Six years after nuclear disaster, evacuees still can’t shake stigma

HIRONO, Japan— Satsuki Sekine’s home was destroyed in Japan’s 2011 tsunami disaster and her family fled in the nuclear panic that followed. But crueller still were the insults and stigmatization she faced in the community where she sought refuge.

Rather than offer sympathy, Sekine’s new classmates bullied her with nasty jibes — part of an epidemic of discrimination in a nation where the vulnerable and the different can be marginalized.

“She’s a Fukushima kid, she carries contagious radiation,” were among the taunts aimed at the evacuee, now 15, in her new home far from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

“My house was destroyed in the earthquake and swept away in the tsunami,” Sekine said. “One of my relatives died in the disaster. We had to flee from the nuclear accident.

“After all that, I was bullied at school. I was so depressed that I wanted to die.”

After all that, I was bullied at school. I was so depressed that I wanted to die.” Satsuki Sekine, Fukushima evacuee

Ostracized

Sekine is now living back near her original home, in a region which is slowly recovering from the disaster that drove more than 160,000 people from their homes when the tsunami-lashed plant went into meltdown.

But she is just one of many who have faced insults, ostracism and even violence in towns and cities where they sought sanctuary.

Japan is famed for social order and exquisite manners. But behind the facade is a suffocating group identity that can result in bullying of those who stand out, a dynamic blamed for a high rate of child and adult suicides.

In the immediate aftermath of the quake-tsunami disaster which left 18,500 people dead or missing, a sense of solidarity swept Japan as it faced its greatest postwar crisis and municipalities welcomed the displaced.

“Ganbarou Nippon (Don’t give up, Japan)” was a common refrain as the nation pulled together.

However, reaction to the refugees at street level was often cold.

Urara Aoyama, now 16, tried hard not to let her new classmates know her family came from a town beside the stricken plant.

“But word spread when I entered middle school,” said Aoyama, who, with Sekine, now attends high school in the town of Hirono near their original homes, which