Planet FukushimaI　ー　From the afterword of the photo book

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I think it was around December 29 or 30, during the last week of 2015, when I was driving from Soma to Date, the city where my parents live. Route 115 was usually thronged with vehicles due to the ongoing decontamination work, but during the New Year holidays there was hardly any traffic on the road, and it had gone back to what it used to be, a mountain pass meandering quietly through the peaks. The taciturn repetitiveness of the curves reminded me of family trips to the beach, which had not been much fun. I remember sitting in the backseat, trying for the life of me not to make eye contact with my father in the rearview mirror, enduring the irregular G-force as we navigated winding roads and sulking at the height of my teenage rebellion. It was a different season now, but it really brought me back.

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Driving in an unfamiliar environment was a bit disconcerting, and since it was already late in the afternoon, I decided to take a shortcut along a narrow side road, indicated by the car navigation system, in order to get over the mountains before it got dark. As soon as I got on the road, I saw a large number of flexible container bags ahead of me and reflexively got out of the car to take a photo. However, even with a 24mm wide-angle lens I could not capture the entire scene, so I decided to climb up a nearby mountainside. The rough, almost nonexistent path to the top was unexpectedly steep. I realized on the way up that I had not brought a bear bell or anything, but by that time I was already 80% of the way up. I wondered when we human animals had become so cavalier in our dealings with nature, and having grown accustomed to an urban environment, I was afraid of the consequences of my own foolhardy behavior. But that did not enable me to turn back, and I had no choice but to keep climbing, trusting that all the denizens of the mountains were safely hibernating. 

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The uphill slope was across from a flexible container bag storage area, and when I got to the top, the view below became clear. It was like a vast empire sprawling across a hidden mountainous region. The grid-like streets reminded me of ancient northern cities, the loose grid layout was like a labyrinth extending between houses, and I felt it would not be strange if smoke from evening fires was rising here and there. The peculiar outlines of white fences seemed somehow meaningful, and the flexible container bags dusted with fine grains of snow began looking to me like the scales of fish. I named the place “Fat Fish,” and my newfound duties as its sentinel began. 

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As decontamination work progressed in various parts of Fukushima Prefecture, around 2014 we began seeing new and unprecedented sights, namely “temporary storage sites” for radioactive waste. These are places where soil, grass, and wood removed during decontamination are packed into large, shielded bags (one cubic meter) known as flexible containers, covered with tarps, and stored. Communities were overflowing with the blue and black furekon bags (as they are commonly called, furekon being Japanese shorthand for “flexible container”), and soon they became a common sight. Ironically, the arrival of temporary storage sites marked the first time that radioactive substances, which until then had been formless presences, were rendered visible. 

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One village has a different name for them than “temporary storage sites.” I once called the village office, in February 2016 I think it was, to inquire about their temporary storage sites, and the person on the other end responded, “Oh, you mean the ‘temporary temporary storage sites.’” They went on to correct this phrase at every turn during the conversation, so I decided to inquire further. The story was that the village had decided to call the local site a “temporary temporary storage site” (italics mine), as it was only a temporary place to store the waste until it could be taken to the intermediate storage facility on the seaside, which was in itself a temporary storage site. Decontamination work in the village is divided by district, and when the number of furekon bags reaches a certain amount, they are moved to the “temporary temporary storage site” designated by the village. Until then, however, the bags were stored in each district. So, I asked, what should we call those places in each district where waste was stored before taking it to the “temporary temporary storage site” in the village (i.e., two stages before going to the “temporary storage” at the seaside)? “Well... it’s a ‘temporary temporary temporary’ storage site,” said the official in charge.

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At that time, there were a great number of such “temporary (×3) storage sites,” “temporary (×2) storage sites,” and plain old “temporary storage sites” of various shapes and sizes scattered across the seaside and inland areas. I am well aware that these designations reflect the hopeful definitions of “temporary” harbored by people living there, but it seemed trying for the government official to repeat “temporary, temporary” over and over again, and it was hard for me to listen to as well. It struck me that being a local government official was no easy task. 

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It had been about five years earlier, in March 2011, that the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant created “hot spots” with extremely high airborne radiation levels in various parts of Fukushima. The radioactive contaminants released by a hydrogen explosion flowed northwest (inland) from the plant in a radioactive cloud known as a plume, and rain that fell at the time was a major source of damage. In Date in particular, where my parents live (about 60 km northwest of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant), while the entire area was not designated as an evacuation zone, by November 2011 a total of 117 sites where evacuation was recommended had been designated by the national government (places where the accumulated radiation dose for one year after the accident was estimated to exceed 20 mSv), and measures were taken via the municipal government to encourage evacuation, especially by pregnant women and children. As a result, many people in my home city of Date, especially in the districts where evacuation was recommended, were forced to relocate voluntarily, and by April 2012, 1,003 people (387 households) had moved out of the city, of which 273 people (102 households) are still living elsewhere today (as of May 31, 2022, according to an inquiry with Date City). 

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It was in early May 2011 when I returned to my parents’ house for the first time after the disaster, and at that time I was still struggling to grasp the seriousness of the situation. I had never thought much about radiation except in the context of war or nuclear weapons, my knowledge of it was vague, and even when I tried to imagine the characteristics of radioactive substances, which are odorless and invisible, it was difficult to come to grips with them. 

