan as a source of soldiers and factory workers for Japan’s main industrial centres. With little immigration and with many young people leaving to work in cities, the population was in decline even before the triple disaster.

People in the isolated district were wary but curious about this pale-faced gaijin. On crowded local trains and buses, they would leave a vacant seat either side of him; older citizens would peer surreptitiously into his shopping bags to see what sort of groceries gaijin bought to eat. Helped by a remarkable, friendly, and intelligent school supervisor, Ikuo Nemoto, and Haruka, a young woman who soon became his girlfriend, Darren was unfazed by the attention, and quickly settled into the small rural community. Adjusting himself to the relaxed cycle of the northern Japanese seasons, he taught a small class of senior students at Kohnan about Australia and the outside world, parading his collection of stuffed Australian animals for their benefit. He soon made friends among foreigners and Japanese in the local community.

But in the month leading up to the 11 March 2011 tsunami, Darren was concerned about an increasing number of tremors shaking the district around Yabuki. He recalls that 11 March itself was an unseasonably cold and overcast day. At 2.40 p.m., a tremor began, but unlike earlier ones that were soon over, it kept growing in violence. After what seemed like ten minutes, the steel and ferro-concrete school, which was situated on a rise on the town’s outskirts, was rattling and groaning, even though it had been buttressed with diagonal steel beams, welded into the structure after previous earthquakes. Darren ran from his office to the car park in front of the school. The earthquake became so intense that he staggered and fell over. Other staff, who had a pupil-free marking day, hurried out of the school. Huge fissures appeared in the cliff-top parking lot, and swallowed several cars. An early-warning system built into mobile phones began to scream, followed by an SMS message indicating where the epicentre of the quake was supposed to be. As the worst of the tremors began to subside around 3.00 p.m., snow fell from a windless and leaden sky. Darren went back into the school to try to straighten out some of the damage. Climbing over getabako (shoe racks) that had toppled over in the foyer, he found a chaotic scene, with classrooms and offices in a complete shambles.

At 4.00 p.m., having done what he could, Darren decided to go home. His car was sitting undamaged on level ground. He drove gingerly over several kilometres of buckled and twisted roads to his flat, where he found everything on the floor. The refrigerator was open, its contents scattered and smashed. Heavy sliding doors were off their runners, and he couldn’t put them back. There was no running water, but the power was still on. He spent a bitterly cold evening bundled up and watching television. Nearby towns and villages had been destroyed in the quake; those on the coastal flatlands had been engulfed by the tsunami that followed. A particularly horrifying long shot showed women and children in a coastal town running uphill towards the camera. All of them, plus an old man in an electric wheelchair, were engulfed by the wave coming up behind them.

To Darren, the days that followed were a nightmare, made more dreadful by news on 13 March of explosions at the Fukushima nuclear-reactor complex — not visible from Yabuki through the mountains, but a mere 65 kilometres away to the north-east. Urged on by the American radio station Armed Forces Network–Japan, foreigners were fleeing. Darren refused to go, but he felt claustrophobic, as if he was being drawn to the centre of an enclosing force. He draped his face in a scarf every time he emerged from his flat, hoping this would do something to reduce his dose of radiation. Many of his gaijin friends with the JET program — there must have been over 140 in the entire prefecture — had left on the first available trains or buses to Tokyo. One, an American, stayed on for several days, but was becoming increasingly panicky. The man still had a working hot-water service, so Darren, who had lost his in the initial earthquake, invited himself around to take a hot shower. Extremely agitated, the man let Darren in, and let him use the shower. But as Darren emerged from the bathroom towelling himself off, his host fled. The man left his car at the airport and surfaced several days later in the United States.

Darren continued to resist the desire to leave, trying to plan something constructive to do each day, no matter how prosaic — find a working toilet, take a shower, find some water, get something to eat, decide when to call Haruka, who was in Fukushima city (he couldn’t drive up to see her because he had no petrol). Shortly after the earthquake, he had liberated a slab of iced-tea cans that had crashed through the plate glass window of a 7-Eleven store, its contents scattered in the street. Some shopkeepers gave their stock away. But as the days wore on, finding food and water was a growing problem.

