Fukushima Refugees Japan Speaking Tour Series No. 3
/ Grayson Webb
In the third installment of Fairewinds’ Japan Speaking Tour Series, Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen recounts his visit to a resettlement community of displaced refugees from the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi. Meeting with 22 women, ages 17 to 60, Arnie is the first person who has met with them to talk about the effects of radiation during the 5-years that they have been evacuees. Nuclear industry reports from TEPCO and the local newspaper have been the only information available to the isolated groups of victims from the atomic disaster.
A woman introduced herself to Arnie, “I am 6A.” Stigmatized and reduced to a numbered identity, these women have suffered radiation poisoning, and been told that their symptoms are simply due to stress. Their homes destroyed, their health in jeopardy, and their future unknown – this is the outcome of nuclear risk.
Transcript
English
MG: Hi. You’re listening to the Fairewinds Energy Education Podcast hosted by the Fairewinds crew. Today we’re interviewing Arnie Gundersen. He’s ringing in from Japan where he’s on a one-month speaking tour near Fukushima Daiichi, the site of the meltdown. Arnie.
AG: So today I went to a resettlement community, and there were 22 women who met us out of 66 families that live in this resettlement community. And they stood up and they said My name is … and I’m in 6A… My name is and I’m in 11B. And that’s how they define themselves. That’s where they – the little cubicle that they live in. It’s very sad. And they had their unofficial mayor, the woman who sort of runs all the groups. And she was very nice and she told us that after the disaster at Fukushima, her hair fell out, she got a bloody nose and her body was speckled with hives and boils and the doctor told her it was stress and she believes him. It was absolutely amazing. We explained that those are all symptoms of radiation and she should have it looked into, and she really felt like her doctor had her best interests at heart and she was not going to pursue it. So they told us that we were the first people in five years to come to them and talk to them about radiation. They’ve had nobody in five years of their exile had ever talked to them about radiation before, which was another terribly sad moment. So I asked them, I said, who do you trust. And they said, well, we get a letter from TEPCO once a month – Tokyo Electric Power Company – and we read the local newspaper and that’s how we get our information, and we really don’t have a choice who to trust because that’s our only sources of information. So they are isolated, they live as this group of 66, and they’re insular. They don’t try to seek out other sources and materials. So it was pretty amazing. So we asked them what it was like, did they feel isolated from the rest of Japan, and they said some of them have changed their license plates so they’re not in Fukushima any more, so that their license plates show they’re from another location. But when they drive back into Fukushima and people realize that they’re natives, people deliberately scratch their cars – deliberately scratch their cars because they’re sort of traitors And then we had the opposite hold true, the people that didn’t change their plates and when they left Fukushima and went to other areas, people deliberately scratched their cars because they were from Fukushima. That’s really sad. They said, you know it’s a small minority of people but it keeps you constantly on your toes about who you can trust and this animosity towards you as if you were the person that caused the nuclear accident. The public’s animosity is directed toward the people from Fukushima Prefecture as if they somehow caused the nuclear disaster.
MG: Isn’t it true, Arnie, that after World War II, the survivors of the bombing at Nagasaki and Hiroshima were taunted a lot and also many of them had to not tell their stories or say they had been at either Nagasaki or Hiroshima because they were the untouchables?
AG: We have one with us. We have a 76-year-old man who was 6 years old when the bomb was dropped. And he talked eloquently today about people who tried to hide their identities, the problems that they encountered because when they hid their identities, they couldn’t get the medical services that they needed for the injuries that they had experienced from the bomb. But then if they told everyone they were from Nagasaki or Hiroshima, they were ostracized in the community. So they had no friends and they were laughed at, things like that. It was a sort of damned if they do and damned if they don’t. There was no safe place to be. Now he’s 76 and spoke to the women about his experience, and they were very grateful to hear that they were not alone with the stigma of being exposed to radiation. When he was a little boy and he left the area around Nagasaki and Hiroshima, his friends used to call him Godzilla. He was a monster that was created by this nuclear disaster. So yeah, the stigma started 70 years ago, continues even now at Fukushima Daiichi.
MG: Well, he’s lived a pretty long, full life. To your knowledge, has he had any major health issues or did he have a lot of treatment as a child? I know that some of the survivors had really a different healthy diet, not western diet, and were specially treated with vitamins and things and that seemed to help them recover better. Do you know any of that?
AG: (5:37) He told me that for the first five years after the bomb, he was a medical wreck. He was emaciated and lots and lots of medical problems which over time he overcame. And by the time he was 20, he became an Olympic bicyclist. He was affected by the bomb and through good food and good medicine was able to recover and has lived a full life. So he’s a pretty special human being, wonderful man.
MG: How does that reconcile with the cancers, the long-term health illnesses and the disabilities that come from radiation exposure, and the people who claim that hormesis and being around radiation is good for you.
