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

Copyright 2021 Yogan Baum

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Cover photo: Through the Sun - Two ships navigatingthrough the melted sun

Author: Halfrain

Source: Through the Sun - Two ships navigating through the meltedsun

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Discover other titles by YoganBaum:

The Voice ofFUKUSHIMA

A Cry from theHeart

Ground Zero 01:Earthquake

The Voice ofFUKUSHIMA

A Cry from theHeart

Ground Zero 02:Tsunami and Worse

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

This is for Mariko.

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

Very special thanks to Stefan myinspiration, 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 theearth shook on that afternoon in March 2011. Giorgio, that's thename my wife Mariko calls me at times when shes in a good mood.So, why dont we stay with that? Call me Giorgio.

A long-forgotten afternoon? Not really. Howmuch I would love to forget it it just cant be done, Sir. It isimpossible, Maam. The repercussions you must understand, theunpleasant repercussions. What about them?

They killed more than three thousand,official number, not too often quoted and drove more than a hundreddesperate, former inhabitants of once beautiful areas in FukushimaPrefecture to take their own lives. Official numbers again.Statistics speak of the dead, yes, but do not say much about theirsuffering, especially as the dead were all old and weak. They diedof lack of medication, neglect, and related causes. In a word,forced evacuation killed them. Many of them died years after theevent, but, as I said, the government recognizes these threethousand as victims of Dai-ichi. Are you surprised? Its the magicof might that makes unwelcome numbers invisible! Its so easilydone. All you need is some money, ok, lots of money, and a publicinclined to believe in your every word, to pull the wool over thepublics eyes.

Under control! is what a certain PrimeMinister happily crowed, down in Buenos Aires, and many swallowedthis silly phrase. Everything is under control! How wishfully canyou think to produce this beautiful Freudian slip? The hoodwinkedIOC awarded the 2020 Olympics to Japan. The torch relay isscheduled to start in J-Village, ten minutes down the road. Do wein Fukushima want those games? To us, they are just another attemptto hush things up. Under control! Really, Mr. Abe, under controlnow?

More than three thousand dead, hopefully,most of these gone in peace but how many animals perished underthe cruelest circumstances? Nobody counted those poor, wretchedcreatures, starving in their pens. The 184 children diagnosed withthyroid cancer (as of February 2017) surely would have something totell their elders. Can you imagine what they would say? Maybe theywould just ask a simple question. Something like Why.? Could yousee that question in a young childs eyes without turning away,hiding your face? Are these children acknowledged, then? Thegovernment, not believing in unpleasant statistics (in step withWinston Churchill, who famously never trusted statistics unless hehad falsified them himself), chooses to attribute these cancers toa screening effect.

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

Hows that? Just pull the plug. Theresnothing 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 owngood, I remember that March day of infamy. That night of the flyinghelicopters, that morning of Marikos and my own flight, leavingour 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 downto write about the sad year 2011, and the big whitewash ushered injust a couple of months after March 11th. Is nuclear dead? No, mydear, the monster is alive and ready to kill again. I need to warnyou, whoever you may be and hope you will remember my words: it isonly a question of time before the monster unleashes its furiesonce again. When will they ever learn? runs a line out of an oldsong 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 theestablishment howled with mirth.

By upbringing, Yours Truly is a conservative.No, I certainly wasnt born a rebel but, as I look around me, Isee nothing but rot. After 2011 my world view has changed. Itwasnt easy at all for me to question the system I was brought upin: 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. Onceyou start thinking, there is no way to stop questioning andreasoning.

The way we live is questionable! We destroythe planet, and we destroy ourselves for a fistful of dollars.Money is not evil in itself, of course. No one would want to goback to cowry shells, I suppose (although shell money was anextremely stable currency, in use for nearly four thousand years).So, whats the alternative? Our contemporary fixation on money,needing (and printing) more and more of it with Disneys UncleScrooge, our hero is slightly ridiculous, to say the least. Itshigh time we change our evil ways, friends. We have to find a wayto live without the madness we all are part of. Is it calledcapitalism? 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 figurativepen again after the first two episodes of this trilogy werepublished. So much has happened! We lost our home of thirty years,which caused us great pain. Finding a new one was extremelydifficult. Things you just never expect: there was a bad shortageof housing in our region, so close to the ruined Dai-ichi powerplant. How could that be? The evacuees, more than a hundred andfifty thousand of them, needed places to stay, obviously, (afterthe government-sponsored villages of temporary apartments wereclosed down one by one), and many of them chose to remain in anarea they knew. An area called Iwaki City, incidentally exactly ourtown, the fishing port of Yotsukura being part of Iwaki thenorthernmost part. Its that easy! The tsunamis second wave gotus, after all. It washed us out clean. The evacuees were awash incash, ohhh, another wet metaphor, however meager their recompensewas, and put once- affordable housing out of our reach. Land andstructures in Yotsukura hit the No.1 spot in nationwide charts ofreal estate price growth. Our landlord liked that and gave usnotice. We were given two years to find something new. Generous?Maybe. We searched, and God, the hovels we were offered. We foundsomething new, a lovely place, too, just in time to meet ourobligations. We were lucky. The pain, though, and the hurt, didntquite leave me.