For foreigners like Darren who didn’t speak Japanese fluently, it was hard to make sense of the news. Japanese broadcasters were calm, but their reports were impenetrable — detailed, technical, and full of diagrams. Foreign commentators regurgitated second-hand, third-hand, and fourth-hand stories; and having flown in to get a story, many justified their existence by sensationalising everything they could. If those interviewed were restrained, their words were manipulated to make them appear panicky. Press conferences were either badly translated, or foreign reporters ignorant of the technology got the facts wrong.

Darren tried to stay informed by watching Al Jazeera, which he found had the best coverage of any foreign channel, including CNN and the BBC. But fragments of information passed on by friends within the prefecture were of more use to him — firsthand experiences of where to get petrol, the state of roads and bridges, which supermarkets were open, and where to get a hot bath. Using his mobile phone, Darren tried to keep up with the news, survive, and remain focused. As the days passed, however, getting information became as much of a struggle as simply trying to survive.

Every day, on waking, Darren clung to small pieces of good news, like the next town getting its water back, or the reactors not heating up too much — enough to keep him from losing hope. Several days into the drama, the Australian embassy in Tokyo called him and offered to find transport to Australia, saying that they were recommending all Australians evacuate from an 80-kilometre zone around the reactors (this radius was an American military recommendation — the Japanese at first declared a 10-kilometre exclusion zone, which they later raised to 30 kilometres with a further 10-kilometre voluntary evacuation zone). A bus hired by the New Zealand embassy was picking up passengers as it made its way south from Fukushima city. Would he care to join it? But Darren didn’t want to abandon his school, his girlfriend, or his community. He stayed, occupying himself by helping the polite, quiet, and patient students and staff to put Kohnan Senior High School back into some kind of working order.

An unexpected reward for Darren’s perseverance came when the few remaining gaijin teachers organised a party at the Haragama kindergarten, an evacuation centre in Soma, a town near the coast. The foreign teachers were expecting around ten children and their parents, but 60 turned up. Word had spread that the gaijin were coming to play games. There was a huge Easter egg hunt and some wild laughter. Parents said their children had not laughed since the tsunami. Tears were shed when the visitors left, picking their way through the rubble. As they went, they saw tatami mats on the ground, upon which bodies would be carefully placed as they were recovered from the smashed houses and rubble of the surrounding suburbs. After the initial shock of the triple disaster, the landscape seemed to be blanketed in silence, emptiness, and lasting grief.

Cherie Firth went to Japan to work for the JET teaching program in 2006. Among her impressive qualifications were a background in nursing and a degree in modern Asian studies, with a triple major in Japanese, Japanese political science, and Japanese history. Cherie spoke, read, and wrote Japanese fluently. She lived for five years in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi prefecture and the biggest city in northern Japan. With a population of over one million, it was the largest urban area in Tōhoku to be hit both by the force-nine earthquake and the tsunami, and much closer to the coast than Fukushima city, which is about 80 kilometres south-east. In Sendai, Cherie taught English to classes in schools at every level ranging from primary to senior high.

When the earthquake struck on 11 March (her mother’s birthday), Cherie had gone to an all-girls senior high school to chat with the home economics teacher, who was supervising about 20 first-year students. They were cleaning up around the school entrance and decorating the walls in preparation for a graduation ceremony to be held for third-year students the next day. When the first of several earthquakes struck in the early afternoon, everyone followed the procedures they had routinely practised, and ran out onto the school oval to be counted and checked for injuries. No one was badly hurt, but a heavy snowstorm started immediately after the earthquakes, and without their outdoor clothes they were freezing.

In the immediate neighbourhood, cemeteries were shaken from their dignified formations, with graves sinking and memorial stones falling over. (In what had been Minamisōma, we later saw a neat set of grave markers standing in the middle of the tsunami-devastated wasteland. Restoring them was clearly a matter of the highest priority.) In Sendai, as in Yabuki, there was no power and very little food. The only communications systems that worked reliably were the emergency telephone line and the emergency radio.

