Novelist Yu Miri: Olympics aren’t helping Fukushima
TOKYO— Yu Miri, who won this year’sNational BookAward for translated literature, saysTokyo’s Ueno Park, where a homelessmankills himself in her award-winning story, looks very clean ahead of next summer’s Olympics. Still, she says, that doesn’t help to raise hope amid the coronavirus pandemic and the delayed recovery of the disaster-hit Fukushima region.
The park is a main setting ofYu’s award-winning novel, “TokyoUeno Station,” in which the protagonist, Kazu, a seasonalworker from Fukushima, ended up. The elderlymanfirst came to the Japanese capital a year before the 1964Tokyo Olympics for construction work.
Yu said at aTokyo news conferenceWednesday that she visited the park recently and itwas surprisingly clean, but that an area where she used to interview homeless residents for her book has largely been eliminated.
The book, first published in Japan in 2014, portrays the life of the seasonal worker without a place to go back— a theme for manyofYu’sworks.
The storywas based on her interviews with homeless squatters living in huts made of cardboard boxes and blue plastic tarp more than 10 years ago. She said shewas also inspired by about 600 Fukushima residents she interviewed while hosting a local radio programthat she started a year after theMarch 2011 meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
The triple meltdowns at the plant caused massive radiation leaks to the outside, contaminated the surrounding areas and displaced asmany as 160,000 people fromthe no-go zones and elsewhere in the prefecture. Most of those places have been reopened as the government has tried to showcase the recovery ahead of the TokyoGames, but those whoreturned to their homes are largely elderly people.
Many families, especially with small children, say they don’t plan to return to their homes due to radiation concerns as well as loss of their former jobs and communities.
But their lives have significantly changed— for theworse— sinceYu finished the book, with a growing sense of isolation among Fukushima residents amid preparations ahead of the Olympics, and the coronavirus pandemic that has made them more isolated, saidYu. She has sincemoved to Minamisoma, where she opened a book cafe in hopes of creating a place for locals to get reconnected after displacement due to the nuclear disaster.
“Both the nuclear accident and the coronavirus pandemic have revealed distortion and inequality in society,” Yu said.
“Many people see the situation through a lens of despair instead of a lens of hope,” she said. “Perhaps the story fit their thinking and that’s probablywhy the book has been widely read.”
She said disaster-hit areas have not recovered enough and preparations for the Olympics have taken away resources and jobs fromthe recovery projects, becoming part of the reasons delaying their reconstruction. “Organizers should have seen the level of progress of the reconstruction before deciding to host the Games,” she said.
The Olympics, initially planned for July 2020, were postponed until next summer due to the pandemic.
Many of thoseYu interviewed hadworked as seasonalworkers inTokyo during Japan’s postwar economic advancement. Whenthey finally came back to have an easy retirement life back in their hometown, they lost their homes in the Fukushima disaster. “Amantoldme itwas back luck, and the word got stuck inmy chest like a thorn,” she said.
Yu remembered another thorn she has had in her chest fromher past conversation with a homeless man. He told her that thosewhopossess the roof andwalls don’t understand the feelings of thosewho don’t.
“So I wrote the story of howthemannamed Kazu lived and chose death, not fromthe outside but his inner self, thinking that perhaps I can convey how he felt to thosewhohave places to go back,” she said. “As a novelist, my job is to play a role as an endoscope to look inside of a person, while also showing him or her with an external camera.”
Yu, an ethnic-Korean whowas born and raised in Japan, haswon a number of Japanese literature awards.