Rebuilding Community After a Nuclear Meltdown

Yoichi Tao unlocks and raises the steel barrier blocking the dirt road. “This area is off limits, but the university let me have the keys,” he says. A few minutes' drive through dense jungle where monkeys scamper across the road, we reach the hilltop home of the Tohoku University Iitate Planetary Radio Telescope. It was built in 2000 to measure solar flares. A massive radar shaped like a cupped hand still towers over the facility, but when radiation from the meltdown of three nuclear reactors along the coast drifted here, making it dangerous for scientists to continue their work here.

Although Iitate village had three good elementary schools, one junior high school, all of the schools were closed. And although there were very few children living in the region, the government spent $40 million on a combined elementary and middle school. It now must bring children from distant villages to try to fill the classrooms, says Tao. Other pointless projects include a new town hall that holds 300 people. Japan tends to support large construction projects for the immediate jobs they create and because construction companies contribute campaign funds to politicians.

Similarly, the Japanese government has provided funds for a massive facility called the for testing robots, including drones with the hope that more robotics experts would move to the area allowing it to become a robotics center.

While the center hosted a robotics conference recently,  and the facility has been used to test drones and other devices, but there is no evidence that robotics experts have any interest in doing robotics research and development in the area.

The Japanese government has also moved forward on some projects without consulting locals. They used heavy equipment to scrape radioactive soil from the fields, for example, crushing the network of clay pipes that are so critical to draining water from the fields.  “You shouldn’t call them the Environmental Protection Agency; they are the environmental destruction agency,” says Tao. The scraped radioactive soil from affected areas of Fukushima have been placed in one square meter black bags that each hold about 35 square feet (about the area of a queen-sized bed) of soil. There are an estimated 14 million of those bags scattered across the prefecture. The Japanese parliament passed a measure some time ago in which it agreed that the burden of storing those bags would be shared by the entire country with every prefecture taking their share. Understandably, the prefectures have refused to accept the bags, so Fukushima has no choice but to store them temporarily in trenches.

Where there has been limited success, it has been in some more distributed approaches that he supports. Under one program, for example, the government has offered $100,000 grants to young people with ideas for businesses. His daughter received one such grant. He takes me to a warehouse-like space in a former big-box store that his daughter is turning into a facility to encourage invention. "It's like an inventor's garage," says Tao. There are various projects in the works, including one for a system to grow wasabi and another an approach to reusing waste products as insulation.

Odaka, a town closer to the nuclear disaster area, has developed an approach that has been successful in launching new businesses. Several young entrepreneurs participating in the “Next Commons Lab,” a venture capital group of sorts subsidized by the federal government.

 It has launched startups including haccoba, which is successfully selling sake with unusual flavors. The company says it benefits from a law the requires sake brewers to stick to simple ingredients when making sake. By calling itself a “Craft sake brewery,” the company has the freedom to add other ingredients including hops, fig leaves and grape skins. The sake has proved so popular that several restaurants in Tokyo have become customers and the rest of the several hundred bottles per batch quickly sell out online. The company now plans to triple production.

One reason for the success of Odaka is its active local community. One center for that community is the  Futabaya, an inn that suffered flooding from the 2011 Tsunami. Inn owner Tomoko Kobayashi and her husband had to leave the area following the nuclear meltdown, but returned in 2013, using government compensation to rebuild the inn, which reopened in 2016 when it quickly became a favorite hangout for researchers and activists.

As tragic and difficult as that period was, Kobayashi remembers it as an exciting time. “I felt so free,” she says. Every week she would have BBQs or dinners and everyone from aid workers to scientists would gather and talk about all the work that needed to be done.” When trains finally started to pass through the area again, it was Kobayashi who planted flowers in front of the train station to brighten up what had become a bleak landscape. Kobayashi has become a networker. She helped launch a museum in a home offered up by a friend where local artists could display their work.

Kobayashi felt a kinship to Ukraine, which had suffered from the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. She visited Ukraine five times and came to develop many friends in the area. Now, despite the challenges that continue in her own hometown, she has worked with young people in the area to raise money to contribute to Ukraine’s war effort. A young man who would like to see the region’s watch-making expertise be better utilized, has started manufacturing a special watch. Earnings for the sale of the watch are donated to nonprofit groups operating in Ukraine. Meanwhile, her husband, Takenori, volunteers at a local fire station where equipment was installed to allow people to check food for radiation.

Others have also pitched in to bring life back to Odaka. Down the street from the Inn, Miri Yu, a Korean novelist and playwright born in Japan. She moved to Odaka in 2015 and launched a radio show to focus attention on the concerns of residents in the community. In 2018, she remodeled her home to create a small bookstore and coffee shop called Full House that remains one of the few commercial establishments open in the neighborhood.