Cherie’s school was near the Tōhoku international students’ residential area, and about 20 minutes after the earthquake struck, foreign students and their families quickly gathered there. The school had a floating population of more than 600 over the next two-and-a-half days, including many elderly or disabled Japanese and their families, who sought shelter in the gyms. The school buildings seemed to be only slightly damaged: the school was located inland and was sufficiently elevated to escape the tsunami, which the refugees did not even know about until late in the evening of 11 March. They heard about the damaged reactors at Fukushima the following morning. Even then the full extent of the catastrophe was not explained. A big fire began on the fourth floor of the school on 14 March, and Cherie came back to Australia soon afterwards.

Terry Colbert is a young baker from Queensland. In 2000, he went to Japan and drifted into a resort called British Hills, in Fukushima prefecture. There he worked as a pastry chef, teaching English and baking. One of his students in scone-making was Satomi, a waitress in a local tea house. They were attracted to each other, courted, and were married in December 2000. Terry and Satomi moved to the nearby city of Koriyama for five years, where they had two children together. Terry worked two jobs — at a Japanese bakery, and as an English teacher. The hours were long, but after a few months, he was offered a full-time English-teaching job with the local board of education in his wife’s home town of Izumizaki. The job was more secure and he could better support Satomi, now pregnant with their third child. He could also help his father-in-law, who was a local rice farmer doubling as a contract dump-truck driver.

When the disasters struck on 11 March, Terry and Satomi had four children — Kai, eight; Noah, six; Jay, four; and Reno, 16 months — and Satomi was pregnant with their fifth. After much agonising, they decided that the rumours about radiation, and the damage it could do to children, were too persuasive to ignore, and so reluctantly they evacuated to Tokyo, then moved their family to Queensland. Although the children quickly adjusted to their new environment, they missed Japan, and Satomi was anxious about her ageing parents. Her father planted his last rice crop in May 2011. Despite some cyclone damage, he went ahead and harvested it in September; but it was contaminated with caesium-137, making it worthless on the market. He heard that TEPCO or the government might pay compensation, but the procedures were complicated, and the outcome unclear.

Terry and Satomi had borrowed money from the Australian embassy in Tokyo for their evacuation. Despite being told by a consular officer that they had a 99 per cent chance of getting a waiver on compassionate grounds, they found that DFAT in Canberra did not support their claim, and they had to pay back the loan. Meanwhile, they continue to pay interest against the mortgage on their land in the prefecture, despite the possibility that radiation might make it uninhabitable for a very long time.

Naoto Kawabata is a clinical psychologist from Kyoto. On 26 September 2011, he gave an interview on ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind program. He recounted how he had an urge to help victims of the tsunami, and journeyed to Tōhoku in April 2011. There were no visible signs of radiation sickness among the people, but the atmosphere was very different from that after the Hanshin earthquake, which devastated Kobe and claimed 6434 lives in January 1995. There was much anxiety about radiation, but many people repressed their emotions so as not to seem to be complaining. Among the displaced, strong local loyalties were disrupted, and the loss of autonomy implied by their refugee status led some to depression. Because they saw the situation as temporary, they had no inclination to meet new neighbours in a similar situation, and many remained secluded in temporary housing far from their homes. Most of the accommodation was cramped, hot in summer, cold in winter, and comfortless. Anger at TEPCO was widespread in Fukushima prefecture, but because a large part of the working community had jobs with either TEPCO or the government, they were inhibited in expressing their emotions. A British researcher said the same psychology existed in the United Kingdom, where people around nuclear power plants tended to trust reactor operators because they had no alternative. Their attitude was that the reactors were ‘theirs’, so they must be OK. They displaced their anxieties onto other dangers, and maintained a black humour about a situation from which they could not escape.

