High school students from a tsunami-ravaged town in Tohoku and a municipality near the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant will hold a joint exhibition of then-and-now photographs in Paris to present their common grief of losing “the present.”
High school students from a tsunami-ravaged town in Tohoku and a municipality near the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant will hold a joint exhibition of then-and-now photographs in Paris to present their common grief of losing “the present.”
Five first-year senior high school students from Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, swamped by the March 2011 tsunami, and from Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, all of whose residents have evacuated since the nuclear crisis started to unfold at the plant, will also speak of their experiences in front of the Eiffel Tower on Aug. 30-31.
This event will take place as part of the OECD Tohoku School project, which started in the spring of 2012.
Yuta Miura, 15, one of the students from Otsuchi, said he saw his home swept away by the towering tsunami from the bank he had fled to.
“That day, my mind went blank, and I was unable to think of anything,” said Miura, who was a sixth-grade elementary student at the time. “The life I had taken for granted vanished in front of my eyes.”
Hirotomo Natsume, 16, who is originally from Okuma, was told to board a bus without being informed of the destination immediately following the onset of the nuclear disaster. It was the last time he has seen his hometown.
“I felt as if I was deprived of my hometown,” said Natsume, who currently lives in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture.
The five students got to know each other in March 2012 at the first gathering for the Tohoku School project, when they were first-year junior high school students. They decided to hold a photo exhibition together to give others an idea of what had happened to their towns.
The two municipalities were both heavily affected by the 2011 disaster. But while recovery work has been steadily proceeding in Otsuchi, residents of Okuma have yet to be allowed to return to their homes.
Feeling how critically different their circumstances were from each other, the Otsuchi members and Okuma students decided to exhibit their pictures at separate booths.
It was an insensitive question from a journalist that led Rinoa Nakai, a member of the photo exhibition project from Otsuchi, to change the group's mind.
A reporter asked one of her friends who lost a grandfather and elder brother in the disaster, “What if the deceased appeared in front of you right now?”
Being at her friend's side at that time, Nakai, now 16, thought the news media were inconsiderate.
“I felt that for those living in areas outside the affected region, the disaster was just somebody else’s affair,” the student said.
In March, Nakai visited Fukushima Prefecture and proposed that the students display all works at the same booth, so that their situations would not be “someone else’s matter.” The other members agreed.
They believe that the tsunami and the nuclear accident are the same problem in essence, because both were brought on by the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake.
To emphasize the point, they plan to conclude their speeches at the Paris exhibition, which will be delivered separately by students from the respective towns, with the very same words.
“We all have lost 'the present,' ” the students plan to say in conclusion. “It is impossible to know in advance when and where a tsunami or a nuclear accident will occur. Do not look on our affairs as somebody else’s concerns.”