3.11, Fukushima, and "Stigma Damage"

Japan, with Fukushima prefecture highlighted in yellow

The cities squared off in black are the places I visited in the prefecture

The first time I told a friend I was going to be visiting Fukushima on my Japan Educator's Tour, she gave me kind of an askance look and said, "Whoa, are you sure about that?" Another friend made a joke about Hazmat suits. I started second guessing myself--wait, should I be worried about radiation? Am I being too cavalier about this? I actually didn't know anything about the situation in Fukushima--but I figured that Japan Society wouldn't be taking us somewhere dangerous, so I wasn't really overly concerned. Of course when I actually arrived in Fukushima I realized that both this hyped-up image of scary Fukushima as well as my own complete lack of information about the situation were typical mindsets of people outside of the 3.11 disaster. Neither mindset is particularly logical or well-informed. The biggest subject of learning here ended up being the power that perception can have over people and the possibly far-reaching consequences of those perceptions. 

I'm going to cut right to the chase here and address everyone's question: Is Fukushima all screwed up and soaking in mutant-fruit inducing, cancer-causing radiation? I'm just an observer, hardly an authority, but I'm going to go ahead and say...no. Most of Fukushima prefecture seems to have resumed normalcy; however, their lives will be significantly altered for the next 30 years as they adjust to a reality of constant monitoring for radiation levels. The biggest concern is revitalizing industry in the prefecture, particularly tourism and the agricultural sector, both of which have suffered greatly due to "stigma damage," a false perception that Fukushima remains dangerous. Because of this "stigma damage," people outside of Fukushima are afraid to go on vacation there and are even more afraid to purchase food grown there.

During our time in the prefecture, we visited Fukushima City, Date City, a small town called Hirono, Iwaki City, and drove along the coast where the tsunami hit. We visited schools, city halls, farmers, and even had a special information meeting with reps from TepCo (Tokyo Electric Power Company, who own the nuclear plant that had the accident). We had a dinner in Fukushima City with residents who are members of a local English club. In all, we had a number of both formal information sessions as well as opportunities for more casual interactions with locals to gain various perspectives of how the disaster affected the region. From these multiple sources we've been able to really put together a big picture of what happened during and immediately after the disaster, and what the process has been since then. I had some pressing "fact" questions at the beginning of my trip and I'll lay out my conclusions to these first:

What's the Damage?

Quick summary: On March 11, 2011 the Great East Japan Earthquake (also known as the Tohoku Earthquake) occurred underwater about 40 miles off the eastern coast of Japan. It triggered a huge tsunami. Many nuclear power plants automatically shut down, but at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant, this process failed due to the tsunami, resulting in a big nuclear meltdown. This incident revealed that many of Japan's power plants are not up to international code when it comes to tsunami precautions.

In total, this event caused about 15,000 deaths and incredible damage to buildings, infrastructure, etc. My focus here is the radiation, however. Everyone within about 12 miles of the plant was evacuated. In a few cases, that meant entire towns were evacuated until things were stabilized. Most of these people have since returned, but a lot haven't. In terms of radiation, apparently there are different types of radiation involved, each with their own half life counts. So one type of radiation that was emitted only had a half-life of 2 years--that type is gone. The type people are still worried about is the one with a half-life of 30 years. Now, there's not enough radiation in places where people live to cause the scary type of immediate effects we saw after the atom bomb in Hiroshima or Nagasaki--what people are more concerned about is that the long-term exposure can increase your risk of cancers. What is the real risk of this? The World Health Organization has published its inquiry into this topic here: http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/78218/1/9789241505130_eng.pdf 
It's really long--if you're looking for a short, undetailed answer, try reading the Findings on page 12. These risks seem minimal to me--certainly not worth worrying about if you're just breezing through on vacation.

Damage from the earthquake

Damage from the tsunami

Foundations of buildings destroyed by the tsunami

This building used to be a middle school

Evacuees bedding down in a gym

Decontamination
Just how the hell do you decontaminate a city? Radiation is in the air. If it gets into the groundwater, it can spread throughout the water supply. It can get sucked up and come back down as rain. To me, one of my biggest questions was, how does one even begin to clean it all up? Well, the process actually is just as crazy as you'd imagine. For the general ground, 5 inches of dirt are scraped off the top and carted away to be isolated and stored. For the houses, you spray pressurized water onto the roofs and walls, then take the contaminated water + clear the ground of several inches of dirt and cart it away to be stored. One farmer we spoke to described the intense and painful work of scraping layers of bark off of his persimmon trees! Decontamination is a long process that is still happening. It's caused thousands of migrant workers to come to Fukushima to complete this work (something that obviously somewhat affects the local hotel and restaurant economies in a positive way). What's more, although we're slowing cleaning the contamination from places where people live, we now have the big question of what to do with the contaminated dirt and debris. So far, it doesn't sound like there's been a solution to this. We were told that many garbage dumps do not want to accept this contaminated material. TepCo has built some special tanks for contaminated water, but a lot of the stuff is being buried far away (this does not strike me as an ideal solution, since dirt is permeable!).

