In ordinary times, Minamisoma (“south” Minami) is a bustling little city of about 71,000 that sits along the Pacific coast line in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture, about 150 miles north of Tokyo.
Most of the town’s citizens used to work in the small shops and businesses that line its streets — beauty parlors and banks, small restaurants and coffee shops, fast food joints, a bakery and a couple of big supermarkets. There are a couple of large factories — a plant that makes kitchen appliances is one of the largest employers in town, and there’s a Hitachi Denshi factory that makes electronics for the auto industry. But small business is the town’s economic lifeblood.
It’s as ordinary a Japanese town as you could find, except for one fact: these days, small or large, all the businesses have one thing in common: they’re closed. Ride through the Minamisoma’s main streets today, and you’ll see shades drawn in the windows of nearly all the small businesses.
These are not, needless to say, ordinary times. Minamisoma today is a place where the simple act of paying a cab fare reduces the driver to tears. The city, at its closest point, lies just 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) north of the stricken Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant that is now the site of the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl. As such, the town sits at the geographic core of what’s become a strange, nuclear never-never land: for nearly three weeks now, the Japanese government’s “guidance” to those living 20 to 30 kilometers away from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactors is that they can remain in town should they so choose, but they should stay indoors or else risk exposure to radioactive gases.
As such, to cruise through Minamisoma, as I did this past weekend with a colleague, Tokyo-based freelance reporter Hideko Takayama, is to visit a nuclear ghost town. Radioactivity levels at 8am Saturday, according to the local government, were completely normal, so we decided to venture in. The town’s mayor, Katsunobu Sakurai, had actually issued a plea on YouTube for reporters to come and see for themselves the devastating impact the ongoing nuclear crisis is having on his little city.
For block after block, there are no pedestrians on the streets, and only a few cars in transit. A couple of stray dogs roam, looking desperately for food. The small merchants whose stores and shops comprise the commercial heart of this little city are, needless to say, getting crushed. Yuichi, the taxi driver who agreed to ferry us around, works for a small company that has a fleet of four cars and usually takes in about 45,000 to 50,000 yen a day ($550-$610). Yesterday, he says, the four taxis had one fare between them. It came to 680 yen ($8.30).
The commercial center of Minamisoma lies far enough away from the ocean (about four miles) that, physically, at least, it survived the tsunami. That is not true of the residential areas closer to the coast, where the destruction, as in town after town up and down the coast, from Iwate prefecture in the North down through Fukushima in the South, is all but indescribable.
Tallying the damage
Just how destructive the tsunami was to this particular town becomes very specific when we get to city hall, the only place in town where there is any sign of life. There, Minamisoma’s political leaders and bureaucrats try to cope amidst the chaos and fear. A few residents whose houses or apartments have been destroyed troop in to fill out the paperwork recording that they are now homeless (even amidst a catastrophe of biblical proportions, bureaucracy grinds on). Upstairs, just outside the Mayor’s office, there is a sign with the up-to-date statistics: as of late Saturday afternoon, there were 301 confirmed deaths from the tsunami, 1173 people were “missing” (and, though officialdom still won’t say so publicly, presumed dead), and 1800 houses had been destroyed.
Up on the third floor, where Mayor Sukurai’s office is, city officials take updates from search and rescue teams hunting for bodies, try to coordinate getting supplies of food and water to the evacuation centers outside the city where many of its residents are now holed up, and keep track, minute-by-minute, of the activity at the TEPCO nuclear plant, which is not visible from the town hall, but is uppermost in their minds.
The Mayor is meeting with a rescue crew, so we sit down with his chief aide, a man named Sadayasu Abe, who has worked for the Minamisoma government for more than 30 years. Most of his colleagues are wearing the little white cotton facemasks that cover the nose and mouth, a commonplace in Japan during the allergy and flu seasons. But, Abe concedes, that’s not why they’re wearing them now. “They’re worried about radiation,” he acknowledges.
The facemasks are a security blanket, something that provides the illusion of increased safety. Millions of people as far south as Tokyo are wearing them these days in Japan, and not because they’re worried about getting the flu. But the idea that they help protect anyone from exposure to radioactive gases is, of course, a joke. Abe himself doesn’t bother wearing one.
He tells us that of the town’s 71,000 residents about 50,000 have left, since the national government said it’s okay to stay, but only indoors. For elderly people in particular, Abe says, this edict was untenable; “how were they to get anything to eat if they can t go out to shop?”
After a while the town began running buses to supermarkets outside the 30-kilometer zone, but the majority of people chose to get out anyway. They’re either staying with relatives elsewhere in Japan, or are holed up in one of the many evacuation centers set up to house those affected by the quake/tsunami/nuclear crisis. They can come back at any time, Abe says, and a few have started to trickle back into town. But most continue to stay away, unsure when — if ever — it will be safe enough to return and live anything resembling a normal life.
Lack of preparedness
Abe, not surprisingly, looks exhausted, and like all Japanese, he has the politeness gene. But it also becomes clear, as we talk, that he is angry. He’s angry at Tokyo Electric Power, and he’s angry at the national government. At no point in the 30 years he has worked for the city, he says, did TEPCO or the government say it would be a good idea to prepare for a possible nuclear emergency. No evacuation drills, no town hall meetings to discuss what residents might do should the unthinkable happen. Nothing.
“Nothing?” I ask him again. How can that be so? This is an earthquake zone — everyone knew that — and earthquakes cause tsunamis, and the plant sits right along the coast. And this is Japan, a nation that pays attention to detail, whose people famously follow instructions, who…
He interrupts me, and through gritted teeth says, “Nothing. Nothing. We never received any guidance or instruction from them.” He’s boiling.
What about towns closer in, did they have drills? “I think some did, I’m not sure,” he says. (In fact, earlier in the week, at an evacuation center farther south, I spoke to a city official from the small town of Futaba, which literally sits in the shadow of Fukushima Dai-Ichi. He says that once a year the residents of the town would go to a local gymnasium, where they would be instructed on “how to use a fire extinguisher.”) The townspeople of Minamisoma occasionally had fire drills, but never was there any preparation for a nuclear accident. “There was never any communication from TEPCO that something like what’s happening now was even possible,” he sighs.
As we make our way out of the building, there’s an odd moment of comic relief. In the main lobby on the first floor I see a foreigner wearing what looks to be a Hazmat suit: he’s in white from head to toe, a hood on his head and little white booties on his feet. Who the hell is this, I wonder? One of the nuclear engineers France has sent to help try to contain the damage at Fukushima? Has this guy actually been inside the plant? I need to talk to him.