OKUMA, Fukushima Prefecture--Standing head to toe in protective gear, Hisatomo Suzuki gazes at the new carp streamers he hoisted outside his home.
OKUMA, Fukushima Prefecture--Standing head to toe in protective gear, Hisatomo Suzuki gazes at the new carp streamers he hoisted outside his home.
Suzuki, 62, has long dreamed of the day he will look up at them alongside his grandchildren, just as other families do to celebrate the Boys Festival in May.
But Suzuki, a former senior official of the Okuma town government, will never be able to do that because his home is only 300 meters from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
The house and the Japanese-style garden he has lovingly tended for so many years will soon be razed to make way for an interim storage facility for contaminated soil and other material generated from cleanup operations in Fukushima Prefecture. Up to 22 million cubic meters of waste will be stored for a maximum of 30 years.
“The landscape of our hometown will vanish,” Suzuki said. “There is no way we can restore it.”
He and his 58-year-old wife Kikuko visited their home on April 3 to take pictures of the wooden house and the carp banners for their grandchildren. The couple live in Koriyama, a city in the prefecture, after they were forced to evacuate because of the triple meltdown at the plant triggered by the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami disaster.
The town's 12,000 residents had to evacuate. Today, they are allowed to visit their homes just once a month, and only for several hours, due to hazardous radiation levels.
According to the family tree, Suzuki is the 19th descendant of his line that settled here.
Now, endless rows of tanks containing contaminated water from the plant stand in the neighborhood just north of his home as work to decommission the plant is in progress.
As the black, red and blue carp banners, measuring 3 to 5 meters, flutter in the wind, Suzuki takes a trip down memory lane as he watches them from the garden that was his pride and joy.
He used to awake early each morning and trim the garden shrubs meticulously, thinking of the day he would live together with his grandchildren at his home.
“I was looking forward to seeing them play in the garden,” Suzuki said.
The couple's home has 11 rooms to enable them to live with the family of their son, Hirotomo, 32.
But his grandchildren, born after the disaster, have never been able to visit Suzuki’s home in Okuma, which co-hosts the plant. Fuka is 3, and Harutomo is eight months old.
So Suzuki decided to take pictures of his home and garden with carp banners as a backdrop immediately after Harutomo was born.
Hirotomo supported his father’s decision because he wants his children to know about the town where he grew up, even if only photographs can tell the story.
“I want to show them pictures of the town and explain to them fully how it looked and why we had to abandon the town,” said Hirotomo, a company employee who lives in Aizu-Wakamatsu in the prefecture.
Beyond the streamers stand forests of cedars and cypress, a landscape that has remained unchanged for hundreds of years and looks much the same as when Suzuki's ancestors lived here.
Although Suzuki has come to grips with the fact he can never return here to live, he said he still has a hard time accepting it.
“There's a nice wind blowing now and it's great,” he said. “I wish I could have been here, holding my grandson and showing him the carp streamers. The wind is just the same as before (the nuclear disaster), though.”
And then, Suzuki went on snapping pictures of the streamers.