The Voice of Fukushima: A Cry from the Heart - Ground Zero 03: Home but Home no More

By Yogan Baum

Coming home from a holiday they never wanted to take Yogan Baum and his wife have to confront a terror you can’t smell, can’t hear, can’t see. Life has its demands however and people near Fukushima Dai-ichi either leave or try to cope with their fear.

Extraordinary efforts are made to somehow go back to life as it was before the triple disaster of 3/11. TEPCO lie through their teeth about causes and effects of the meltdowns and the political establishment allows them to do so.

The world stands by Fukushima. Yogan Baum and his wife Mariko try to get back on their feet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yogan Baum
• Release date: Dec 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781370083992

Yogan Baum

“What brought you here?” is a question Yogan Baum was asked hundreds of times over the years. “Well,” he used to say, “the train, mainly,”: which is not untrue. After a weeklong ride on the famed Moscow Peking Express of 1984, he rolled through China some more, went up in the air for the second time in his life, reached Hong Kong, and took to the air again. He saw Philippine palm trees out of an oval window, and there he was in Japan. The immigration officer looked into his wallet, then at his naivety, in despair and stamped his passport: “Welcome to Japan!”The friendly Narita information girl, “moshi moshi,” charmed him and the green scented tatami in his hotel room made him feel at home instantly. He had arrived.What made Yogan leave his own country, then? Was it a love of traveling? When he was a child, he spent many happy hours exploring maps. He loved the deep brown highlands of South America and, before all else, Tibet. Not Japan. Later on, India was his dream destination – something made him veer off course, and so he did not reach Bombay but Iwaki, Japan, instead. Was it Tony Scott and Hozan Yamamoto’s “Music for Zen Meditation and Other Joys” that hooked him? The magic of the Shakuhachi he could not resist. It conjured up pictures of a rural hillside in autumn, wind rustling in leaves and mist rising from the valley. Yogan felt at peace. He felt at ease in the eerily spine chilling strains of these strange sounds.Did he find that hillside, then? That peace? As for that hillside, Yogan hasn ́t found it yet. Could it be his present state of being in limbo, between loss and hope, will lead him towards the light he once had a glimpse of, in a lost world far, far west of here?Not a hillside in autumn – a family was what he found in Japan! A wife. Children. A whole, new, unexpected, wonderful life! He worked hard and learned to be a husband and a father. Their life in the small fishing port of Yotsukura, Iwaki City, was as happy as could be. People were good to them, and they tried their best to be responsible. All foreigners are outsiders, yes, but being on the outside of things has its advantages, too. Opening his soul to the near vastness of the Pacific Ocean and the night stars high above gave him space to breathe: there was nothing much he missed.Life changed dramatically on and after March 11, 2011. Fortunately, Yogan and his wife Mariko were spared in many ways. The megaquake did not break them. The killer tsunami stopped short of their street. The triple meltdown of the ruined Dai-ichi nuclear power plant 20 miles north of here miraculously came to a halt somewhere below the crippled plant. Thanks, mainly, to the courage of a man called Kan. Where and in what state it is, and how to deal with it, is absolutely unresolved. It is the black heart of Fukushima.Life changed all the more as it went on as if nothing had happened. This, the second catastrophe is the real one, Yogan now thinks. Japan was spared and squandered its chance to rise out of the ashes. The old guard was too strong. Japan suffers, and there is no end in sight. It could have contributed to a better world. It didn’t. Fukushima’s tears could have watered the seeds of a better future. Japan was not allowed to. This is bitter.Yogan tells the sad story of defeat as it unfolds in one man’s, one family’s struggle. He tells it to honor those who suffer in silence. The old. The children. The uninformed. The victims.He does not claim to be uninvolved in his report on life twenty miles from ground zero. “Ground Zero” it is, however often, one will hear that “it was just an accident.” That is a lie nobody should accept. Yogan does claim to be completely honest in showing how human hubris, as exemplified in the recently exploded dream of “unlimited energy, for free!”, blighted all existence so close to the shore.Life is precious. It is fragile. We have to treasure it if we want to survive. “Life is an ocean,” a song says, “but it ends,” too. We are stewards, not kings.