Dianne Takahashi is an Australian lecturer at Gakushūin University, in Tokyo, where she lives with her husband, Masahiro. She recalls that the earthquake and aftershocks were intense and frightening. Each shock was accompanied by the wailing of the keikai (public emergency) alarm, and the sirens of police cars and ambulances. The stress people experienced in Tokyo manifested itself in various ways: a senior colleague died of a stroke, a friend’s daughter had a miscarriage, and Dianne and Masahiro both had vertigo for a couple of months. For Dianne it was a relief when the attention of the international media drifted away from the disaster. With a few honourable exceptions, she observed, reporters who knew virtually nothing about Japan were sent from all over the world to Tōhoku, where they stood over people and tried to get quotes that would satisfy their sensation-hungry subeditors. It was hard for the foreign media to acknowledge that Japan was not Haiti. They didn’t seem to understand that a country that had had a natural disaster need not be treated, in media terms, as if it had suddenly become part of the Third World. What shocked Dianne was that many in the media seemed to wish Japan really would collapse into a Third World state, and they seemed to want a full-on nuclear catastrophe, too.

Accustomed to giving emergency aid to others, Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, was able to deploy enormous forces, send ships and planes to scan the sea for survivors, provide emergency help and relief supplies, rebuild airports and roads, and distribute aid within hours. Dianne believed that the rescue period was remarkable both for its efficiency and the way information was spread. She and Masahiro lived beneath the flight path of Fuchu air base, on the northern outskirts of Tokyo. In the middle of the night they were shaken by the reverberations of giant helicopters heading towards the disaster zone with relief supplies. Knowing the psychological importance of hot baths to people who had lost everything, the Self-Defence Forces provided rotenburo (outdoor baths) for earthquake and tsunami victims, and anchored vessels with hot water offshore from villages that couldn’t be reached by land.

Japan’s national broadcaster NHK constantly put out emergency information in English, Tagalog, Chinese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, and many other languages, repeating bulletins over and over, constantly updating. But in doing so, NHK and the government as far as possible avoided predicting what the Fukushima reactors might do, and avoided recommending a mass evacuation. An emergency evacuation of Tokyo was impossible; the greatest danger for its 35 million inhabitants, if such an order had been given, would have been a full-blown panic leading to massive loss of life, as well as the paralysis of national governance.

The summer after the disaster (June–August 2011) was extremely hot in Tokyo, but despite more than half of Japan’s nuclear-power reactors being closed down, blackouts were avoided. Lights were dimmed on local trains, and shops in Ginza, usually garishly lit, were toned down, in a fashion reminiscent of the early postwar years, before the country hit its economic stride. Neckties and jackets virtually disappeared in the business districts, and men returned to using fans. Dianne observed that the fluttering on train stations was a pretty sight; her husband, Masahiro, had a macho black lacquer one, and a Canadian she knew, whose conversation was limited to the fortunes of the Vancouver Canucks ice hockey team, had a fetching blue one.

Dianne said that many of her Tokyo friends suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, with many ill-defined symptoms. A common thread was depression, and the need for time simply to get over things. When my wife, Alison, and I came in October, Dianne predicted, we would find everything in Tokyo much as before. There seemed to be a lot of young foreigners in Roppongi — Americans and Europeans — and concerts and exhibitions were starting to reappear as visiting artists returned. In the northern prefectures, they held a big sumo tournament, which, like hot baths, made an important contribution to the morale of people in devastated small towns. But the scale of the disaster in Tōhoku was enormous and it would take years to recover, Dianne said, just as it did New Orleans to recover from Katrina, or Christchurch from its earthquakes. As in Kobe and Niigata, people would be rehoused, infrastructure rebuilt, and compensation paid. Every senior-citizen refugee would have to have his or her nenkan (yearbook) rewritten and certified at the local post office to take account of the residential displacement. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands, as the people followed their preferred and time-honoured way of resolving problems through consultation, and the process would and could not be fast. But in due course, Dianne was sure, it would happen.

