Walking through Futaba, Fukushima.

5/27/17

**Please note** Any pictures that I did not take myself, I have received permission from the owner to use them. This includes Sarah and the other 3 people in my party, Reanna, Matt and Olga.**

This is the stand-alone post for the time I spent in the Exclusion Zone of Fukushima. This was a trip where a group of five of us went to the town of Futaba, Sarah, Olga, Matt, Rihanna, and I. Every year Sarah goes back to Futaba to see her old apartment and see the town. She gets permission from the Fukushima Government every year, and she cannot go alone, so she will assemble a small group of friends to go with her.

On the way there we had to get our papers that said we were allowed to be in the exclusion zone, and they gave us some plastic pants and a jacket to wear. They also gave us a personal miliseivert counter so we could keep track of how much radiation we were absorbing. When we got our permit they told us that the permit was good for 5 hours.

When we made it to the section of town in Futaba that we wanted to go to, they checked our papers, counted made sure the number of people in the car matched the number on the paper, and checked that the license plate number on the car matched the one given on the paper. This was how they regulated access into and out of Futaba.

Futaba is the town where the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is. We went with my friend Sarah who was living in Futaba as a JET when the earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit the coast of Fukushima and Miyagi.

Because Sarah used to be a resident of Futaba, and she is an evacuee, she can get permission to enter the exclusion zone pretty easily.

Sarah was working at a Futaba High School during her 4^th year of JET when the earthquake hit. She was working on some lesson plans after classes had ended and the only students that were around were the ones doing club activities.

After the earthquake hit, they gathered all the students in the school and regrouped on the school baseball field. To discuss what they should do. They knew there was a risk of tsunami, so they walked about ten minutes to a nearby elementary school that was across a bridge and on top of a nearby hill. This hill was surrounded by trees so they couldn’t see the tsunami when it did come. But it did surge through the river under the bridge they crossed.

After a few hours of waiting on this hill, they got word that they were being evacuated. Sarah told her coworkers that she needed to grab a bag of supplies and clothes from home, but she would evacuate with a Junior High close to her house.

She gathered a bag of necessities and made her way to the junior high. When she arrived, the principal of her High School was driving by and saw her. He told her to get into the car and they evacuated to Kawamata together.

She left the JET Program soon afterwards and then came back to work a few years later in Minamisoma as an English teacher, although this time it was not through the JET Program.

So this is a summary of the story Sarah told us as she took us through Futaba.

Our first stop was the high school that Sarah worked at. We walked around the building and were able to peek  in some windows. 

We also saw this abandoned bus on the school grounds. 

The high school looked old and forgotten, and when you peeked in the windows of the entryway there were a lot of items littering the floors. Right after the evacuation, people were allowed to come back briefly and gather important documents and items. But on the way out of the building they had to get everything checked, and if the item was carrying too much radiation in it, it had to be abandoned. That’s why the entryways were littered with things.

Afterwards we walked around the elementary school up on the hill. 

The elementary school looked to be in much better shape. 

We walked around the elementary school, too. There were other buildings around the perimeter.

I do believe this is the kindergarten building, but I am not sure.

Most elementary schools have this statue on the grounds. I was told it depicts the "second son." AKA the son who could pursue learning rather than taking over the profession of the father.

It looks like this school had a pet that was kept in this cage. It was released or brought when the town was evacuated.

You can see a vine-y plant growing up through the engine block.

We peeked in the windows of the elementary school, but all the rooms we saw were cleaned up and even appeared to have been swept. There was very few items on the floors of the entryways.

The elementary school had a little goldfish pond out front with a metal grate lying over the top of it, when we looked inside the pond there were still living fish inside! They had survived all these years on whatever bugs came close to the pool. It was a neat thing to see.

The elementary school also had a display on the grounds that talked about an ancient cabe drawing that was on the cliff side next to the school. The city had built a shelter around the ancient drawings in order to preserve them. The building had a staircase up the cliff side so you could access the building and see the cave drawings.  We decided to climb the stairs and go into the building to see if we could see the cave drawings.

The building at the top of the stairs was unlocked and we could go inside. But there were quite a few bugs inside. And to my dismay there were those awful locusts that look like spiders but jump like grasshoppers. When I used to live on the Mississippi river for a while, those horrid locusts would come out at night. They like small, dark spaces. Other than that it looked pretty clean. Update: I found out that they are called Cave Crickets.

We noticed in the wall of the building there was a small door about shoulder/head height and the size of a small window. These doors were double doors and if they opened they would have shown us the ancient cabe drawings. Sadly we didn’t get to see them because the window-doors were locked.

Behind the doors are where the cave drawings are.

An illustration on what the placement and appearance of the cave drawings.

A poster advertisement of the cave drawings, there is a bigger illustration below.

