"Nuclear Energy Is the Energy of a Bright Future": Haunting Photos from Fukushima's Exclusion Zone10/15/2015
"Nuclear Energy is the Energy of a Bright Future". Street sign in Futaba, Fukushima, Japan. All photos in this article by Arkadiusz Podniesinski, www. podniesinski.pl "Nuclear Energy is the Energy of a Bright Future". During the heyday of the Fukushima nuclear power plants, this street sign may have made sense. But after the devastating nuclear accident that rendered the area virtually uninhabitable, the irony of the sign could not be more palpable, or more cruel. Located on a strip of coastline in Japan's Fukushima prefecture, roughly 150 miles north of Tokyo, the two nuclear power plants once stood as shining pillars of modernity and prosperity amid their more traditional, rural surroundings. The plants were located near the ocean to have access to ample supplies of water for cooling purposes - a common practice for nuclear power plants worldwide. But the plants' costal location would prove to be their achilles heel. In 2011, a devastating earthquake and the tsunami that followed damaged the plants and unleashed destructive and potentially deadly nuclear radiation on many of the nearby towns. In response, the Japanese government created an "exclusionary zone" around many of the cities, restricting locals' access to the cities and in some cases prohibiting it entirely. The exclusionary zone has created a virtual limbo for many of the area's residents. Though many still maintain property rights within the area, they can't make use of their property. And given the alarmingly elevated levels of radiation that remain, many would prefer not to. Last month, Polish photographer Arkadiusz Podniesinski, known for his numerous photo essays of nuclear destruction in the Russian city of Chernobyl, was granted access to the exclusionary zone. He documented his experience in photos and in words, which were picked up by other websites and quickly went viral. We're going to run some of the photos here, the full set is definitely worth checking out. Podniesinski says that, after entering the zone, the first thing he was struck by were the rows and rows of trash bags filled with nuclear contaminated dirt. An aerial photo reveals these sacks filling up farm fields. In general, the area remains very rural; even before the nuclear plants' promise of a bright future was tragically broken back in 2011, many in the area preferred to stick to their agrarian roots. And some continued to stick to those roots even after the exclusionary zone was put in place. On his trip, Podniesinski met with Naoto Matsumura, a local farmer who still sneaks back in to care for cows and ostriches left stranded in the area. Unfortunately, Matsumura's efforts aren't enough; some abandoned cows in the area are becoming sick from the radiation, developing white spots on their coats. Sacks of radioactive dirt are collected by excavators and stacked. Naoto Matsumura cares for an ostrich in the exclusionary zone. Cows in Fukushima's exclusionary zone, sick from radiation. Some efforts are made to restore properties; Podniesinski came across some cleaning crews, decked out in nuclear-resistant suits, cleaning off houses in the area. But in general, locals have abandoned their property. The photo gallery shows an aerial photo of row after row of abandoned cars, overgrown with weeds. Podniesinski estimates that this lack of care will soon render many buildings economically unviable to repair, perhaps returning the area back to a more natural state, albeit one tinged with the toxic influence of man-made nuclear radiation. In order to enter the town of Futaba, whose main street still features that fateful pro-nuclear sign, Podniesinski had to pass through a number of ominous, quasi-totalitarian checkpoints. Once inside, the scene was one of virtual abandon and disarray. Destruction wrought by the earthquake and tsunami remains; locals had no time to clean it up as they were promptly evacuated. Dinner tables at restaurants look in some cases as if people there were just about ready to sit down for a nice evening meal before the destruction came. The photos also show the town's trappings of modernity. In a local mall, an awkwardly out of place Colonel Sanders mannequin still invites onlookers to come on in for a tasty bucket of fried chicken, though the mall has sat empty for years. A local market proudly features an entire section devoted to sake (spelled out in "romaji" Latin alphabet letters, not Japanese characters). Though the floors are cluttered with fallen items, presumably from the original earthquake, many of the sake bottles are still intact - though taking a sip from one would probably not be a good idea. Abandoned restaurant, exclusionary zone. Colonel Sanders statue, abandoned mall. The sake section of a supermarket in the Fukushima exclusion zone. For me, perhaps the most moving image was taken from an abandoned school outside town, which stood up to the tsunami and remained intact, though for obvious reasons, disused. The picture shows a chalkboard in an empty classroom covered with Japanese characters. At first I assumed these were lessons for students long since transferred to other schools; in reality, they are messages of hope and encouragement written by survivors of the disaster. Podniesinski translates them as: "We will be reborn / we can do it, Fukushima! / stupid TEPCO / we were rivals in softball, but always united in our hearts! / We will definitely be back! / Despite everything now is precisely the beginning of our rebirth / I am proud to have graduated from the Ukedo primary school / Fukushima is strong / Don’t give up, live on! / Ukedo primary school, you can do it! / if only we could return to our life by the sea / it’s been two years now and Ukedo primary school is the same as it was on 11 March 2011, this is the beginning of a rebirth." Chalkboard with inspirational messages, Fukushima. At the end of the day, the most moving part of these photos for me were the mundane remnants of everyday Japanese life, frozen in time and left to rot. Even though I have absolutely no experience translating Japanese, being a translator has given me a certain empathy for photos dotted with texts in unintelligible languages. I'm not sure how monolingual folks would react to these; perhaps the lack of understanding generates a lack of empathy. When you don't understand the writing on the street signs, the storefronts, or those pep talks scrawled on the chalkboard of a doomed classroom, it's easier to distance yourself from the tragedy. It's easier not to care.
For me, the effect was a bit different. It made me think of San Onofre, a nuclear power plant near the seaside town of San Clemente, not far from where I grew up in California. It's a plant that anyone who has driven from Los Angeles to San Diego would probably be familiar with. And like the Fukushima plants, San Onofre is located on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, and in an active earthquake zone. Currently, that plant is inoperative. Its closure happened in January 2012, within a year of the Fukushima disaster, though for a completely unrelated (yet equally terrifying) reason: some of the plant's equipment was found to be prematurely decaying. Perhaps English speakers, or anyone who grew up speaking a language other than Japanese, could look at Podniesinski's photos and simply write them of as irrelevant snapshots from an alien land. But just one earthquake off the coast of San Onofre while it was still operational, or if it is ever operational again, and a sizable chunk of the California coast would end up looking a lot like Fukushima. Those haunting vacant sushi restaurants and sake markets could just as easily have been beachside burger stands and surf shops. We as humans are dramatically influenced by cultural and language barriers. But nuclear contamination isn't. English speaking cities aren't immune to the chaos and destruction that Podniesinski so meticulously documented in Fukushima and Chernobyl just because we don't write in Kanji or Cyrillic. One major quake, and San Clemente could find itself in the middle of its own exclusionary zone. Perhaps the language divide makes it harder for people outside Japan or Russia to remember that. But we do so at our own peril. Comments are closed.
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