EYE ON THE BALL
Sports help prefecture devastated by 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown recover from lingering impacts of disaster.
Asea of brightly coloured banners and advertisements decorated the Fukushima train station in early November to celebrate coming road races and Fukushima United, the local football club. There are new professional baseball and basketball franchises too. They carry inspirational names like the Hopes and the Firebonds, the latter signifying the spirit of a team connecting to the community, said 21-year-old point guard Wataru Igari.
For an area with a growing interest in sports, the biggest boon came in March when the International Olympic Committee approved Fukushima to host baseball and softball games during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Yet Fukushima remains defined by tragedy.
The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami caused meltdowns and radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Devastation touched every corner of the prefecture, which covers 14,000 square kilometres. Among the population of nearly 2 million residents, more than 160,000 near the power plant fled or were evacuated, while an estimated 16,000 people died.
The disaster also damaged the Fukushima name. Tourism declined. The rest of Japan shunned food and other products from Fukushima.
Almost seven years later, pockets of the prefecture — mainly in its capital city — are attempting to change its perception through sports.
“We are looked at like Chernobyl,” said Saito Nobuyuki, who was born in Fukushima and owns Sportsland, a sporting goods store. “It’s difficult to change.”
Akinori Iwamura is among those hoping to rehabilitate Fukushima’s name.
Iwamura was the starting second baseman for the Tampa Bay Rays in the 2008 World Series. He also won two World Baseball Classic championships with Japan and played in the Nippon Professional Baseball League for 13 years.
Today, Iwamura, 38, is toiling at the lowest levels of organised baseball. He is the manager of the Fukushima Hopes, a semipro team whose games are sparsely attended; Iwamura equates the level of play to Class AA baseball in the United States.
“I call myself a missionary,” Iwamura said. “Even though it’s a negative way many people know the name of Fukushima, we have to change it into a positive way.”
Iwamura was preparing to play for the Rakuten Golden Eagles when the earthquake and tsunami struck. Although he is from Ehime prefecture in southern Japan, Iwamura said he felt it had become his “destiny” to help rebuild Fukushima after he retired.
Iwamura could have a big stage to help bolster the area’s image when Fukushima Azuma Baseball Stadium, the home park of the Hopes, hosts Olympic Games in 2020. Iwamura sees in that another opportunity to inform the world about life beyond the disaster.
“When they go back to their country, they can tell their impression to the local
people of their countries so it will bring more people to come for tourism,” he said.
The stadium is about 90 minutes from Tokyo by high-speed train and 90km west of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The city did not sustain extensive damage as did towns closer to the plant and the coast, which concerns critics who believe the conditions of more seriously affected areas will be ignored because of the Olympics.
Immediately after the announcement in March that Fukushima would host baseball, anti-nuclear activists denounced the move. They argued that it created a false impression that Fukushima had returned to normal and glossed over the remaining hardships faced by an estimated 120,000 residents who still cannot — and may never — return to their homes.
“The Japanese government wants to show the fake side of Fukushima,” said Hajime Matsukubo, secretary-general for the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo. He brandishes a copy of the Fukushima Minpo newspaper, which lists radiation levels of all the towns in the prefecture like baseball box scores in a daily sports section.
Azby Brown, who works for Safecast, an organisation that helps citizens independently measure environmental data, said Olympic visitors staying near the stadium for a week would probably not be exposed to higher-than-normal radiation levels. But he also disagreed with the government’s message about Fukushima.
“Communities have been destroyed, there has been no real accountability, the environmental contamination will persist for decades and will require vigilance and conscientious monitoring the entire
time,” Brown wrote in an email. “People who accept the radiation measurements and make a rational decision to return still live with a nagging concern and doubt, as if they’re living in a haunted house.”
When Japan was awarded the 2020 Olympics in September 2013, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe assured the International Olympic Committee that “the situation is under control” in Fukushima.
Four years later, Brown said, public infrastructure projects in destroyed areas
have been delayed because construction companies became too focused on gaining Olympic-related work around Tokyo.