Book preview

The Voice of FUKUSHIMA

A Cry from the Heart

Ground Zero 03: Home but Home no More

Yotsukura Diaries 3/11 and Beyond

Yogan Baum

Copyright 2023, 2021 Yogan Baum

Published by Yogan Baum at Smashwords

Cover photo: Through the Sun - Two ships navigating through the melted sun

Author: Halfrain

Source: Through the Sun - Two ships navigating through the melted sun

License: CC BY-SA 2.0

Cover design by Bonnie Mutchler: https://bonniemutchlercovers.wordpress.com/

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Discover other titles by Yogan Baum:

The Voice of FUKUSHIMA

A Cry from the Heart

Ground Zero 01: Earthquake

The Voice of FUKUSHIMA

A Cry from the Heart

Ground Zero 02: Tsunami and Worse

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

1 Election Campaign Night

2 Back in Yotsukura

3 Interlude: Flash Forward

4 Picking up the Pieces

5 A Second Interlude

6 Fighting and Losing

7 Back to Work

8 Springtime

9 Flotsam

10 Measuring up

11 Diverse Nuclear Considerations

12 Mothers and other Volunteers

13 Meet the Press: The Danger and the Whitewash

14 A Trip North

15 Death and the Guardian of the Animals

16 On Borrowed Time

17 Gates of Hell

18 A so-called Investigation and a Memoir

19 Autumn

About Yogan Baum

Other books by Yogan Baum

Sample Chapter I

Sample Chapter II

Connect with Yogan Baum

Acknowledgments

This is for Mariko.

Special thanks to Jayne for proofreading and more, to Leslie, and to Bonnie for a great cover.

Very special thanks to Stefan – my inspiration, guiding light, and the practical wizard in publishing – who gave me the idea to publish this book serial.

Preface

Giorgio, you have come a long way since the earth shook on that afternoon in March 2011. Giorgio, that's the name my wife Mariko calls me at times when she’s in a good mood. So, why don’t we stay with that? Call me Giorgio.

A long-forgotten afternoon? Not really. How much I would love to forget it – it just can’t be done, Sir. It is impossible, Ma’am. The repercussions … you must understand, the unpleasant repercussions. What about them?"

They killed more than three thousand, official number, not too often quoted and drove more than a hundred desperate, former inhabitants of once beautiful areas in Fukushima Prefecture to take their own lives. Official numbers again. Statistics speak of the dead, yes, but do not say much about their suffering, especially as the dead were all old and weak. They died of lack of medication, neglect, and related causes. In a word, forced evacuation killed them. Many of them died years after the event, but, as I said, the government recognizes these three thousand as victims of Dai-ichi. Are you surprised? It’s the magic of might that makes unwelcome numbers invisible! It’s so easily done. All you need is some money, ok, lots of money, and a public inclined to believe in your every word, to pull the wool over the public’s eyes.

Under control! is what a certain Prime Minister happily crowed, down in Buenos Aires, and many swallowed this silly phrase. Everything is under control! How wishfully can you think to produce this beautiful Freudian slip? The hoodwinked IOC awarded the 2020 Olympics to Japan. The torch relay is scheduled to start in J-Village, ten minutes down the road. Do we in Fukushima want those games? To us, they are just another attempt to hush things up. Under control! Really, Mr. Abe, under control now?

More than three thousand dead, hopefully, most of these gone in peace – but how many animals perished under the cruelest circumstances? Nobody counted those poor, wretched creatures, starving in their pens. The 184 children diagnosed with thyroid cancer (as of February 2017) surely would have something to tell their elders. Can you imagine what they would say? Maybe they would just ask a simple question. Something like Why….? Could you see that question in a young child’s eyes without turning away, hiding your face? Are these children acknowledged, then? The government, not believing in unpleasant statistics (in step with Winston Churchill, who famously never trusted statistics unless he had falsified them himself), chooses to attribute these cancers to a screening effect.