Geoffrey Gunn is a professor of international relations at Nagasaki University. On 11 March 2011, he was with his wife in Paris. When they learned of the disaster at Fukushima, the French government had already made a decision to evacuate French citizens from Tokyo. Geoffrey contacted his son, working in Tokyo with a large American company, and advised him to evacuate to Nagasaki. It appeared to him that the French knew more than the Japanese government about radiation risks, or at least were being more transparent. Over the next two weeks, Geoffrey, still doing research in France, kept anxiously reading Le Monde, which was full of commentary on Fukushima by prominent French scientists, cultural historians, environmentalists, and experts in Japan studies. He read sophisticated analysis of government–TEPCO collusion, historical-geographical analysis of past tsunamis on the ‘tsunami coast’, and examinations of Japan’s socialisation of ‘atoms for peace’ in nuclear-themed manga (comics) like Tetsuwan Atomu (Iron-Arm Atom, or Astro Boy). His impression of the early days of the disaster as seen from Paris was of a worst-case meltdown scenario, colossal failure of crisis management by the Japanese government, and massive suffering on the part of tsunami victims.

When he returned to Nagasaki, Geoffrey thought that the Japanese media were way behind events, and possibly, in the case of the nation’s main broadcaster, NHK, compliant in a government–TEPCO cover-up. Typically, NHK would show complex flowcharts of pipes and valves for an hour at a time, while totally avoiding hard discussion of what it all meant. Most of Geoffrey’s Japanese colleagues were loath to discuss anything, although one with international experience exposed his feelings by slamming TEPCO for making drastic mistakes in the early stages, and for hiring temporary workers without experience or accountability. However, even he stopped short of blaming the government for lack of oversight. There were other undercurrents of opposition to government ineptitude, but people were reluctant to express it openly. At first there were no local demonstrations. Later, in Tokyo, Geoffrey’s son went to an anti-nuclear rally of some 20,000 people in a local park, but they were heavily flanked by what he said were TEPCO thugs. There were no protests on the scale of anti-US rallies in the 1960s and 1980s (although by mid-2012, rallies of up to 200,000 people had occurred in Tokyo).

As he settled back into his Nagasaki routine, Geoffrey detected a subtle change in the local attitude to nuclear power. Every year, a committee met just before the anniversary of the atom bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, to decide on the wording of the mayor’s speech. Year after year, the mayor called for the abolition of nuclear weapons. In August 2011, however, Mayor Tomohisa Taue introduced into his speech a paragraph to the effect that Japan should phase out nuclear power as well, and look to sustainable energy. Meanwhile, the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, commissioned a gas-powered plant, which was probably good news for Australian gas suppliers — Geoffrey described Nagasaki as being powered by Australian coal.

At a national level, the situation looked murky. Prime minister Naoto Kan resigned after seeing through a sustainable-energy bill, taking away the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry’s role as a nuclear watchdog, and imposing a ‘stress test’ on all reactors. But in doing so he upset some very powerful interests. Geoffrey thought that the fortunes of the Democratic Party of Japan — a coalition of left-of-centre parties, which had toppled the conservative Liberal Democratic Party in the 2009 general elections — might be changing for the worse. They might hang onto power, but their reform agenda of controlling the bureaucracy, eliminating superfluous government agencies, and terminating wasteful public-works projects had been derailed, and some form of cohabitation with the conservatives might occur. Meanwhile, the prestige, even the arrogance, of the nuclear bureaucracy had not in any way been undermined. It was rather ironic, Geoffrey observed, that Japan’s disaster gave a big fillip to greens in Europe, especially in Germany and France, and yet no such green parties appeared to be influential in Japan.

