Families back in nuclear ghost town
Ten years after reactors’ meltdown in Japan, health fears remain
This is not a place where humans should be living.
Nobuyoshi Ito
Even inside Nobuyoshi Ito’s log cabin home, in an idyllic valley in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture, the Geiger counter clipped to his jacket gives off a nearconstant crackle. But every time he goes to put another log on the wood burner in a corner of his living room, it intensifies into a single, drawn-out cacophony.
The locally felled timber was exposed to the radiation that escaped from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, less than 60km to the south east, when three of the plant’s reactors suffered meltdowns after the March 2011 earthquake and the tsunami it unleashed on coastal regions of north-east Japan.
One of only nine people who defied the government’s request to evacuate, Ito now monitors radiation carefully as a warning to the people, including young families, slowly trickling back to repopulate the ghost towns and serene valleys.
“If you look at the numbers, there is only one conclusion; it’s not safe to be here,” he says.
About 6500 residents fled this community 10 years ago. Since the evacuation order was lifted, about 1500 have returned.
The town of Iitate now wants to fill its remaining properties, which have been abandoned for years and are slowly decaying. With more than 70 per cent of the residents now of retirement age, the area is desperate for an injection of youth.
Some have already arrived. Among the 150 newcomers are Yuki Hanai and her husband Junichiro, who came to set up a flower farm because of the cheap availability of land.
“My husband was more worried than I was, but I told him that the mayor and the local government say it is safe and I trust them,” she said.
“We decided that after living in the city, it would be a good place for children to grow up, in the countryside with lots of fresh air around.”
The Hanais have three children, aged eight, seven and three, and the family have taken up walking in the local hills and along the picturesque rivers at weekends.
“People have driven past us and looked at us as if we were mad, but this is the life we want to lead,” she said.
Last year, the children grew vegetables in the garden of their refurbished home and ate them with their meals, Mrs Hanai said, although there have been times when the water from the taps has been murky and they went to the local supermarket to buy bottled water.
“I must admit that I do always look at the electronic signs that are around the town showing the radiation levels and I get a little worried when the numbers are high, but most of the time they are pretty low so I have nothing to worry about,” she said.
“And so far, none of us have felt any effects of being here. I’m not too worried.”
Generous subsidies are on offer to anyone who wants to move to Iitate. Land or a property has to be bought, though prices are low, while the town will pay 200,000 yen ($2556) to cover moving costs, up to 5 million yen to build a new house, as much as 2 million yen to buy a vacant property or cover a maximum of 20,000 yen a month in rent for up to two years.
In addition, children have free healthcare until the age of 18.
Abandoned farmhouses dotted around the town, once named the 12th most beautiful in Japan, are being renovated and turned into venues for artists and writers, while others are being used for people working remotely during the pandemic. Other plans call for a creativity hub and a community made from shipping containers.
Nana Matsumoto, 28, is one of the youngest to have made the move, and is now employed by the council to attract more young people.
“Immediately after I joined the town hall in 2019, we were just trying to get the message out that people could come back to Iitate, that people were living here again and that we intended to rebuild the community,” she said.
The town’s new mayor, Makoto Sugioka, a 44-year-old former Buddhist priest who, by chance, studied nuclear physics at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, says that the older population needed little persuading to help rebuild the community.
“They have told me that if they were able to get through [the war], then there is no way that they are going to be defeated by a natural disaster,” he said.
Asked whether families were not being put off because of the possible effects of radiation on their health, Sugioka insists that is not their primary concern.
“The people who want to come here to live and work are openminded about the situation,” he said.
There is much scientific debate over a level of radiation exposure that is safe for humans.
One study by the World Health Organisation suggests that there is a 70 per cent higher risk of thyroid cancer in girls in areas affected by the fallout from the Fukushima plant, and a 7 per cent higher risk of leukaemia in males.
In his time holding the fort, Ito has carefully monitored contamination levels in the wild vegetables and fruit that grow in the mountains surrounding the town and charted figures that change with the seasons, the wind and the rain.
He unclips his Geiger counter and holds it over a plastic bag of wild mushrooms he picked near by this morning. Once again, the crackling intensifies. The valleys, paddy fields and tumbling streams here are still not safe, Ito insists.
The view from his porch is of fallow paddy fields that rise into a steepsided valley.
“This is not a place where humans should be living,” he says. “The government has cleaned less than 16 per cent of the areas affected by the radiation. Caesium has a half-life of 30 years, so it will take 330 years before levels here return to normal.”