It is impossible to forget a tragedy like Fukushima, especially as all the terrible suffering it caused, and the next catastrophic failure of an atomic power plant (sure to happen soon, oh so soon) is so easy to prevent – so very easy.

How’s that? – Just pull the plug. There’s nothing to it. Just – do it. Switch it off. Switch them all off, all of those 450 remaining ticking time bombs.

Five years later, too many years for my own good, I remember that March day of infamy. That night of the flying helicopters, that morning of Mariko’s and my own flight, leaving our five cats to fend for themselves – and the numbness it gave me. I still am all numb and parched up inside! Still, I had to sit down to write about the sad year 2011, and the big whitewash ushered in just a couple of months after March 11th. Is nuclear dead? No, my dear, the monster is alive and ready to kill again. I need to warn you, whoever you may be and hope you will remember my words: it is only a question of time before the monster unleashes its furies once again. When will they ever learn? runs a line out of an old song called Where Have All the Flowers Gone. After Fukushima, people in Japan were ready to start something new: the government, that is, the commercial giants of the country, aka the establishment – howled with mirth.

By upbringing, Yours Truly is a conservative. No, I certainly wasn’t born a rebel – but, as I look around me, I see nothing but rot. After 2011 my world view has changed. It wasn’t easy at all for me to question the system I was brought up in: I was forced to do it. Once you begin to doubt certain things, though, there is no way to stop the nagging of your own brain. Once you start thinking, there is no way to stop questioning and reasoning.

The way we live is questionable! We destroy the planet, and we destroy ourselves – for a fistful of dollars. Money is not evil in itself, of course. No one would want to go back to cowry shells, I suppose (although shell money was an extremely stable currency, in use for nearly four thousand years). So, what’s the alternative? Our contemporary fixation on money, needing (and printing) more and more of it with Disney’s Uncle Scrooge, our hero – is slightly ridiculous, to say the least. It’s high time we change our evil ways, friends. We have to find a way to live without the madness we all are part of. Is it called capitalism? Whatever its name, this is beyond words and ideologies: it has to be reined in. MONEY is killing us.

It took me years to pick up the figurative pen again after the first two episodes of this trilogy were published. So much has happened! We lost our home of thirty years, which caused us great pain. Finding a new one was extremely difficult. Things you just never expect: there was a bad shortage of housing in our region, so close to the ruined Dai-ichi power plant. How could that be? The evacuees, more than a hundred and fifty thousand of them, needed places to stay, obviously, (after the government-sponsored villages of temporary apartments were closed down one by one), and many of them chose to remain in an area they knew. An area called Iwaki City, incidentally exactly our town, the fishing port of Yotsukura being part of Iwaki– the northernmost part. It’s that easy! The tsunami’s second wave got us, after all. It washed us out clean. The evacuees were awash in cash, ohhh, another wet metaphor, however meager their recompense was, and put once- affordable housing out of our reach. Land and structures in Yotsukura hit the No.1 spot in nationwide charts of real estate price growth. Our landlord liked that and gave us notice. We were given two years to find something new. Generous? Maybe. We searched, and God, the hovels we were offered. We found something new, a lovely place, too, just in time to meet our obligations. We were lucky. The pain, though, and the hurt, didn’t quite leave me.

Episode three of The Voice of FUKUSHIMA - A Cry from the Heart will try to let you experience some of the 2011/2012 years of atomic poisoning. It is the most important book of this serial by far. The poison was measurable in part, but as it is impossible to understand humans scientifically – there is more to the poison, if you allow me to use that term, we breathed day in and day out. This poison, you can’t see it, can’t smell it, can’t feel it, people said back in 2011, compelled me to write this. I want to make it palpable! I need to make the poison and its source known. This runs against the entrenched interests of the pillars of society: all the more important it is to speak out. We, the people,… we don’t want the nuclear madness anymore. We, the people, were taught a lesson, and I, for one, have not forgotten what I knew back in 2011. There is much to forget, and to forgive, to be sure, but your grinning, blatant lies are not included, gentlemen of power. Sorry, but no.