On the way back we walked down some local roads that showed a lot of warping and sinking of the ground, and it broke the asphalt. It was so interesting to see.

Sarah did mention that one of the first things the city did after the disaster was fix the roads, because when people had to come back for whatever reason, they couldn’t make it to where they wanted to go because the roads were so damaged. So the roads throughout the city look pretty great, but the ones on this small side road had not been fixed.

We also walked across this bridge between the high school and the elementary school. Sarah said it was supposed to represent walking on the path of life to bigger and better things. 

It had many pictures of flowers on the bridge and they said things like “Friendship” and “Hard Work.” as well as the names of the different flowers. 

"Sunflower" and "Splendor."

"Sweet Pea" and "Starting out."

"Lily of the Valley" and "Happiness."

"Adonis Buttercup" and "Hope."

After checking out the high school and the elementary school we walked around the town nearby.

We saw this entire house that had been collapsed due to earthquake damage. 

There are many collapsed buildings. But it is difficult to tell whether they were collapsed from the earthquake or if they just collapsed over time.

We walked down some narrow streets. This street, Sarah used to travel on her way to work every day.

We spend a large amount of time walking around the town. I don't remember exactly what part of the day these pictures were taken. But here are some more pictures of the city.

 

You can see this pillar is quite close to sliding off the base completely. The entryway will collapse when it does.

On this corner there used to be a shed, but after the earthquake it collapsed. When we were there it looked like the rubble had been cleared and there was a garden there now. (I seem to have lost my picture of this corner garden.)

This is what the shed and corner looked like before the disaster.

We walked on until we got to a local Buddhist temple. It was red and you could tell that it used to be quite pretty. It had a small gate at its entrance that was also red.

When facing the temple, If you look to the left you see the cemetery.

Off to the side there was a large Kannon-sama statue that had toppled over during the earthquake and the head had broken off when it hit a large stone behind it in the garden.

At the top of this memorial you can see a large stone circle. That is the bottom of the Kannon statue. You can walk around to the left of it and see the rest of it on the ground. 

The pillars of this little shrine were nearly shaken off it's supports. 

This is the rest of the Kannon-sama statue. You can see that the head broke off when it fell over and is lying a few feet to the left.

The temple itself was open to the elements with a couple of the front walls were removed. You could still see most, if not all, the decorations and items used in a typical Buddhist temple.

Because it was open to the elements, it did look like animals had been inside this building.

We walked through the cemetery next to the temple. Many of the monuments and headstones had been damaged in the earthquake, but there was a lot of effort in the past to clean up the cemetery, and it showed. Broken monuments were gathered and piled up neatly on the plots.

Plants in the cemetery were overgrown, but it did look like they had been managed sometime in the recent past.

There were these really old Buddha statues at the back of the cemetery in a small cave carved into the cliff side. These ones looked quite old.

After the temple we retraced our steps and made our way back to the car.

As we walked along there were many flowers in bloom, and Sarah said that she liked seeing so many pretty flowers blooming in this place. It made her feel like this place was recovering, and that it made this town feel less gloomy.

We got back in the car and started driving through the town. Sarah drove down one of the main shopping streets, and stopped just before a bridge in the town. This bridge had daruma on all four of the side rails to the bridge.

Here are some photographs of the town nearby.

This is a picture of a temple entrance that was toppled during the earthquake. Sarah had a picture of it before the earthquake when she lived there, one picture of what it looked like two years ago, and this is what it looks like now. It is slowly crumbling.

Over 6 years prior.

Six years after the disaster.

We drove on and we stopped at a Shinto shrine in the town. This one was nearly shaken off its support beams in the front and looked to be leaning to one side.

Here you can see the shrine as it used to be over 6 years before I was there. You can see the beautiful decorations and the lovely stone work for the little bridge at the entrance

Over 6 years prior.

Over 6 years prior.

Over 6 years prior.

Six years after the disaster.

Some more details from around the shrine grounds.

Inside the shrine and on the walking path on the outside of the shrine and around the grounds there were a lot of miscellaneous objects littering the area. One of these things was a large plastic bag of daruma dolls painted in the local style, with a blue ring around the faces of the red dolls. It seemed like such a shame. Because the daruma dolls were in a plastic bag, they looked like they were brand new, that they had avoided the mold and water and decay that had touched everything around it.

You can clearly see the Daruma with the blue ring around the face. This is a local style and not found in many other places.

Across the street there was a residential lot that Sarah says had a building that collapsed completely during the earthquake. She says that the rubble from the collapsed building spilled into the road and made the road almost impassable during the evacuation. She remembers it being quite the inconvenience for everyone trying to make their way around it.

Something heavy fell on this car and the debris is pretty well organized. The tarp is covering the house, perhaps to protect it so restoration can be done.

From here we piled back into the car and Sarah took us to see the train station.

