Hope returns to town of the dolls
Following the 2011 earthquake, a group of women have ‘repopulated’ their community
AT FIRST glance, the Japanese town of Naraha appears normal, if a little quiet.
There are a handful of residents dotted about the place – a few in the post office, and some others in the bank – though several are oddly still.
There are some youngsters loitering around too, but the older residents say they don’t mind as they never cause any trouble. In fact, they say, it is nice to have some new faces around a town still struggling to come to terms with the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which brought the community to its knees.
Even if they are only dummies.
The life-sized mannequins are the work of a group of elderly women who have taken it upon themselves to “repopulate” their town, after most of its inhabitants fled during the March 2011 disaster, which took place just 12 miles away.
These days, most of Naraha’s former residents are scattered across the country. Though the elderly have stayed, young couples are reluctant to raise children there due to fears of radiation poisoning. As a result, 67year-old Kaneko Takahara and a handful of her friends have created life-size dummies and placed them around the town, in the hopes of restoring some semblance of the hustle and bustle of years past.
“I got the idea from a village in Tokushima Prefecture that was disappearing because all the young people were moving away,” Mrs Takahara told The Daily Telegraph.
“I thought we had the very same problem here and believed that if we could put dolls in different places around the town, the people who are here would feel warm and not so lonely or negative. “We need to make people [the dolls] to show everyone that used to be part of this community, that there is still life here and that they should move back.” To date, Mrs Takahara and her friends have completed 30 dolls, each of which is given a name and age and is registered with the town hall as a resident. Most of them are placed near what were once hives of activity: the post office, the day care centre and the bank.
Mrs Takahara and her friends meet up in an abandoned classroom in one of the town’s junior schools a few times a month and it takes them a full day to make just one dummy.
Their workroom is littered with clothing that has been donated from across the country – everything from elaborate kimonos to suits and children’s dresses.
Each head is unique – the eyes made from buttons and the hair from strands of wool – and is fixed on top of a cross of wood. Twisted newspapers are used to bulk up the torso, arms and legs before clothes are worked into place.
When visited by the Telegraph, Mrs Takahara and her team were working on a dummy bride and groom, complete with formal wedding kimono and suit. Their next project is to create 30 child-size dummies, enough for a full class at Naraha’s empty school.
Before the magnitude-9 earthquake struck north-east Japan, triggering a massive tsunami and causing three of the six reactors at the Fukushima plant to suffer meltdowns, around 7,700 people lived in Naraha. Today, fewer than 1,000 have returned – almost all of them elderly residents who say they are already old so radiation holds no fears for them.
The government lifted a compulsory evacuation order for Naraha in September 2015, but the town’s two junior high schools and most shops and restaurants are boarded up and are succumbing to creeping vegetation.
Radiation in most of the town is within limits set by the government, but it is still higher than background radiation elsewhere in Japan. The most northerly part of the town, however, remains off-limits.
The town’s government intends to open a junior high school class in April and hopes that a slowly growing population will gradually encourage others to return home.
“It is especially sad that there are no children here any more,” Mrs Takahara said. “Their parents fear the radiation, but they have also settled into their new schools in other parts of the country so it is hard to disrupt their lives again by moving them back here”.
Mrs Takahara had no worries about the possibility of her own prolonged exposure to radiation. For her, being away from the community that made her home town so special is far more hurtful.