AG: The hormestra theory is – there’s no foundation in science to support it and the National Academy of Science would say that hormesis is not founded in fact but in wishful thinking by nuclear proponents. It’s like smoking and live a full life and some people smoke and get lung cancer. And he’s one of the lucky ones. He’s 76 and doesn’t have cancer and is active and vital. So it’s very much an individual lucky situation. He was not at ground zero but he was near enough to be contaminated and experienced the disaster. So most of the people at ground zero were obliterated in a flash. So he’s a special case.
MG: One of the things that you’ve talked about and Marco has talked about is internal radiation exposures and hot particles. What’s the difference between a bomb exploding and a nuclear plant exploding in the hot particles?
AG: Most of the bomb exposure was from a direct flash that was over in seconds. There wasn’t a significant amount of contamination on the ground because the bomb went off 1,000 feet in the air. So there was not a lot of radiation residual left on the ground for hot particles to get into people’s lungs. There were people downwind that breathed in particles from the thunderstorms that it created and stuff like that –
MG: You mean in fallout?
AG: Yes. In fallout downwind from Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And they experienced something called the black rain, and dust particles did come down hundreds of miles away. And so those people are also exposed. But he was at or very near ground zero. So his exposure was a flash of external radiation, not a lot of internal radiation to damage organs. And that’s not what we’re seeing at Fukushima Daiichi. Everything I’m finding here is millions and billions of very, very small particles that are spread pretty much everywhere. We’ll know a little bit more about that in the future.
MG: I appreciate you answering the question. I’ve been wondering about it because you had your best-selling book in Japan, and a lot of the pro-nukes and the hormesis people proceeded to try and refute a lot of what you said before the book was published. I mean the published book is irrefutable and an important documentary, but they tried to refute anything you said, on TV or CNN or any of the stations in the media. They’ve tried to refute anything you said because they were trying to claim everything is okay in Japan; look how well most of the Japanese have recovered from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so therefore, it’s okay, don’t look this way, there’s nothing here to see.
AG: Yeah, there’s no comparison between a bomb and what happened at Fukushima. A bomb obliterated maybe a pound of uranium and it was a thousand feet in the air, so most of it went up almost immediately; whereas each of the nuclear reactors at Fukushima had 100 tons of uranium in them so that the quantity of radiation that’s spread out throughout the countryside is orders of magnitude higher at Fukushima than it was at Nagasaki.
MG: Thank you. I know that our followers and listeners would want to hear this.
AG: We had another thing that amazed me. The way the Japanese are paying off the victims is creating a lot of animosity. This community is special because they all came from the same couple of blocks in area, they all knew each other for many, many years.
MG: What’s the difference between the people that you met today and other people around Fukushima Prefecture who’ve been impacted, or going back to those people who were survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima?
AG: (10:30) The community I visited today was special enough. There was no animosity between the different members. The 22 women – some were in their 60’s, some of them were 17 – one of them had their parent with them when they lived in their home community. The parent was 88 years old, so this is an older woman who was in fine health. This community was special. All 22 women knew each other for a long time – some were in their 60’s and one was as young as 17 – and one of the women in her 60’s was living with her 88-year-old mother when the disaster occurred. And the 88-year-old mother was in fine health and loved her community. And when they moved her, she fell apart and died very quickly, because she wasn’t in the environment she was used to. And she’s actually listed as one of the fatalities now. There’s over 1,000 people who the Japanese say died as the result of the nuclear disaster. So she’s one of those people. The 17-year-old is not allowed to go back in. The Japanese don’t let people under 18 back in. So we asked her, when you turn 18, will you go back. And she said, I will go back once to pay my respects and I will never go back again. But the older women had a different attitude. It was the home of their children and their ancestors are all there. The family ancestral burial grounds are all there and they have to take care of their ancestors. So they desperately want to go back. We have one woman who cannot go back. She’s been told that her house is in an area that’s so contaminated she will never go back. And then we have other women who’ve been told they may have to wait 4 or 5 more years but they probably will go back. Then we had a few that thought they might go back in a year or two. Now what the Japanese government does is, when you never can go back, they give you a lump sum of money which allows you to buy a house. And in some communities, there’s a lot of animosity because these people can now have a house. They don’t have to live in these resettlement situations. And the other people who may go back in 5 years are not given any money and they’re kept in these resettlement communities in limbo until their homes are ready. One of the women lost her house in the tsunami but the ground around it was so contaminated that she could never build there. So what the Japanese government did was they paid her for the foundation.
MG: That’s horrible. That’s horrible.
