NIHONMATSU, Japan — Nobody knows whether Hiroshi Yokoyama’s elderly parents tried to outrun the tsunami that engulfed their home in Namie on the Fukushima coast a year ago.
But Mr. Yokoyama does know that he would have looked for them high and low, if not for a second disaster that unfolded at the nuclear power plant just a few miles away, forcing him to abandon his search.
As grieving families across the nation gathered Sunday to mark the anniversary of Japan’s 3/11 disasters — an earthquake and tsunami that ravaged the northeastern coast, killed almost 20,000 people and caused a huge nuclear radiation leak — some communities are still coming to terms with the calamity’s scale, complexity and lasting effects, and painful new revelations have shed light on how some of the victims died.
Last week, the police in the Futaba-gun region of Fukushima, which includes the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station and the town of Namie, confirmed that a handful of tsunami survivors who were trapped in the rubble probably starved to death as rescuers fled the scene for fear of radiation. A month passed before rescuers were able to venture back into the exclusion zone set up in a 12-mile radius around the nuclear plant; the bodies of Mr. Yokoyama’s parents were not discovered until the summer.
“If only there was no nuclear power station, lives could have been saved,” Mr. Yokoyama said. He thinks, and hopes, that his parents were quickly overpowered by the waves and avoided the drawn-out deaths that some around them may have suffered.
A year later, Mr. Yokoyama and his wife and two young children are still unable to return to their home on the shore. They observed the anniversary in Nihonmatsu, a city about 35 miles away, where a group of Namie townspeople now live.
“If only there was no nuclear power station, we could all go home,” Mr. Yokoyama said.
Across the country, there were hundreds of memorial services on Sunday like the one in Nihonmatsu. Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, in a nationally televised address, pledged to work for a faster recovery. “We shall not let our memory of the disasters fade, and must pay attention to disaster prevention and continue our effort to make this land an even safer place to live,” he said.
Japan’s reconstruction has accomplished much in the past year. Virtually all of the tsunami zone’s roads have been fixed, and many landscapes once strewn with debris are now lined with tidy plots and a growing number of restored buildings. Severed manufacturing supply chains have been re-established, and some of the region’s devastated fishing ports are back in service.
But the still-evolving story of the towns like Namie is a painful reminder that the three-pronged onslaught of earth, sea and radiation that hammered the country a year ago was no ordinary disaster. The waves that crashed into Namie not long after the magnitude 9.0 offshore earthquake at 2:46 p.m. that day swept entire houses out to sea, witnesses said.
By nightfall, rescuers reached some of the worst damage in the town’s Ukedo district. In the pitch blackness — the town’s power supply had been knocked out — they heard taps and voices, possibly survivors under the mangled debris.
But as darkness enveloped them, the rescuers decided to suspend their search until dawn. “We told them we would be back,” said Kimihisa Takano, a neighborhood volunteer firefighter. “But we never did.”
Mr. Takano instead found himself helping evacuate the town after reports of a radiation leak from the nearby Daiichi nuclear plant. The town owned only a handful of microbuses and other vehicles to get residents out, and as news spread of the unfolding nuclear crisis, commercial bus companies refused to travel to Namie, slowing the evacuation.
With no guidance from Tokyo Electric Power Company, the nuclear plant’s owner, or the central government, town officials led evacuees north, believing winds were blowing the radiation south. They would later learn that the wind had swung north and that they had fled right into the path of the radiation plume, despite the existence of government simulations that could have pointed them to safety instead.
Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo
From:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/world/asia/a-year-later-effects-of-japans-disaster-are-still-unfolding.html