Nationhood was a difficult question for Geoffrey to ponder. He thought that Japan would recover from the quake–tsunami, just as it had from Kobe’s 1995 earthquake. But the nuclear meltdowns had added a new dimension that might exacerbate the economic ‘hollowing out’ of Japan, especially if no new nuclear reactors were built. Japan remained the third-largest economy in the world, and was still a mighty powerhouse. It was far ahead of the pack in technology, and had huge holdings of US Treasury securities. It had enormous ‘soft power’ with its electronic gadgets and culture, especially anime and manga. But demographics might be Japan’s time bomb. With a declining birthrate, who would pay into the pension funds? And with an ageing population, who would be the carers? South Korea had been much more adept in confronting similar problems. The Japanese looked aghast at France with its Muslim immigrants, at senseless riots by restless and destructive youths in the United Kingdom, and indeed at the bumbling official response in the United States to Hurricane Katrina. With the appointment of a few hundred foreign teachers to permanent posts in universities, Japanese kokusaika (internationalisation) received only token acknowledgement. Bilingualism hadn’t worked, international tourism — never significant — had become moribund, and multiculturalism remained taboo. True globalisation was obviously seen as threatening, as with, to take a single case, hapless Filipina and Indonesian nurses struggling with their kanji (calligraphy) tests to gain entry to live and work in Japan.

In the months after the Fukushima catastrophe, many stories emerged about the astonishing resilience and bravery of a handful of mavericks who, like many flood-stricken residents of New South Wales during the floods of March 2012, refused to leave their homes. One such was Naoto Matsumura, about whom Christopher Johnson wrote a special report in The Japan Times on 18 December 2011. Living in the town of Tomioka, 13 kilometres from the Fukushima reactors, Matsumura described himself to Johnson as a lifelong farmer and a loner in a toxic desert haunted by an invisible enemy called ‘radioactivity’, which was eating away at things then and into the future. All Matsumura’s friends had left. At sunset, surrounded by miles of total darkness that were devoid of human movement, he had no television or internet, only a mobile phone that lost its charge all too frequently. His evening routine was to stoke up his charcoal burner, tuck himself into a futon, and fall asleep at 7.00 p.m., haunted by nightmares about what could be happening inside his body. He would wake with the sun, walk his dog through barren fields, clean grave sites, and tend to animals, which had been deserted by their owners, left confined to their stalls, sheds, and barns. Daily, he would feed 400 cows, 60 pigs, 30 chooks, ten dogs, more than 100 cats, and an ostrich. The ostrich was one of several roaming through the dead zone, imported in a moment of hubris by TEPCO, to add an exotic touch to the animals in the company’s private zoo. The bird had been adopted as a mascot, a symbol of energy efficiency. But as Rick Wallace observed in The Australian on 12 March 2012, the ostrich, with its famed head-in-the-sand defensive posture, was instead a perfect metaphor for the Japanese nuclear industry’s attitude to safety. By December 2011, Matsumura calculated that his food supply would run out, and all of the animals would die from starvation. He had appealed to TEPCO officials to take care of the animals, but they responded by saying that they would study the situation — which meant that they did nothing.

Matsumura’s anger against TEPCO was uncompromising. He blamed the company for ‘killing’ his 100-year-old aunt, who he claimed died from exhaustion after being moved among several hospitals around Tomioka and Aizuwakamatsu, in western Fukushima prefecture. ‘Many people died like that because of TEPCO,’ he told Johnson. ‘It’s a terrible company. They have more power than the national parliament, because they control the supply of electricity, and they have power over the media through advertising.’ He said that TEPCO, which would need massive taxpayer funding to stay afloat, had paid nuclear refugees only ¥1 million each (about AU$12,000). He thought that the whole world should stop using this bad form of energy because anything built with human hands would break one day. Governments should stop lying to the people, he said; nobody in Fukushima believed the news about the nuclear situation. Yet, as Johnson observed in the same article, the company kept trying to present itself in a positive light when, on 12 November 2011, it invited 35 journalists, including four from overseas, for the first media view of the wrecked nuclear complex, which it claimed to be in ‘cold shutdown’. In contrast to such selective spin, a survey conducted in the same month by Teppei Yasunari of the Universities Space Research Association in Maryland confirmed what everyone unofficially knew — that radioactive caesium and other isotopes were continuing to contaminate large areas of eastern and north-eastern Japan.