FUKUSHIMA, Japan—Here, in the course of three weeks at the height of winter, I visited the area where the earthquake struck, the coast where the tsunami hit, the nuclear plant where the “accident” occurred, all in a prefecture that still grapples with the memory of a disaster that happened 15 years ago.
For those of us who did not experience it, grasping the meaning and full significance of what happened is difficult. But hearing the stories of the people who lived through what is known in Japan as the “Great East Japan Earthquake” made it come alive for us, from the principal who had to tend to her pupils to the high school student (now mayor of Fukushima City) who was about to take an entrance exam. Through their narratives, we were brought back to the exact moment when the 9.0–9.1 magnitude earthquake hit, the terror of the tsunami soon after, the anxiety and fear over radiation levels, and the arduous months and years of recovery that followed—and continue today.
The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident are all well-known. But for many Fukushima residents, what has really hit hard is the “fourth disaster”: the prejudice, discrimination, and unfounded rumors faced by the city’s people—and products—after “3/11.”
Preserved everyday lives
Perhaps the most poignant part of the “Fukushima Field Trip Course”—the second edition of a Harvard course led by Prof. Aya Goto that I joined as a Fellow of the Takemi Program in International Health—was a visit to Ukedo Elementary School, which was hit by the earthquake and the tsunami.
Now a museum, the school located just 300 meters from the sea preserves the everyday lives of pupils before the disaster. Everything is still there: the blackboards, the cauldrons for the pupils’ lunches, the dust-covered laptops, including a minute-by-minute recollection of what transpired starting with the principal’s decisive order to evacuate to a hill just 8 minutes after the earthquake, to a schoolboy’s identification of the trail that led everyone to safety.
We also had the opportunity to visit the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the site of the century’s worst nuclear disaster and the only one—other than Chernobyl in 1986—to be categorized as Level 7 (major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects) on the International Nuclear Event Scale.
Standing in front of the four damaged reactors which released radiation and caused the protracted evacuations, I was brought to the awesome realization that humanity has accomplished much over the past century, but has also attained greater means for its own, and the planet’s, destruction. Indeed, aside from the human toll, hundreds of thousands of animals had to be euthanized due to the evacuation, and there are untold consequences of the aftermath on terrestrial and marine ecologies.
Still, despite the profound physical, economic, and psychological toll of the most powerful earthquake in Japan’s recorded history followed by the nuclear disaster, the people we met were concerned about the future as much as the past. Rightly, they are quick to stress that there is more to Fukushima than the events of 3/11—and I can heartily attest to the beauty of its mountains, the richness of its sake, the lusciousness of its fruits.
Hearteningly, we met people who have decided to return to their hometowns and recreate the community that earlier existed, including a taiko drummer in his mid-20s who said he’d rather stay in his hometown than seek a better life in Japan’s big cities. “Just keep communicating with others, and smile always,” the okami-san (traditional female manager) of a Fukushima restaurant told us as we were in the middle of a kaiseki dinner. The public health experts and officials also spoke of various recovery strategies—from the technical work of decontamination to the social work of (re)building the economy; despite language barriers, I sensed that they spoke from deep experience and knowledge.
Challenges
And yet challenges remain for the prefecture. At the Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum in Futaba, we were helpfully provided the valuable historical context of the nuclear accident: Japan’s rapid growth in the 1960s and the need to satisfy Tokyo’s energy demands.
Today, in the aftermath, there are conflicting visions of what Japan’s energy future should look like. Should they cut trees to give way to solar panels, as has been happening around the prefecture? Or should they give nuclear energy another chance? If Fukushima is to revive its agricultural industry, it will have to contend not just with learning to live in a contaminated world but also with questions facing Japan itself, including whether it is willing to accept—and support—migrant labor to save its aging agricultural sector, and society at large.
Meanwhile, Fukushima presents lessons for the whole world, particularly for our earthquake-prone country. Despite the devastation Japan was actually highly prepared for an earthquake, and in many ways this preparation—from serious earthquake drills like that in Ukedo Elementary School just days before 3/11 to stringent construction codes in response to previous earthquakes—surely saved many lives. Indeed, although there were clear lapses and shortcomings, the nuclear incident being the most glaring example, it is clear that the damage could have been far worse without strategic foresight.
It has been decades since the 1990 Luzon earthquake; I remember ducking under a table in our house in Los Baños as a child. And time and again, we receive warnings, including from a landmark 2004 report led by JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency), that the Philippines is not prepared for a major earthquake.
As Fukushima reminds us, we will do well to take the many aspects of disaster preparedness very seriously, or risk a calamity from which we may never fully recover. CS
Gideon Lasco is an anthropologist and physician currently serving as professorial lecturer at the University of the Philippines Diliman and as Takemi Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. A Palanca Award-winning essayist and longtime commentator on health, culture and society, he is the author of five books, including “The Philippines Is Not a Small Country” (2020), a winner of the National Book Award.
The author thanks Prof. Aya Goto and Isamu Amir, also a current Takemi Fellow, for their feedback.
