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After the government on April 22, 2011, banned entry into a 20-kilometer radius from the disaster-stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, declaring it to be an evacuation zone, many people still began to enter the area illegally to rescue pets left behind.
One of them was Mieko Yoshida, a 63-year-old cram school teacher who lived in Odaka Ward in the city of Minami-soma.
Yoshida was living with 12 cats when the nuclear disaster broke out at the plant in March 2011. Despite her desperate search, she couldn’t find four of the cats that went missing amid the pandemonium created by the disaster. For Yoshida, who lives alone, they were all precious members of her family.
Yoshida started a one-woman campaign for the rescue and protection of pets left behind in the no-go zone.
When she stood in front of the city office, carrying a placard reading, “Give me back my family,” many pet owners approached her, saying, “The same here.”
Yoshida compiled a list of some 80 houses in the off-limits zone where pets had been left behind. She secretly went to these houses to feed and rescue the animals.
Her concern for the lives of these vulnerable animals outweighed her fear of radiation.
Police kept bolstering the barricades erected to keep people from entering the zone, but that didn’t deter Yoshida from her stealth animal rescue mission.
She was repeatedly spotted in the no-go zone by police and was forced to write many letters of apology. Unfazed, she kept entering the zone to help animals, convinced that she was doing nothing wrong.
In mid-April, the Environment Ministry was secretly exploring the possibility of allowing civilians to enter the 20-kilometer zone to rescue pets. But a team at the Cabinet Office, which the ministry sounded out about the idea, flatly ruled out any such possibility. That was not surprising given that the government was struggling to cope with the ongoing nuclear crisis, and even local residents were not allowed to enter the zone.
The ministry then considered asking police and the Self-Defense Forces to rescue pets left in the zone.
But the ministry decided against making such a request, according to Koji Okura, a 53-year-old official at the ministry’s Animal Welfare and Management Office.
“We thought a plan for the rescue of pets (by police and the SDF) while they were still searching for missing people would not be supported by the public,” says Okura.
In the end, it was decided that pets captured by owners and other residents while they returned temporarily to their homes within the evacuation zone under government permission would be placed into an animal shelter operated by the Fukushima prefectural government. By the end of August, when all local residents had returned home at least once under the government’s temporary homecoming program, some 460 animals had been taken into custody.
The problem was that not many of the owners were ready to take back their pets from the shelter. Most evacuees were living in conditions that didn’t allow them to take care of their pets. They were living in no-pets-allowed temporary housing or had moved out of Fukushima and couldn’t easily return to the prefecture.
Inevitably, the pet shelter remained overcrowded.
The prefectural government then recruited volunteers to take care of animals in the shelter in their own homes. Some 40 people, mainly outside the disaster-stricken prefecture, responded to the recruitment and offered to look after animals on behalf of their owners.
But none of the owners wanted their pets to be placed in the hands of strangers. They said they felt more reassured if their pets were protected by the prefectural government.
A veterinarian named Seido Watanabe had secured a former pachinko parlor that was now unused in Miharu, a town in the prefecture, as the building to house a second pet shelter. But the work to remodel the building into a shelter had been running well behind schedule.
As there was little room in the existing shelter for accepting additional animals while there was no other place to keep them, the prefectural government was unable to take any effective steps to rescue and protect the cats and dogs that were prowling around in the no-go zone and whose owners were unknown.
Asked about volunteers who braved the radiation danger to rescue animals in the evacuation zone, such as Yoshida, Okura said, “Honestly, we were grateful.”
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