FUKUSHIMA--At the age of 58, Midori Eda realized that it was time to plan for her future--and that of her 82-year-old mother.
FUKUSHIMA--At the age of 58, Midori Eda realized that it was time to plan for her future--and that of her 82-year-old mother.
But they are having a difficult time making a decision.
“What should we do from now? Should we continue to live here?” Eda asked.
Eda, who has been using a wheelchair for more than a decade, and her mother, Chizuko Kuwahara, who recently underwent surgery for breast cancer, now live in Tokyo, far from their home in Tomioka, Fukushima Prefecture, near the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
Like so many others, their evacuation and ordeal began on March 12 last year, after a hydrogen explosion occurred at the No. 1 reactor building of the plant.
A year after the explosion, the evacuees continue to struggle in their unfamiliar surroundings, some gripped with fear that they were exposed to high doses of radiation in the early stages of the crisis.
On March 11, when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck, Kuwahara was being treated at Futaba Kosei Hospital, which is just 4 kilometers north of the nuclear plant. Damage to the roads forced her to spend the night in the hospital.
On March 12, the government ordered residents living within 10 km of the plant to evacuate. About 40 inpatients and outpatients at the hospital boarded a bus bound for Namie, also near the plant. The bus then traveled to Saitama and Nagano prefectures, as well as Iwaki in Fukushima Prefecture, in search of facilities that could accept the patients.
“(During the evacuation), we took naps together in kotatsu (foot warming table). We had little food to eat,” Kuwahara said, adding that she would rather forget the experience.
A week later, she was reunited with Eda in Tokyo.
They spent their days in evacuation centers, including one set up in the former Grand Prince Hotel Akasaka. Since June, they have been living in a Tokyo metropolitan government-run apartment complex in Musashino, western Tokyo.
It’s been a long and painful struggle.
In August, Kuwahara was found to have breast cancer. She underwent surgery to remove cancer cells in October, and her physical condition only recently became stable.
Eda has been using a wheelchair for 12 years due to a disease. Her power was sapped during the evacuation, making it impossible for her to drive her car that was specially modified for her use. She mostly stayed inside the apartment.
Norio Kanno, 53, from Namie, was helping patients leave Futaba Kosei Hospital, where Kuwahara had been staying, when the first hydrogen explosion occurred.
On March 11, his house was washed away by the tsunami. The next day, he carried his 89-year-old blind mother from an evacuation center to Futaba Kosei Hospital, and was in the playground of Futaba Senior High School about 3.5 km from the nuclear plant waiting for a helicopter to take the patients away from danger.
Kanno heard “a muffled sound, like fireworks exploding in a distant town,” and saw white smoke rising.
“Gas may have exploded. (It’s) in the direction of the nuclear power plant. What happened?” he said he thought at the time. He said he didn’t think too much about what had caused the blast.
Later in the day, he got on a helicopter with his mother and arrived at a facility in Nihonmatsu, also in Fukushima Prefecture, along with about 20 patients and family members from the hospital.
Two days later, people wearing yellow protective clothing closed off the facility and measured the radiation levels of all the people there.
The radiation from Kanno’s shoes sent the hand on the measuring equipment to the maximum figure. He was instructed to abandon his shoes.
The person measured the radiation level of Kanno’s body, and said, “No problem.”
However, Kanno remembered that in the dust whipped up by the helicopters, he had walked between the school building and the playground four or five times without wearing a mask.
As his concerns grew about his exposure to radiation, his physical condition gradually deteriorated and he had difficulties sleeping.
His acquaintance tried to encourage him by saying, “You have no problems because you were not exposed to radiation.”
However, Kanno believes he must have inhaled radioactive materials in the school playground.
He asked hospitals in and out of Fukushima Prefecture for medical checkups. However, his requests were rejected.
“During this past year, I have repeatedly recalled the situation on March 12. I don’t know what the effects will be on my body if I was exposed to the radiation,” he said.
In Tokyo, Eda undergoes rehabilitation treatment three times a week so that she will be able to drive the car again.
On March 10 this year, Kuwahara and Eda made a temporary return to their house in Tomioka. The furniture remained toppled. It was as if time had stopped on March 11 last year.
Seeing the flowers of Japanese “ume” apricot trees beginning to blossom in the deserted garden brought tears to Kuwahara's eyes.
As spring approaches, Kuwahara says she feels nostalgic about the rows of cherry blossom trees, which were a specialty in Tomioka. She has heard there is also a place with beautiful cherry blossoms in Musashino.
The mother and daughter say their dream is to gather under the cherry blossoms in Musashino with other evacuees they met when they were forced to leave their hometowns near the Fukushima nuclear plant.
(This article was compiled from reports by Naoko Kawamura and Takayuki Kihara.)