Monitoring
Now that the immediate aftermath of the disaster and first period of decontamination is over, how do we keep an eye on what's happening with the radiation in Fukushima? There's actually a lot of monitoring taking place by various parties. UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on Effects of Atomic Radiation) is one of them, as you can see here: http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/fukushima.html  The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is another big one. TepCo is also doing its own monitoring, as is the Japanese government. What surprised me was the high degree of monitoring taking place in every aspect of daily life. For example, the schools we visited all had Geiger Counters on school grounds that take readings every 30 seconds. We were informed that most public places had similar setups. These readings are published in local newspapers and online. That's for general radiation in the air.

Measuring radiation in the school field

Newspaper reportings of pubic testings. Note how different the scores seem to be. I spot one as high as 16.09 on this page

But this point, just walking around in Fukushima isn't going to expose you to tons of radiation; the larger concern is internal radiation, radiation absorbed from drinking contaminated water or foods with high radiation levels. One school we visited tested their school lunches daily. They also publish their readings online. Testing is even more intense at the agricultural level. Many farms were unable to sell their produce for the first year and some remain unable to sell. The farms that are back to producing test their products themselves, but these products actually undergo monitoring from a number of decentralized agents: the prefecture monitors to make sure produce is meeting standards, the companies selling the produce monitors, and the distributors monitor to ensure the quality of their goods. Rice is monitored an average of 5 times, we were told by one elementary school principal.

Machine used to test school lunches

Testing bags of rice

These charts were provided in a brochure printed by the prefecture. Interesting that Japan's standards would be so much higher than any other country. 

What's almost more important than the monitoring, though, is that everyone remains transparent about what they see. As mentioned above, all kinds of test results are widely available online and in the newspaper. Here's a website giving readings for different kinds of produce (the 3 buttons in the middle are for vegetables, grains, and fruit): https://fukumegu.org/ok/mieru/   and here a website about the monitoring in general. Apparently there's a way to search for testing by location: http://www.new-fukushima.jp/  There are even places that you can bring things grown in your own garden to be tested. Despite all of this, the prefecture is still suffering from very low sales in their agricultural sector, particularly sales to outside of the prefecture (in other words, people outside the prefecture are afraid to buy anything from Fukushima, while people inside kind of know what the story is and are ok with it). I guess there will always be a little voice in some people's heads insisting that the government is lying to you. OR, people don't bother checking the numbers and just panic based on no information at all. OR...people aren't sure they understand the numbers? I could definitely fall into this category. I mean, I do have some perspective. I know that at any given place there will always be some background radiation, so even if we stuck a Geiger Counter in my living room the number certainly wouldn't be 0. I know that every time you get on a place, you're exposing yourself to some radiation. And certainly, we expose ourselves to radiation every time we get an X-ray or MRI or whatever. With this understanding, I can accept some low numbers on the test results in Fukushima and not freak out. Even so, the classic aphorism goes that we fear that which we do not understand. Which brings us to....

Radiation Education & Research
One of the things the prefectural government has implemented since 3.11 is a mandatory curriculum of radiation education throughout the 12 years of schooling. It's not a separate class, just a certain number of hours of education following the set curriculum. The subject matter includes some science about what radiation is and how it can hurt us, as well as the teaching of practical behaviors to avoid radiation contact.

 

The government and TepCo have also set up research centers to further the study of radiation and its effects on humans, such as the Fukushima Prefecture Medical Device Development and Safety Assessment Center, and the Fukushima International Medical and Science Center, both of which also offer healthcare related to radiology. Monitoring extends also to the watching of people and their general health, of course. People in the prefecture have access to small radiation detectors, but there's also larger machines that have been made available ("Hard Body Counters"?). At the elementary school we visited, this large machine was bussed to the school in the previous year to examine every single student.

Finances
TepCo must first of all, deal with keeping the destroyed nuclear reactor at the Daiichi plant under control. They have to constantly cool it with water then store that contaminated water in tanks. They also have to upgrade all their other plants to ensure that they are definitely up to code. They have to spend money to build the new research facilities and to monitor radiation levels. They have to pay workers to decontaminate. Most of all, they have to pay compensation to people affected by the nuclear disaster, and this is no small number (according to the reps, 2 trillion yen to date). Fukushima prefecture had 154,285 evacuees, according to the prefectural office. TepCo was responsible for building temporary housing for them, paying compensation for damages and lost work time, etc. In addition, we spoke to a farmer who has not been able to sell off a crop since the disaster due to radiation levels being above the limit. He's been getting compensation for nearly 2 and a half years, which he says has allowed him to live without any financial burdens at all.