Most of this episode was written in 2016. Occasionally later years creep in (like in the first pages of chapter 1), and you are kindly asked not to mistake those intermissions for the main narrative. 2016 provided me a vantage point, being out of Yotsukura, but still in Iwaki, to try and review the events of several years earlier. The crucial ones were the years right after 2011. Before 2016 I tried to make sense of what had happened and found that I couldn’t. I tried to keep calm – and found that I still couldn’t. Even now, I can’t.

So, this report is the story of a shipwreck, and I was not the only crew member stranded. Many suffered, and many suffered worse than my family did. My lovely wife and I are survivors! I hope you will understand that as you follow me down the rabbit hole. Here we go!

1 Election Campaign Night

Howling wolves and rabid dogs … It was plain scary. By chance, I witnessed an election campaign event for the upcoming Upper House election two days from now, July 8, 2016. The ruling party, name withheld, fields our ex-mayor. Election campaigns in Japan are something extraordinary. The candidates are promoted in many ways, of course, and one of these is by loudspeaker-carrying cars that cruise the streets and go full blast in hammering home the name of the candidate. Iwaki, Iwaki, this is Iwaki – vote for me! Iwaki, Iwaki, Iwaki! (Could you possibly guess the candidate’s name now, I wonder? By coincidence, his name is so very similar to our good city’s name …) It is so incredibly silly, but it seems to work. As election day draws near, the voices screaming through those god-awful speakers get more and more hysterical.

Standard fare, and heard from a certain distance, just one of the voices of sweltering summer. A nuisance, just like the biker gangs (hot rodders, who enjoy torturing their fellowmen and women by endlessly revving their whining engines), or the mosquitoes around your ears. The sounds of hot summer in Japan. The poet Matsuo Basho found his 17th-century cicadas unnerving (daring a rather unorthodox interpretation of his famous haiku); he should have heard those 2016 sounds. Summer is hard.

Well, tonight at 7 p.m. Iwaki City had the pleasure of being the target of its former mayor’s efforts. Did I mention his name, by any chance? Did you guess it? And, could you possibly have guessed his affiliation, too? He was not in the opposition, no, not him!

A bus parked in front of the station, two large and incredibly bright lights (like those used for nightly road repairs, right and left of the van), and a crowd of two hundred on the boardwalks. Helpers who held ropes to keep open a corridor for people like me to walk by unmolested. Wearing flashy green and yellow jackets, they worked the crowd – in a friendly way, it must be said. This is Japan, so there is decency. Police are there to ensure traffic flows ok. No, this is not an event meant to paralyze anything. It is big enough, though, to stop me in my tracks, especially as I have just an hour ago participated in the weekly protest against Japan’s nuclear policies, that is, the policies of Mr. Abe and friends. There were seven of us. We, too, had a megaphone. We stopped nobody on their way to or from the train, though. Not one single person. There were some hangers-on who watched us from a distance, and that was all we had to show for our idealism.

How about the mayor’s bus then? What is the difference between us, who pray to St. Jude (saint of lost causes) and them who worship mammon, the god of money? Money is what makes them strong, said Mariko as I related my experience, and she is right. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has incredibly deep pockets. It is money the government shows its supporters. Look! Everybody craves it, even though it is more of a vague hope than a realistic prospect for most people. We will make you rich! the voices brayed if you only adore us, we will give you the whole world. It is an old song, it is the siren’s song, and it is the voice of the deceiver; it’s the eternal whisper of temptation and damnation. People have fallen for it and still do. It is scary.

