Fukushima Crisis - Nate Henty

            “Hurry up! We can’t miss this train. It is the last to leave for another hour. Run!”

            My uncle and I squeezed through the train’s closing door with less than a second to spare. We had just spent the last week in Tokyo and we were making a leg from Shinjuku station to Fukushima today. The train ride from Tokyo to Fukushima is scheduled to take about three and a half hours. My uncle’s friend Yamazaru was planning on meeting us around the time that we got off the train.

            One thing that people from the United States don’t understand is that Japanese people are very time oriented. If a bullet train (Shinkansen) does not arrive to it’s station on time, it will make national news. Needless to say, timing was everything. Or so we thought.

            Leaving Tokyo, I spent a lot of time looking out the window of the train. While in Tokyo, looking out the window, you can see nothing but buildings and advertisements. There are a few stray streets moving in and out of the paths below the track, but Tokyo was by and large concrete and ads. But as we continued to leave the city, houses became scattered. The view was dominated by rice fields, shacks, and mountains whose peaks penetrated the clouds. Already I could see that Fukushima was going to be a whole different beast.

            “We have to switch trains. This is as far as this one will go. This next train will take us all the way to Fukushima.”

Soon we reached tracks that were surrounded by a tunnel of trees. As we got further and further from the city, the train car began shaking more and more. It was clear that the tracks were not cared for as much in the more remote parts of the island. There was a constant rattling, and no one seemed to be bothered by it. Or if they were, they didn’t show it. However, the people changed as the landscape did.

            Instead of the clean and well-dressed people of the city, more and more people who were coming on were dressed in clothes of someone who works in manual labor. They were often covered in dirt, wearing a bandana around their head, and adorned in beads of sweat. But these people were few and far between. Passengers in general became less and less common.

“Our stop is up next. Grab your bags and have them ready. The train won’t stop long, so we need to be ready to get off.”

When we arrived at the station in Fukushima, we were not greeted by Yamazaru, so we decided to start walking to his house. My uncle had made these arrangements weeks before, so he was expecting us, but something had come up for him. Luckily my uncle brought maps of the area that we had taken the train to, so we started walking. We walked for 4 hours to get to a Seven Eleven that was close to his house. From there, my uncle used a pay phone and called Yamazaru’s wife, who came to pick us up. Already I could tell things were different.

Unlike the fast paced life of Tokyo, where timing is key, the people of Fukushima function off of their own schedule. Timing isn’t always important. We had wished that it was more important to Yamazaru, but their way of life was so different. A lot of their way of life seemed so hard.

Yamazaru is the owner of a farm. In Japan, a farm is usually something like rice fields and a shack where the workers can get out of the sun on a hot day. But not at Yamazaru’s. He had an animal farm. He had horses, chickens, rabbits, dogs, cats, everything. To me it all seemed so nice and laid back. I felt at home. But no one around me was smiling. Or if they did, it was only for a minute, and it was back to a stone face. See, there was an underlying problem.

Two years ago when a tsunami hit Japan, Fukushima got hit bad. So bad that the force of the tsunami destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and caused an enormous meltdown. Thousands of people died due to radiation from this meltdown and thousands more have been displaced. Unlike Tokyo, many people in Fukushima live there because their ancestors have lived there for generations upon generations. Now, they are faced with a choice: leave the land their family has called home for generations or die from the radiation.

The area we stayed in wasn’t as affected by the radiation, but radiation levels were still high. I spent three days in Fukushima. The first day I spent helping Yamazaru around his farm with little jobs that he cannot accomplish on his own. Towards the end of the day, two women arrived at his house. They were “neighbors” and they wanted to introduce themselves to us, the foreigners (gaijin). Later, I found that the reason they came to visit was because I was there. Ever since the meltdown, none of the young men have been able to find work in Fukushima, so they have been saving up, leaving their family, and buying a one-way train ticket to Tokyo.

The lady who was interested in me in particular, was a woman who was thirty years old. She needed to be wed and have children, or she was going to let her family down. There is almost an epidemic, for these women, that is going on. They cannot find spouses because most of the men have left. Now I have a thirty-year-old woman all but asking me, an eighteen-year-old gaijin, to wed her. Obviously, I did not. Even if I was interested in her, I cannot speak her language, she is thirty years old, and works on a cucumber farm. I only speak English, am eighteen, and go to college.

When I told her that I was not able to act on her request, devastation filled her face. Not only did I feel guilty, but helpless as well; I couldn’t do anything about it. My hands were bound.

The next day, we visited a village deep in the mountains of Fukushima. Here, we found, yet again, another thirty-year-old woman who was looking to be wed. Her mother, who she lived with, brought up the idea of marriage. Again, I had to decline. How, in two days, can I be offered marriage to two people who don’t even speak the same language as me?  It all comes back to the nuclear meltdown. The men have left for Tokyo where they can find work, and the women are left in a radiation filled landscape with no hope of making their lives any better.

But along the roadways, I do see some men. They are grayed, tired, and weather beaten. They are covered in dirt and are capped with construction hats. There is always one man handling a power shovel while the others are making sure the dirt they dump makes it into a huge blue, tarp bag.

“What are they doing?” I asked my uncle.

“They are scraping the top three inches of soil off the ground to try to lower the effects of the radiation.”

“It’s that bad?”

“It’s that bad.”

We stopped at one more place on the way home. It was a “supermarket.” This supermarket was nothing more than a shack that had sliding doors and a place to lay out fresh vegetables. In this market I met a man who was 93 years old. He was a World War II veteran and when he got back from the war, he began working on the rice field next to his market. He was sitting when I met him, and when he stood up, his back was held at a ninety degree angle. He had worked in the rice field for so long that he could physically not straighten out his back. All the days he labored in the rice field caused him to be permanently bent. It made him look so un-human.

And the saddest part is, he was still working. At 93 years old, this man was still working. He didn’t work nearly the hours that he would have when he was young, but he still did. And this is because the lack of young people living in Fukushima. There is no one to take over his job.

In the United States, people complain when they cannot retire at 65. People complain that their life is hard. People act like life is impossible, but sitting in front of me was a man, 93 years of age who had gone through a war, tsunami, and nuclear crisis, and is still working. And why? Because Fukushima is gone.

Fukushima is beautiful, but it is soon to be forgotten. Nowhere else is there mountains that reach into the clouds that watch over the rice fields below. Nowhere else is there such beautiful landscape. Nowhere else will you find such broken people to such an invisible attacker. Nowhere else can someone be so change forever.

On the train ride back to Tokyo I asked my uncle about some of the things that happened to me in Fukushima. He explained to me that the women needed husbands and that the Fukushima prefecture was almost rid of all young people. I had asked him one more question as well.

“What does Fukushima mean in English?”

“It means ‘Blessed Island.’ Ironic, isn’t it?”