One of the first things Sarah notices was that there used to be a spinning clock above the train station entrance, but it seems to have been closed up and put away. 

Over 6 years prior.

Six years after the disaster.

One of the things I noticed first was the bike lot next to the station was full of bikes that people and kids were unable to retrieve when they were evacuated.

We tried the station door and found that it was open and we could go inside.

We walked around the lobby and looked around. It is a nice train station, the walls are mostly glass and the lobby has kind of a squiggly layout with squiggly benches. It would look pretty modern under normal circumstances.

There were old brochures sitting in the brochure stands and advertisements. There was an old train schedule in a display case on the wall.

We walked to the back of the lobby where the ticket window was and the entrance to the train platform. That door was locked, however, so we stood staring out the back at the train tracks. There was a digging machine on the tracks, so it looked like there was work going into repairing the train tracks.

After that we got back in the car and drove to Sarah’s old apartment. 

We walked up through the parking lot where we saw Sarah’s old car. She was not able to take it with her when she was evacuated, so it just stayed in her parking spot and eventually broke down. It can’t be moved now. 

We entered the stairwell and there were some vines and crawling plants growing all around the entrance and all over Sarah’s old bicycle that was left in front of the mailboxes.

Sarah told us the story of a sticker that is on her bike. When she first arrived to Japan and began teaching high school, the school district bought her a bicycle for transportation. In her first few months of working at the high school, some trouble-making boys stole her bicycle. She reported the missing bicycle and walked to work for a few days.  

Soon after, one of the other teachers found her bicycle in the student's bike parking. They returned it to her and punished the boys that stole her bike. After that the school printed a giant sticker/label and put it on the back rim above the tire. It says something like "For teacher use only. No Students allowed." She laughed while telling us this story.

We entered her apartment and everything is as she left it that day. 

When she came home and packed a bag. She was able to spend some time cleaning up the mess created by the earthquake. As a result she says that the inside of her apartment is quite a bit cleaner than most houses and apartments in the town, because others were not able to tidy up before leaving. She was tidying up because she was unsure whether or not she would be evacuated.

Her apartment was actually built with the intention of having multiple families, or roommates living in it at a time, so, it has two kitchens and two bedrooms with a shared bathroom. She says that before she moved in, the house belonged to the city and they were housing traveling construction workers in it, or something like that.

She used the second kitchen and second bedroom for overflow, but rarely used the rooms. So her main kitchen and room were the ones she was in daily.

There was a lot of clutter on the tables, chairs, couches, and on the floor. Her bed was unmade from when she got up that morning and it had a pile of clothes on it from when she was going through her clothes deciding what to take with her.

Sarah comes from a Christian missionary family. I do believe it affects her life greatly. I know she attended church every Sunday in Iwaki. In this appartment she had a prominent Bible quote written in colorful paper and hung around her room. I believe it is a Bible verse about doing missionary work. It was the first part of Jeremiah 29:7, "But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf,..."

She was fixing her computer at the time, so her computer is in pieces on her kotatsu table. Her closet is full of books, both educational and entertaining. She had a lot of the older edition of JET Japanese help books, and the entire Harry Potter series in her closet.

There was a round pile of dirt on a stool. She said that it was an orange she had in her kitchen. Over the years it had decayed, until now where it was literally a brown, crumbling ball of dirt.

She had a white board on her fridge held up by string and a magnet. The last time she was in her apartment it was still hanging up, but when we arrived it was on the floor. The string had finally decayed enough that it couldn’t support the weight of the white board anymore.

After we were done looking at Sarah’s apartment we had enough time to go see the ocean.

Futaba beach used to be a hoppin’ place. We had been looking at a book about the nuclear disaster in the car and it had extensive information about what the town was like before the disaster. They had exciting festivals and their own style of daruma. The beach was a popular place and there was a nice beach house/community center just off the beach. 

The community center is a triangular-shaped building. When the tsunami hit, the water was so high! We saw a photo in Sarah's book that illustrated how high the water came up and the water was within five feet from the top of the triangular roof.

Sarah said you could see the Daiichi Power Plant from the end of the cement wave breakers, so we picked our way across the large cement barriers out into the ocean until we could see the Daiichi Power Plant from around the seaside cliffs.

We snapped a few pictures, and we talked and looked.

It was a really fun time, but it was also solemn and thoughtful. Imagining the tragedy that happened here. It really put some things into perspective for me. 

While the radiation in the town is not as high as the media would have you believe, it is still high enough that you shouldn’t spend a whole lot of time there and it will still be years until, and even if, it opens again. Even if it does open again, it will never be the same. 

*******Update:   Sarah took some pictures from a book that she owns about the Tsunami adn Nuclear disaster. She took a few pictures to show the area that the Tsunami affected as well as the cover with a bunch of relevant photos.