Some weeks on, and I would like to ask you to please regard the above lines as a preface to Giorgio’s report on life in Yotsukura five years ago, 2011 and 2012. Have things changed? Oh, yes. Well, no. Take your pick. Plus ça change… the French say, the more it changes, the less change there is. It is all surface, in other words. We had election campaigns here, even in 2011. The Kan administration (DPJ, Democratic Party of Japan) resigned after a group of their party members, led by the wily Mr. Ozawa, switched allegiance. That was the end of the Japanese spring. It had been a time of high hopes. A terrible price had been paid, inadvertently, for decades of short-term thinking. Short term as in short-term gains, never mind a million years of radioactive trouble. After us, the deluge. Let the future take care of its own! A price had been paid, and for a short moment in time, redemption seemed possible. Mr. Kan had learned a lesson. He had come to understand nuclear is a dead-end street and wanted out. He made no bones about it: a bad mistake. A fatal mistake.

The Voice of Fukushima is a desperate one. It’s a song, the sigh of the weary: hard times, hard times (come again no more). There’s a song that will linger / forever in our ears: Oh, hard times, come again no more … oh hard times, come again no more. Our old friend, Hashime, gave me a Chieftains CD with that Stephen Foster song on it, and I listen to it a lot. This Voice of Fukushima is a voice in the desert with no one there to hear it. It is a cry from the heart, yes, and I am not ashamed to admit it. It is a testimony. Of all the voices for and against, out of all the cacophony of claims and counterclaims, of half-truths and lies, of pain and deliverance, of guilt and forgiveness, my own sad, little voice is one that was not bought and is not for sale.

I do not pretend to speak for all of Fukushima, which would be absolutely ridiculous. I do intend, though, to say out loud what happened here; and what is still going on in and about Fukushima. Circles within circles, ever-spinning wheels, a situation far too complex for anyone to understand. An incredibly chaotic chain of events right from the moment IT happened.

How can you analyze it? You can’t. You will not succeed in going far beneath the surface. The core of the problem is too well disguised, the black heart of the matter hidden too well. It is hidden in plain sight. It is so obvious, so commonplace as to be invisible. Just like we don’t feel the Earth rotate or own blood rush through this body, we are endowed with. We have forgotten that beyond all the moneymaking schemes and power-grabbing efforts, there is one basic agreement at the bottom of Fukushima we all share in. It is deeply engraved in our twentieth-century minds, and it says: We want it all, and we want it cheap. We feel the Earth belongs to us. We are so very convinced, we poor, deluded creatures, we drivers and flyers, high rollers and dorks, that the Earth is ours for the taking. We dig, slash, burn, and torture without ever understanding what we do; how can people like us get to the bottom of Fukushima?

Mind, I don’t pretend I could get to the bottom of things in any reasonable way. I am far too dull for that, I know full well. But I do have (from time to time) a glimpse of something like the truth, like in a flash. It is one individual person’s truth only, to be sure, but it is valid. I vouch for it. I paid and keep paying for these occasional insights, and they don’t come cheap. The price? A ruined life, my dear.

Life in Fukushima is not pleasant now. Fukushima Prefecture recently scored lowest in a survey that asked residents of all Japanese prefectures how satisfied they were with their lives. Very few people here are happy. We suffer from many things, but we have one thing in common: the brand mark. Each one of us is stamped indelibly. Fukushima. Toxic: Handle with Care. There are many ways to ruin people’s lives, and TEPCO tried a good many of those: killed people, took away their homes, destroyed their livelihoods, tortured and killed countless abandoned animals, gave children cancer, made children fearful of visiting their parents, made marriage difficult for many young people, and impossible for some, made work impossible for farmers and fishermen, drove Mariko and me out of our home in a second wave of destruction, and took away our future.

Is it possible at all to warn others, not to do what I have done? To change things? To make our common future a little bit less bleak? It is bleak, believe me. We are on the brink of disaster. Fukushima could have been an eye-opener; it should have been: it was not. It was not meant to be. We were blindfolded. Everybody went back to sleep.

But, back to the question. Can one single person achieve anything at all? Don’t be ridiculous! is what I hear,