Interesting photo story at Japan Focus: "Inside Fukushima's Potemkin Village: Naraha"

Text by David McNeill and Androniki Christodoulou. Photos by Androniki Christodoulou.

Twice a year, journalists are taken on guided tours of the ruined Daiichi nuclear plant, operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO). The drive there from the southern outskirts of the 20-kilometer exclusion zone imposed in 2011 took them through the nearly empty towns of Hirono, Naraha, Tomioka, Okuma and Futaba. The state of neglect could be measured by the encroachment of weeds and wild animals, and the slow decrepitude of housing and infrastructure.

Despite the decline and the still urgent beeping of Geiger counters nearer the plant, there has never been any official talk of abandoning the area. Instead, it was divided up into three zones with awkward euphemisms to suggest just the opposite: communities with radiation of 20 millisieverts (mSv) or less (the typical worldwide limit for workers in nuclear plants) are “being prepared for lifting of evacuation order;” 20-50 mSv are “no-residence zones;” the most heavily contaminated (50mSv) are “difficult-to-return.”

A vast public-works project was started three years ago to decontaminate an area roughly half the size of Rhode Island, at an estimated cost of $50 billion. Compensation by TEPCO was explicitly linked to the possibility that many of the 160,000 nuclear refugees would return, and any hint otherwise was controversial: When new trade and industry minister Hachiro Yoshio called the abandoned communities “towns of death” in September 2011, he was forced to quit a week later.

In September 2015, Naraha, 15km south of the plant, became the first town in Fukushima Prefecture to completely lift the evacuation order imposed after the Daiichi plant's triple meltdown. At a ceremony to mark the town’s reopening, Mayor Matsumoto Yukiei declared the nightmare that had descended nearly five years ago officially over. “The clock that stopped has now begun to tick”, he said. Explaining the decision, Takagi Yosuke, state minister of economy, trade and industry, said contamination was “not dangerous enough to continue forcing evacuation on residents who want to return home.”

That explanation somewhat inverts reality. A Reconstruction Agency survey conducted last year of evacuees from Okuma, Tomioka, Futaba and the town of Namie, northwest of the plant, found that just one-fifth wanted to go back to their homes. Thousands of refugees have reluctantly made lives elsewhere and fear that their nuclear compensation, amounting to a monthly stipend of 100,000 yen ($837), will be terminated if they refuse to go back to areas declared safe. Many feel they’re being pushed back, not invited.

Read the whole story and see all the photos.

David McNeill and Androniki Christodoulou, "Inside Fukushima's Potemkin Village: Naraha", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 41, No. 1, October 19, 2015.

URL: http://japanfocus.org/-Androniki-Christodoulou/4389/article.html

Interesting new content at Japan Focus: "The Making of 'A Body in Fukushima': A Journey through an Ongoing Disaster" by William Johnston with Eiko Otake - and - Some VAOJ Commentary on 3.11

A Body in Fukushima (quick view 5 sec each) 2014 05 30 from Eiko and Koma on Vimeo.

One day in November of 2013 I answered the phone to hear the voice of Eiko Otake saying excitedly, “Bill! What do you think of going to Fukushima to shoot photos of me performing in the stations along the Jōban Line?” For several years Eiko, better known as half of the performance duo Eiko and Koma, and I had collaborated in the classroom and by then knew each other well. We had co‑taught two different courses, Japan and the Atomic Bomb and Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining in which we integrated movement exercises with historical and environmental studies. We both have long-standing interests in those and related topics, and had spoken at length about the triple disaster of 3.11 in Japan. Soon after the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, we had talked about our concern for the people of Tōhoku and exchanged feelings of dread at the unfolding nuclear disaster in Fukushima. And I knew that she had visited Fukushima with a friend only five months after 3.11. But this new proposal took me by surprise.

“A Body in Fukushima” is an ongoing project that consists of still photographs shot by William Johnston of Eiko Otake performing in the area surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi Reactor and of video interpretations of those still photographs made by Eiko. Representative images and videos are embedded in the text...