AG: So she got nothing for the house that was destroyed. She got a small amount of money for the foundation of the house which can never be built on because it’s too radioactive, and she’s essentially stuck in this resettlement home for life. So you’re right – it’s horrible. In some communities, these tensions manifest themselves in all sorts of internal hatred. But this community seemed to overcome it. There was a wonderful woman from Rwanda who escaped the Rwanda genocide because she spoke Japanese and they got resettled in Fukushima and then had to flee Fukushima. But she seemed to be the sparkplug to keep people happy and glad that they had each other. Some of the communities don’t have that and they fall into a lot of infighting – so-and-so is getting more money from the state than I am. So when they leave, they get their cars scratched and when they hang out together, there’s a lot of animosity over their payments from Tokyo Electric. So being a refugee from Fukushima Daiichi is a terrible place to be.
MG: (14:29) I think back to Dante and I think back to Purgatory – limbo – being in limbo is Purgatory. And just a hellacious place to be and which to my way of thinking is so incongruous with how I see Japan. Yes, there’s intense city living in Tokyo and some of the big cities and everyone’s very close together. But there are many parks and there’s a lot of emphasis on beauty and I have pictures that you and our daughter, Aleta, took when you were in Tokyo, just going down the city street and you come to a place and there’s a shrine and there’s flowing water and there’s plants and gardens so the people can get away and reconnect with nature. And I look at these pictures that you send of where you went yesterday and the resettlement village, and there’s no feeling of permanency; there’s no feeling to put the artistic and spiritual beauty back in the environment that I have always internalized as being Japanese.
AG: When we left, they sang a song to us. One of them is an accomplished musician and she wrote a beautiful song about their hometown. And they sang it. It was about three or four minutes long. It was haunting, it was so beautiful. And it talked about how nice the town was and all the special things in the town and how sad they felt to leave it. And that was the only time I saw them cry. Every one of them broke into tears at the end of the song. The scars are deep. They seem to be focused their lives together and that’s more important than where they live and how they live is that they’re all together. It was very special but terribly sad. And after that, we went to see a family that was in a lumber business. And their hillside that they take the lumber from is so contaminated they can’t use it any more. So they have to actually import lumber from around the country. So we asked the family, what’s changed for you since the disaster. And their answer was swift. Everything’s changed. Nothing is as it was. And then they went in – they used to go up into the woods just to harvest their livelihood to work, but they used the fruits and vegetables and mushrooms and things like that that were up in the forest to live on. And they can’t get any of that. They can’t eat the shitake mushrooms, they can’t eat the fruits that are up there, they can’t use the ferns for salad. There’s absolutely nothing in their lives that hasn’t been torn out from under them. The personal toll, you can’t quantify it. There’s no way to put a dollar figure on any of this. There’s 160,000 people that are each individually experiencing – you had it right – I think the word I’d use is limbo. That’s what these people are in – that place that’s not Heaven, not hell, and they just are in some sort of a holding pattern in their lives. And it was terribly sad to see the destruction force that the atom can be. All these women were in their 60’s and they said that they would go back because they know they’ll probably die of something before they die of cancer. But their kids have already moved on. And their kids won’t be back in the village that they grew up in. And their kids won’t be back to take care of the ancestors. And then the grandkids are not allowed back now, and by the time they get to 18 years old, they will have forgotten the village. So the keepers of the village tradition are all 50, 60, 70 years old, and when they die, their kids are not going to keep that village alive. So it’s very much a death sentence for the village. It’s a slow death. If they get back into them, there will be no generations to come.
MG: (18:39) What touched me is by village, you mean their community, their entire community that had generations of tradition, and that is totally fragmented. And that’s true for thousands of people.
AG: Yeah, there’s 160,000 people living in temporary housing, and 60 now have been displaced back into high-radiation areas, but another 100,000 are still waiting to get pushed off into high-radiation areas that I don’t believe they should be going back to. That’s a lot of people. That’s the size of a big piece of the state of Fukushima, and their lives are permanently torn asunder.
MG: The thing that you said that really concerned me and upset me, women are so much more radiologically sensitive than men. These children are not allowed to go back until they’re 18, but when they’re 18 they can go back. And for women and 18-year-olds, that’s when your reproductive organs are still really, really vulnerable. And you would go back and if you were exposed and you were going to start a family, that’s a really tragic amount of exposure for someone that age, don’t you think?
AG: Yeah. Again, little girls are 20 times more radiosensitive than older adults like me, and little boys are 10 times more radiosensitive. By the time they hit 20 years old, they’re still – girls are 3 or 4 times more radiosensitive than young men, who are about twice as radiosensitive as older adults. So yeah, when you send a young family back – if they go back – and most are refusing to go back – they’re moving on and lying about their location, where they came from – but if they go back, they know that the likelihood of a cancer is dramatically higher than it would have been.
MG: It’s so tragic. Arnie, thank you for sharing this information with our followers, and I really appreciate it. Have a good sleep tonight. You’re 14 hours ahead of us in Japan. And have a good trip tomorrow. I know you’re on the road again and traveling. So thank you.
To our listeners, I’d like to say thank you for joining us today and hearing Arnie’s interview with me from Japan. Join us again next time when we speak to him on the road in series 4. Thank you.