Although Odaka has benefited from government compensation schemes, the subsidies have also had the perverse effect of discouraging people from returning and investing in their communities. Many prefer to continue to receive the government compensation rather than try to rebuild their businesses. Odaka’s population is now 3,000, down from 13,000 before the nuclear accident. In nearby Namie, the town has seen its population drop 90% to 2,000. Former residents who rebuilt their lives elsewhere don’t want to be uprooted again. Although Futaba, in a different area from the Futaba Inn, opened to returnees in the summer of 2022, for example, it still has only 50 residents, down from 9,000 before the accident. Many homes in the neighborhood have caved in roofs caused by the original 2011 earthquake. Even those returning to work at Futaba’s city hall are commuting from outside the area. Although the farmland along the ocean has been scraped of topsoil and can now be safely farmed, many landowners are choosing instead to lease their land to utilities who are using the land for solar farms. Fukushima has decided to depend on renewable sources for 100 percent of its energy including solar power and hydrogen. But the rest of Japan, which had temporarily shut down its nuclear plants, is restarting them and is even planning to build two new nuclear facilities to the north in an area also famous for its earthquakes. One farmer has chosen to return to his land near Futaba, and is now growing flowers and vegetables. Although he might have made more money leasing the land for a solar farm, he says, “I want to work the land. I don’t want to sit around at home.” But few other farmers in the area seem inclined to follow. Another problem with the way the government responded to the disaster was the decision to pay compensation for damages to the man in each family, not the women who typically handle a family's finances in Japan. Many of these men squandered the money at pachinko parlors that were quickly established to suck up the large sums these men suddenly found themselves with, says Karin Taira, who works for “Real Fukushima” leading tours of the areas affected by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown.

The day of the nuclear accident, it had snowed and radioactive particles fell to the ground entering the the region's rivers and lakes. Tao says the space telescope hasn't been used but a guitarist did once hold a small concert inside. But Tao gets angry at those who say the entire region should be abandoned. Although mushrooms foraged in the surrounding forests still contain unhealthy amounts of radioactivity, vegetables, meat and other food products from the region are tested regularly and are now being eaten. “The radiation released by the nuclear plants was swept by the wind up here against the mountains,” says Tao. The snow then carried the poison cesium into the soil, the region’s rivers, and its lakes. “The government had supercomputers measuring the weather; they knew which direction the radiation was going,” says Tao. “They should have been warning people to avoid the Iitate area.” While the government has poured tens of billions of dollars to help revive the region, as with so many of the Japanese government's responses to crisis, much of Japan’s effort has focused on construction projects. These included spending more than $12 billion on a massive new seawall that residents complain cuts them off from the sea on which they depend for fishing. Although Iitate village had three good elementary schools, one junior high school, all of the schools were closed. And although there were very few children living in the region, the government spent $40 million on a combined elementary and middle school. It now must bring children from distant villages to try to fill the classrooms, says Tao. Other pointless projects include a new town hall that holds 300 people. Japan tends to support large construction projects for the immediate jobs they create and because construction companies contribute campaign funds to politicians. Similarly, the Japanese government has provided funds for a massive facility called the for testing robots, including drones with the hope that more robotics experts would move to the area allowing it to become a robotics center. While the center hosted a robotics conference recently,  and the facility has been used to test drones and other devices, but there is no evidence that robotics experts have any interest in doing robotics research and development in the area. The Japanese government has also moved forward on some projects without consulting locals. They used heavy equipment to scrape radioactive soil from the fields, for example, crushing the network of clay pipes that are so critical to draining water from the fields.  “You shouldn’t call them the Environmental Protection Agency; they are the environmental destruction agency,” says Tao. The scraped radioactive soil from affected areas of Fukushima have been placed in one square meter black bags that each hold about 35 square feet (about the area of a queen-sized bed) of soil. There are an estimated 14 million of those bags scattered across the prefecture. The Japanese parliament passed a measure some time ago in which it agreed that the burden of storing those bags would be shared by the entire country with every prefecture taking their share. Understandably, the prefectures have refused to accept the bags, so Fukushima has no choice but to store them temporarily in trenches. Where there has been limited success, it has been in some more distributed approaches that he supports. Under one program, for example, the government has offered $100,000 grants to young people with ideas for businesses. His daughter received one such grant. He takes me to a warehouse-like space in a former big-box store that his daughter is turning into a facility to encourage invention. "It's like an inventor's garage," says Tao. There are various projects in the works, including one for a system to grow wasabi and another an approach to reusing waste products as insulation. Odaka, a town closer to the nuclear disaster area, has developed an approach that has been successful in launching new businesses. Several young entrepreneurs participating in the “Next Commons Lab,” a venture capital group of sorts subsidized by the federal government.  It has launched startups including haccoba, which is successfully selling sake with unusual flavors. The company says it benefits from a law the requires sake brewers to stick to simple ingredients when making sake. By calling itself a “Craft sake brewery,” the company has the freedom to add other ingredients including hops, fig leaves and grape skins. The sake has proved so popular that several restaurants in Tokyo have become customers and the rest of the several hundred bottles per batch quickly sell out online. The company now plans to triple production. One reason for the success of Odaka is its active local community. One center for that community is the  Futabaya, an inn that suffered flooding from the 2011 Tsunami. Inn owner Tomoko Kobayashi and her husband had to leave the area following the nuclear meltdown, but returned in 2013, using government compensation to rebuild the inn, which reopened in 2016 when it quickly became a favorite hangout for researchers and activists. As tragic and difficult as that period was, Kobayashi remembers it as an exciting time. “I felt so free,” she says. Every week she would have BBQs or dinners and everyone from aid workers to scientists would gather and talk about all the work that needed to be done.” When trains finally started to pass through the area again, it was Kobayashi who planted flowers in front of the train station to brighten up what had become a bleak landscape. Kobayashi has become a networker. She helped launch a museum in a home offered up by a friend where local artists could display their work. Kobayashi felt a kinship to Ukraine, which had suffered from the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. She visited Ukraine five times and came to develop many friends in the area. Now, despite the challenges that continue in her own hometown, she has worked with young people in the area to raise money to contribute to Ukraine’s war effort. A young man who would like to see the region’s watch-making expertise be better utilized, has started manufacturing a special watch. Earnings for the sale of the watch are donated to nonprofit groups operating in Ukraine. Meanwhile, her husband, Takenori, volunteers at a local fire station where equipment was installed to allow people to check food for radiation.