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When I called my parents’ house and heard my mother nonchalantly say, “Everything is fine around here,” it was shocking and almost anticlimactic. I guessed it was true, as I could see horsetail and bamboo shoots poking up out of the hills behind my house, and Japanese mustard greens and spinach flourishing in the garden in front. So it’s easy to imagine how my mother felt at the time, half hopeful, half attempting to reassure herself, when she saw the ordinary springtime meadows the same as always, and spoke in just a slightly more strained voice than usual. 

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Since I had visited the seaside (Hamadori), which was severely damaged by the tsunami, before returning to my hometown, I was not surprised to see blue tarps covering the roofs of houses and cracks in the roads 30 to 50 cm wide in the inland area (Nakadori) where my parents’ home is located as well. Then, when I boarded the Abukuma Express, a local train that had just been restored to service, the scenery outside was so familiar, so much the same as ever, that I could hardly believe the drastic situation I had seen on the TV news was unfolding outside the window. 

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I sat and mindlessly gazed at the budding spring-green trees, listening to the usual pleasant clickety-clack of the train. It was as if the world up until yesterday had been a lie. Outside the rain had just stopped, fresh wet leaves were passing by the windows, and the inside of the train was filled with faint sunlight. In front of the door, an old man in boots was waiting to get off the train, holding onto the railing. The few gray hairs on the top of his head were swaying in the breeze from the fan, and suddenly I felt all the strength sapped out of me. In that moment, images of my late grandfather and the stands of trees he had cleared in the mountains overlapped with the scene in front of me. I still remember a visual experience that seemed to be a metaphor for a train of the future, one that would never open its doors, cut off from the outside world, and the familiar scenery looked terribly different from what I was accustomed to.

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A few days after I returned to my hometown, the dosimeter that I had long been eagerly waiting for, as production had not kept pace with demand, finally arrived, and I also began feeling the severity of the situation firsthand. My vision began to change in a very strange way, with each scene before my eyes composed of three layers: foreground, middle ground, and background. You might even call them three different dimensions. For example, suppose there was a person in front of me and a mountain in the distance. In the past, both of them would have existed in the same space at the same time. However, the nuclear accident caused the foreign substance called radioactive contamination (in the middle ground) to come between the person in the foreground and the mountain in the background, and the two were separated off into completely different dimensions. Somewhere along the way, a new layer (close-range view) was added between the person (foreground) and the camera lens, and I became aware of the space before me in layers, like those in Photoshop. If the dosimeter reading was unexpectedly high, the space behind the lens, that is, the space I (and the camera) occupied, formed one additional layer (perhaps as a barrier), and before I knew it, another space behind me, separate from the one occupied by me and the camera,was pressing against my back. I felt a sense of discomfort as if I had been gotten sucked into one of many layers in a Photoshop image on a computer monitor.

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The Hirose River, a tributary of the Abukuma River basin, flows nearby. Just before it reaches my parents’ house, the river makes a sharp turn and becomes 50-meter-wide shallows. Standing on the bridge there and listening to　the noise of the water brings back old childhood memories. I used to play in the shallows of this river, and when I saw my grandfather coming down from the mountain to have lunch, I would follow him back to his house. 

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Fortunately perhaps, my grandfather passed away about 20 years ago and did not experience the earthquake. I often wonder how he would have reacted to the disaster had he been alive. Whatever happened, he always worked the land, regardless of rain or snow. My grandfather was mild-mannered, patient, and somehow always in a good mood. He must have been happy to see the area modernize after the war with the massive energy revolution, and see gas and electricity reach even this small village. He must have been happy with the reliable four-wheel-drive vehicle he drove along the bumpy mountain roads, as he had suffered from polio in childhood and had a limp in one leg. With what joy did he hear the brisk sound of his chainsaw as it cut through a big tree that was just reaching maturity? The mountain has been left untouched since the disaster and has become a dense wilderness (it has only been decontaminated up to 20 meters from the forest’s edge). Thickets and bamboo are encroaching on the road, and it is unlikely that I will ever reach the woods that my grandfather grew on the mountainside. Nothing has changed from a distance, but an invisible, transparent and soundless space lies between the mountains and me. If I close my eyes quietly in front of the river, I can catch a glimpse of my grandfather climbing up the mountain on the other side, his body swaying from side to side amid the dark foliage. 

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From the many people I have met over the past 10 years, I have learned that each person has a different sense of time. For some it goes fast, for some slow, for some it is fragmented, and for some things have already gone back to how they were before the disaster. People’s sense of time can differ depending on the type and scale of the disaster they experienced, as in the difference between coastal areas where tsunami damage is visible and inland areas where radiation damage is severe. There are also major differences between adults and children. Things also depend on the jobs people do. Of course, it is only natural that concepts of time and feelings about the disaster differ from person to person in regions outside of Fukushima. In Fukushima, though the presence of this invisible foreign substance has undoubtedly had some effect (even if only temporarily) on people’s sense of time. 

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The middle ground is at the center, and there are many layers attached to it on either side. And there is a new space, seen from above, that of the “Fat Fish” that I encountered by chance. The layers seem to me to be fragmented and isolated, each ticking away time in its own way, without any rhyme or reason. 

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