MINAMI-SOMA, Fukushima Prefecture--Abandoned platforms lined with rows of weeds instead of passengers are waiting for trains that will never arrive.
MINAMI-SOMA, Fukushima Prefecture--Abandoned platforms lined with rows of weeds instead of passengers are waiting for trains that will never arrive.
Rails that once carried residents to their daily destinations fade into overgrown weeds less than 100 meters down the tracks.
On a chilly and crisp early winter day in December, JR Odaka Station in the Odaka district in Minami-Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, looks as if it has been abandoned for years.
As the general election approaches on Dec. 16, the nation is enjoying a festive atmosphere, brought by the heated campaigns of more than 1,500 candidates nationwide, a record.
But no campaign car with loudspeakers blaring a candidate’s name breaks the eerie silence in this small town.
No residents are present at this once-bustling station and the surrounding shopping streets. The heart-wrenching scenery could feel even more so if one imagines that this no man’s land extends to all the areas in a 20-kilometer radius from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co.
Odaka district, located on the southern end of Minami-Soma, was included in the 20-kilometer evacuation zone until the government relaxed the eviction order in April. Entry was strictly restricted, leaving decontamination work and infrastructure recovery efforts uncompleted, even today.
In April, much of Odaka, formerly an independent town of the same name, was re-designated a “zone preparing for the lifting of the evacuation order.”
Residents and business operators are now allowed to freely enter their homes, but they are still prohibited from staying overnight. Most businesses and public facilities remain closed.
Fear of radiation contamination and delay in infrastructure recovery prompted about 2,000 of 14,000 registered residents in the district to move their residency registry to elsewhere.
“We used to have a small but close-knit community, but now we seem to have different thoughts in our minds,” lamented Sunao Kato, a 62-year-old local barber. "There are people whose houses were completely washed away by tsunami and on the mountainside, radiation levels are prohibitively high. There are people who are growing accustomed to a life dependent on compensation from TEPCO.”
While more than 50 shops and stores once operated along the district’s main street, stretching 1 kilometer from Odaka Station, Kato’s barbershop is the only business that had resumed operation after April this year.
Outside Kato’s shop, houses and shops destroyed by the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, remained almost untouched as if time had stopped. No pedestrians are seen, and only an occasional patrol car and construction vehicles pass down the main street.
“I doubt we can get people back even if this town manages to return into an inhabitable place,” Kato said.
Despite his pessimism, Kato retains the hope that his barbershop will provide a place where residents can hang out and forget their predicaments for an hour while they have their hair cut.
Immediately after the eviction order was relaxed in April, he filed a notification to reopen the barbershop that he inherited from his father. To help customers recapture the feeling of the former good times and temporarily escape their plights, he and his 61-year-old wife, Mikiko, restored all the equipment and interior decoration on their own.
The only difference and biggest inconvenience is that they need to pick up gallons of water for shampoo service, as water service has not reached individual households.
Every morning, the couple fill 40 PET bottles and five 20-liter plastic tanks at a nearby city office, and warm the water in electric-heated pots to rinse customers’ hair.
At day’s end, they drive to their new home, a temporary housing unit located in the Haramachi district in central Minami-Soma, about 10 kilometers to the south.
Some days no customer shows up, but there was a day when a record eight people came to Kato’s shop, making him travel back and forth between his shop and the city office to pick up water.
“No word of gratitude is more rewarding than customers saying they could forget their realities after the disaster even if only for a few minutes,” Mikiko said. “I can also forget our current plight while working at our shop.”
Her husband agreed. “Throughout the year I lived and worked in Tokyo since the disaster, all I wanted to do is give haircuts to my customers in Odaka, and do the same old mindless chatter about gambling, golfing and all that.”
Asked what he expects from the new government to be formed following the upcoming snap election, Sunao only said the national polls this time feel the farthest thing from his day-to-day reality.
“I think someone who is barely getting by each day without any vision for tomorrow cannot discuss national politics. It feels like a very, very remote thing,” he said.
Only when leaders of political parties, such as Liberal Democratic Party President Shinzo Abe, pledge to keep nuclear reactors online, does Sunao admits he feels a sense of frustration, realizing “they have no sympathy for the people of Fukushima.”
“Seeing our community completely split apart, I think it is just illogical to stick to nuclear power,” he said.
While the radiation level in Odaka’s town center is as low as less than 0.3 microsievert per hour, the figure easily jumps tenfold if one drives about 6 kilometers southwest.
Takako Kuroki’s residence is located in the Kawabusa area near the mountainside of Odaka, where a prohibitively high radiation level is still detected and is designated as an “unlivable zone.”
Kuroki, 57, currently lives in Bando, Ibaraki Prefecture, with her mother. Her son’s family and their children, who used to live with Kuroki in Odaka, have decided to permanently settle in Tsuchiura in the prefecture.
She said that the farming family is among the many families from Odaka who were split apart in the wake of the nuclear disaster. She has about given up hope that she and her mother will be allowed to return home.
“Even if decontamination work clears the surface of the land, wind will bring back radioactive dust from the highly contaminated mountainside,” Kuroki said.
“I am not confident that I can live a life in which I will be asked whether I weigh more my love for my hometown or my health.”
This sense of frustration has prompted Kuroki to attend the anti-nuclear protest rally that is held in front of the prime minister’s office every Friday evening.
Since September she and three of her friends who live in the Kanto region as evacuees joined the rally once every month. When protesters shouted in chorus “let’s protect Fukushima,” she was moved to tears in a rare outburst of her suppressed emotions.
But her expectations that she could be reunited with many of her old acquaintances from Odaka have so far been betrayed each time.
“Unless people who lost their homes to the nuclear accident raise our voices, the government and TEPCO will not feel regret,” Kuroki said.
The campaign rallies for the Dec. 16 election so far, in which the LDP and other conservative parties are showing reluctance to promote a sudden shift away from nuclear power, is reinforcing her conviction.
“I feel very uncomfortable at seeing parties still divided over such a nonsense question of whether or not to maintain nuclear power,” Kuroki said. “They have no idea how much we are suffering.”