Others have also pitched in to bring life back to Odaka. Down the street from the Inn, Miri Yu, a Korean novelist and playwright born in Japan. She moved to Odaka in 2015 and launched a radio show to focus attention on the concerns of residents in the community. In 2018, she remodeled her home to create a small bookstore and coffee shop called Full House that remains one of the few commercial establishments open in the neighborhood. Although Odaka has benefited from government compensation schemes, the subsidies have also had the perverse effect of discouraging people from returning and investing in their communities. Many prefer to continue to receive the government compensation rather than try to rebuild their businesses. Odaka’s population is now 3,000, down from 13,000 before the nuclear accident. In nearby Namie, the town has seen its population drop 90% to 2,000. Former residents who rebuilt their lives elsewhere don’t want to be uprooted again. Although Futaba, in a different area from the Futaba Inn, opened to returnees in the summer of 2022, for example, it still has only 50 residents, down from 9,000 before the accident. Many homes in the neighborhood have caved in roofs caused by the original 2011 earthquake. Even those returning to work at Futaba’s city hall are commuting from outside the area. Although the farmland along the ocean has been scraped of topsoil and can now be safely farmed, many landowners are choosing instead to lease their land to utilities who are using the land for solar farms. Fukushima has decided to depend on renewable sources for 100 percent of its energy including solar power and hydrogen. But the rest of Japan, which had temporarily shut down its nuclear plants, is restarting them and is even planning to build two new nuclear facilities to the north in an area also famous for its earthquakes. One farmer has chosen to return to his land near Futaba, and is now growing flowers and vegetables. Although he might have made more money leasing the land for a solar farm, he says, “I want to work the land. I don’t want to sit around at home.” But few other farmers in the area seem inclined to follow. Another problem with the way the government responded to the disaster was the decision to pay compensation for damages to the man in each family, not the women who typically handle a family's finances in Japan. Many of these men squandered the money at pachinko parlors that were quickly established to suck up the large sums these men suddenly found themselves with, says Karin Taira, who works for “Real Fukushima” leading tours of the areas affected by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown.  Another obstacle to development has been the high rents that remain in the region despite the many empty homes. Former residents are reluctant to rent out their homes in part because of a sense of obligation to their ancestral ties, but also because strict tenant protection rules make it difficult to evict tenants. Consequently, even if a new business does have a successful launch, the companies have trouble finding employees who are reluctant to move without affordable housing. Taira, the tour leader, says she was lucky that Kobayashi, the inn keeper, was willing to rent her space behind the inn.

Many of the government's efforts have fallen short. The notion of Futaba as an arts center isn't anywhere close to being realized, though there are some interesting murals. And the nuclear disaster museum offers a broad picture of the disaster, but does little to point out the shortcomings of bureaucrats and utilities officials in their response to the disaster. The government has spent far too much money on concrete and not enough on helping to make the affected areas better places to live. That's the area in which community activists are hoping to make a difference.