One of my biggest questions before our meeting the with the TepCo representatives was, How is TepCo footing the bill for all of this? The answer is that they aren't. TepCo was already one of those big companies that was constantly borrowing money from other people to stay afloat. It can't take out any more private loans, obviously, because no one is willing. In our meeting the TepCo rep said that the national government is "supporting the company" but that "we will have to return our profits to the government for many years." So....essentially, the Japanese government owns TepCo now. This has become almost like a bank-bailout issue, in which TepCo is far too large and important of a company to let fail, in part because they provide most of Japan with its power, in part because they employ a huge percentage of the Japanese population. What to do? The government is basically bankrolling all of TepCo's payouts.

My Visit
None of the facts above give a real sense of what people who live in Fukushima are still going through, and that is the part of my experience that I found most valuable. Many times while we were in Fukushima, we heard expressed in various ways the desire to return to normal and forgo this label of "special." But the fact is, even in places of the prefecture that were, in physical terms, scarcely affected at all are still perceived as part and parcel of Fukushima, a place that is getting special treatment, Fukushima, a place that needs to be treated with rubber gloves to avoid contamination. The prefecture has been stigmatized as unsafe, and despite the intangible nature of this fear, it has had very real consequences for the people who live there.

Fukushima City was far from both the coast and the nuclear meltdown, and so life pretty much just goes on there. It's a large-ish, bustling city with restaurants and shops and everything normal you can imagine. We took the train into the city and spent the night there having dinner with a local English club. There ensued many of the usual trappings and quirks of the semi-formal Japanese gathering, by which I mean that every member of the club stood up and read a pre-prepared speech on the topic of their favorite thing about Fukushima. They wanted to know what we'd learned about Fukushima before we came. One man confessed to me that he panicked at first after the disaster, and abandoned his job to run away to Kyoto. The way he spoke about it, almost like it was a matter of shame, was very interesting to me--he kept saying that his wife was the strong one and that he was not a man for running away. You could really tell that what the prefecture has suffered has changed people's perceptions of themselves and strengthened their "prefectural" identity, if you will (Perhaps you could compare it to post-9/11 New Yorker identity). But mostly, these people just wanted to have a good time and practice their English. Life was pretty normal in Fukushima City.

Things were much more somber in Hirono Town, a small town very close to the Daiichi Power Plant. On the way there we passed the highway exit to the plant (it was closed off). In reality, Hirono's radiation level is comparable to Fukushima's, but its stigma damage is much, much worse because of its proximity to the plant. This entire town naturally had to be evacuated when the disaster occurred. The town originally had a population of about 5000, but only just over 1000 of the evacuees returned. The majority of the evacuees are living in nearby Iwaki City, which has a population of about 300,000. As long as the evacuees continue to stay away, poor Hirono Town is facing the serious possibility of disappearance. There were numerous empty houses, and the elementary school we visited only had about 20 students. We watched the kids sing a few songs for us then taught them to sing "Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes." We were told to "be as cheerful as possible, to lift their spirits." They were super cute and ran from window to window waving goodbye at as our bus pulled away, but it was also a little sad. Why aren't the evacuees returning? Part of it seems to be that people are leaving the agricultural sector because it's simply not a viable option when no one wants to buy produce from Fukushima. Part of it seems to be simply that the younger generations found Iwaki City much more convenient and filled with opportunity than the small town they grew up in.

Our last stop was Iwaki City, and this perhaps was the most emotionally brutal. We visited a non-profit organization called The People, and talked to them about their efforts to help rebuild and provide counseling and community services to evacuees living in Iwaki. They seem somewhat successful in having created a community space and sponsoring activities in that space for evacuees. What hurt to watch was the explanation of their project to save the agricultural industry of Iwaki. As I said before, some farms have already started selling their produce again, while others are still waiting for radiation levels to go down. One farmer we spoke to near Date City was very optimistic about passing the levels this year and having his first crop sold. We asked if he felt that consumers would still buy, and again he seemed very optimistic. Well, Iwaki has been able to sell their produce since last year, and it has not gone well. Demand is way down. Consumers who used to look to some Fukushima produce specifically for its organic quality now stay far far away from it. The People has begun a new project to try to revitalize farming....and the project is organic cotton. =( I feel that probably most of us were suppressing pained winces as we watched the inspiring promotional video depicting agricultural experts coming in to teach farmers this new skill, intercut with snapshots of happy children and cheerfully spooling cotton thread. It was rough, because the spokesperson was selling this project as an innovative solution to an economic crisis...while we sat there thinking, who's going to pay $40 for a cotton T-shirt?

All in all, Fukushima is not the radiation nightmare some conspiracy-loving panic-mongers would believe, but it is a place that is facing some serious challenges right now. Whatever changes may come to this place in the future, people are pretty resilient. Hopefully they'll manage and come through to the other side.