Governor Masao Uchibori contended that the prefecture was showing notable progress in reconstruction. He cited the continual reopening of tourist sites and the growing influence of sports on civic pride.
“At this moment, I cannot find any negative point,” to holding Olympics events in Fukushima, Uchibori said, “but I would like to work in cooperation with the organising committee and the central government in order to make people think it was good to hold the events in Fukushima”.
Uchibori added that “rumours” of Fukushima’s condition contributed to the shadow over the prefecture.
Large swathes of Fukushima remain uninhabitable, and it has been estimated that cleanup at the plant will take up to 40 years and cost almost US$200 billion.
Still, some residents see hope in the Olympics.
“If the Olympics doesn’t happen in Fukushima now, the image of Fukushima doesn’t change for a long time,” said Aya Watanabe, a university student who interned in Houston during the summer and saw the impact the Astros’ World Series victory in November had on morale in the hurricane-stricken city. “It’s a very big chance for Fukushima to change the prospects.”
While teams like the Hopes and Firebonds are still relatively new, their players have already seen how sports can be helpful in Fukushima’s recovery.
Deon Jones, who played college basketball at Monmouth University in New Jersey, is in his first year with the Firebonds. His mother initially worried about his living in Fukushima, but he has enjoyed playing here, learning about the backgrounds and hardships of local teammates like point guard Igari and Shota Kanno, who is from nearby Nihonmatsu. Several times a week, players hold clinics at local schools. A team spokeswoman said Firebonds home games draw about 2,000 fans.
“You’re playing for a little bit more than basketball,” Jones said. “You’re playing for everyone in Fukushima.”
And then there’s baseball, Japan’s national pastime. After Tokyo was awarded the 2020 Olympics, a strong push was made to reintroduce baseball specifically for those Games because of its history and popularity in Japan. Participation has fallen in Fukushima since 2011. Atsushi Kobari, director of the Fukushima High School Baseball Federation, has tracked the declining enrollment of high school players over the last six years.
“It’s definitely due to the disaster at the nuclear plant,” he said.
Miwako Kurikama, whose son Ryota plays baseball for Fukushima Commercial High School, was evacuated after the tsunami. Ryota’s elementary school permanently closed. At times, Kurikama drove 90 minutes away just to find fields where her son could practice.
On a recent Sunday morning, Kurikama watched him taking part in drills with his high school teammates at Shinobugaoka Baseball Stadium in Fukushima. She was joined by six other mothers behind home plate. They shared snacks and kept score on a chalkboard, laughing and cheering during rundowns or run-scoring hits.
Kurikama has known some of the players since first grade, before her son’s school closed. Having them all together again seemed cathartic, familial.
Nearby at the baseball stadium, Little Leaguers from Fukushima were playing on the same field in Azuma Park that Olympians will patrol in 30 months from now. At Matsukawaundo Koen Ya Baseball Field, a children’s tournament was invigorated by a soundtrack of banging plastic megaphones.
As normal as these scenes may have felt for some residents, the spectre of the 2011 disaster remained.
In a fenced-off area in Azuma Park, hundreds of giant black garbage bags filled with decontaminated waste were being stored, stacked above eye level and still not yet properly discarded. The city government is working with the environment ministry to remove them before the Olympics, but for now the area, which was big enough to hold another baseball field, instead resembled a junkyard.
At the baseball diamonds around the city, as children ran down the first-base line or chased down fly balls in right field, they passed by ominous signs posting the day’s radiation levels — tallies with more serious implications than the runs on the scoreboard.
Although sports are helping some in Fukushima heal, they have not erased all doubts about the future — and perhaps they shouldn’t be expected to.
“The government needs to inform us of actual information with scientific proof,” said Michiaki Kakudate, who was watching his son, Keigo, 11, pitch at the children’s tournament. “They say it’s no problem, but that doesn’t convince people.”
© 2018 New York Times News Service
“People who accept the radiation measurements and make a rational decision to return still live with a nagging concern and doubt, as if they’re living in a haunted house” AZBY BROWN Safecast