Read and see more at the source: William Johnston with Eiko Otake, “The Making of ‘A Body in Fukushima’: A Journey through an Ongoing Disaster,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 9, No. 4, March 9, 2015. http://japanfocus.org/-William-Johnston/4295

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Today is the 4th anniversary of the 3.11 earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disasters. 15,891 people died and 2,584 people remain missing. 229,000 people are still living as evacuees; 80,000 of those are living in prefabricated temporary housing units. These last two statistics are incredible in that so much time and energy is being devoted to the 2020 Olympics, promotion of traditional Japanese food and idol groups. The priorities of the government are strange and unfortunate to say the least.

There is an article in today's The Japan News about disabled people living in temporary housing. The focus is on a blind woman living in a temporary housing unit that is small and lacking audio assist systems. She has little contact with her neighbors; she talks with a caretaker who visits her three times a week. She has asked the local government to give priority to disabled and elderly people seeking permanent housing. The reply: "We can't build a community with only such people." She can't get an apartment because landlords think blind people might accidentally start a fire. She faces prejudice and discrimination on top of being a 3.11 victim. Why is this happening in a country that is focusing on offering omotenashi and good services to foreign tourists? What about its own citizens in need?

Link to "4 years after quake, 229,000 still evacuees," in The Japan News, 3/11/15: http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0001993657

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims, families of the victims and those still missing and the evacuees.

More Japan’s 3.11 Earthquake, Tsunami, Atomic Meltdown coverage at Japan Focus: http://japanfocus.org/Japans-3.11-Earthquake-Tsunami-Atomic-Meltdown

Previous 3.11 coverage at VAOJ: http://visualanthropologyofjapan.blogspot.jp/search?q=3.11

CINEMA TYPHOON @ TKU2013 “Filming ‘Fukushima’: Diverse Memories, Multiple Representations”

This year’s “Cinema Typhoon” will present three films on the theme of people’s memories and filmic representations. Funahashi Atushi’s “Nuclear Nation”, Fujiwara Toshi’s “No Man’s Zone” and Ian Thomas Ash’s “A2″ deal with the ordinary people’s lives and feelings devastated by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station’s accident in March 2011, each of which provokes us to ponder on individual processes in which private memories are transformed into public representations, and representations recreate memories.

Only a short while after the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear ‘triple disaster’, the first filmmakers ventured to Fukushima and the Tohoku disaster areas to document the devastating effects on people’s lives. Since then, an astonishing array of documentary as well as feature films about the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster has been produced, constituting what has poignantly been called an ‘all-but-instant subgenre’ (D. Lim). Why are so many films made about the Fukushima nuclear disaster? What are the motivations of the filmmakers? In which ways might these films participate in the production of a public ‘Fukushima’ memory? How can they stem forgetting, when ‘disaster fatigue’ has already set in? Do these films affect, or seek to influence, anti-nuclear thinking and movements nationally and internationally? The panel discussion, including the directors Funahashi and Fujiwara, aims to address these and other questions pertinent to the production, screening, and reception of films concerned with the social consequences of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The discussion will be complemented with screening a small but fine selection of relevant films.Suggested Film Screenings (all of these available with English subtitles):Nuclear Nation/Futaba kara tōku hanarete (dir. Funahashi Atsushi)No Man’s Zone/Mujin chitai (dir. Fujiwara Toshi)Fukushima: Memories of the Lost Landscape/Sōma Kanka (dir. Matsubayashi Jojyu)Odayaka na nichijō (dir. Uchida Nobuteru)[Language: English and Japanese]

Dates: July 13-14, 2013
Place: Room B201 in Bldg. 2 at Tokyo Keizai Daigaku Access Map: http://www.tku.ac.jp/access/kokubunji/
Campus Map: http://www.tku.ac.jp/campus/institution/kokubunji/

For more details: http://cultural-typhoon.com/2013/en/cinema-typhoon/