Wisdom From Fukushima
by Carolyn Wilbur Treadway, JYA 1960-61

On 3/11/11 a giant 9.0 earthquake occurred off the coast of Tohoku, hurtling a massive 60’ high tsunami traveling 50 mph into Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate prefectures, scouring away everything in its path. In the next days, several of the flooded nuclear power reactors at Fukushima Daiichi melted down, releasing massive amounts of radiation. The destruction from these Triple Disasters was horrific. Recovery efforts have been under way for more than four years, but as Dr Hidefumi Kotani conveyed so eloquently in his lecture on “The Hidden Impact” (see A New Leaf June 2015), the disaster is still ongoing.

In May 2013 I met in Tokyo with Dr Kotani to learn about the counseling and trauma education clinics that he and other ICU psychologists founded soon after the Triple Disasters, and had the privilege of attending a support group at the Sendai clinic. My July 2013 A New Leaf article, “We Will Not Forget You,” described this impactful experience—so impactful that it drew me back to Japan to visit the disaster area again when another opportunity arose.

In November 2014, I participated in a Learning Journey to the disaster area, led by Bob Stilger, co-president of New Stories, who had been developing “Future Centers” across Japan since 2011 to help survivors find a way forward after all was lost, and to create the lives, communities, and nation that they now want to have–not the Japan they had.

The losses in the disaster areas are massive beyond comprehension. Thousands upon thousands of people died. For those who remained, many lost their homes, their livelihoods, and their communities. In one fell swoop, their past, their present, and their future were gone. Japanese people have been dealing with earthquakes and tsunami for millennia. History informs them what to do: clean up, rebuild, go on. But nuclear radiation introduces a whole new dimension of uncertainty.

When everything about the future is unknown, how does one start to go forward? Future Centers work seeks to discern this. It involves a lot of tender listening, and then—slowly—much dialog. Our whole Learning Journey was about listening, listening, and then dialog. The carefully built relationships with the people we visited allowed us to enter their lives at a depth that would otherwise have been impossible. It was a sacred privilege indeed. Everyone had experienced trauma. They wanted to tell their experiences not only to honor all that was lost, but also to share what they had learned so that others might benefit from it. In turn, we felt a deep commitment to share their stories with the world.

I returned to Tohoku to honor the disaster survivors and to learn from them how they could be surviving my personal worst nightmare—living near a nuclear meltdown, having lost everything.

I wanted to honor and learn from their courage, tenacity, resilience, and whatever else allowed them to continue to survive and try to find their way forward.

As we traveled from place to place, we learned much by hearing stories of people’s lives after the disasters. A woman in Ishinomaki, noticing that children in the emergency shelter had nothing to do, decided to create a preschool day care center. Without experience to do this, she stepped forward to act on the need she saw. She had lost everything; caring for the children now gave meaning and purpose to her life. Her day care center was beautiful and inviting, full of children’s art and plans for the town they designed to replace theirs that had been washed away. It took more than a year for nature to return to their tsunami scoured area. As the plants and birds and insects returned, she and the children felt they could come back to life too. Carefully and reverently, she taught the children to honor nature.

Near Higashi-matsushima, the owner of a well-known fish products factory lost all his factory buildings, many of his employees, his home, and his livelihood to the tsunami. He didn’t know whether to try to rebuild. Digging in the mud where his house had been, he found a photograph of his deceased ancestors. He asked them what he should do; the reply that came to him was “do what you must.” He tried to rebuild, but the task was overwhelming.  He was in despair and ready to give up when a young volunteer showed up to help him. At the end of the day, the volunteer said he’d be back tomorrow. With a shock, the factory owner realized that tomorrow would come and he needed to be there to greet the volunteer. This went on and on. Other volunteers came to help, and after much effort and time, a new factory—further inland and on higher ground—was opened. Forty of his original employees remain. He calls them “my treasures.” Outside the factory, there is a giant wall listing 1200 names. These are the names of every single volunteer who helped clean up and rebuild this factory. Every day, every employee honors these volunteers. The factory owner teaches us “we must help keep each other afloat.”

Life in the tsunami areas is still very difficult, but slowly going forward. It was strikingly different in the irradiated areas where so much is still in limbo, still on hold. As we drove through parts of beautiful Fukushima prefecture amidst the glory of Fall, it was surreal. Mind-boggingly surreal. All looked so beautiful, so normal, yet was so lethal. We could not see, hear, smell, taste, or feel radiation. It was invisible except through the numbers on the radiation monitors. Many towns and villages had been evacuated due to high levels of radiation—wherever the fickle winds had blown that radiation in the early days of the meltdowns. People were first put into emergency shelters such as schools or gyms, and then into temporary housing (very small row houses). The government promised to build permanent houses, but this is not happening. Already the Tokyo Olympics are getting the resources (building supplies, builders) that the disaster areas need for their rebuilding.

In Itatemura, we visited the beautiful home of a family who owned a roof-tile factory. Both the home and the factory were in an irradiated area and could not be lived (or worked) in. All around the home were workmen, in ordinary work clothing, “cleaning up” the house and property. This meant washing down the house, cutting down trees, stripping tree branches, and removing the top 6” of soil which was “low-level” radioactive. The area around the “cleaned up” house was starkly denuded—but six meters into the surrounding forest nothing was touched. Thus the next rain or snow or big wind could bring more radiation into the area that had just been “cleaned.” To us, it was heartbreaking.

Now Japan is the only country in the world to have had three catastrophic nuclear disasters. Most fortunately, in the early days of the Fukushima disaster, the prevailing winds blew the radiation out to sea rather than south over Tokyo. But enormous amounts of radiation remain in the destroyed reactors, and further releases or explosions could occur. Great quantities of irradiated water still flow into the earth and the sea.

My admiration for people who choose to live next to such potential danger is enormous. Many people have left the area already, and many can’t leave. But many are also choosing to stay in the area that always was and always will be their home. To me, they exemplify the courage, determination, self-reliance, and resilience it takes get through the days, living right on the edge of the great unknown.

Reflecting upon all our listening and experiences on the Learning Journey, I hold in my heart some of the wisdom shared with us by the survivors. On their behalf, I would like to share their wisdom with you:

1.     Live the life that is important to live

2.     Never take life for granted

3.     Honor those who have lost much

4.     Keep on shoveling the mud

5.     Help others as best you can

6.     Create ways to have hope

7.     Find life again through nature

8.     Protect and guide the children

9.     Build community

10.  Care for one another, because it is receiving and giving care that can keep you going and provide meaning for rebuilding your life

After the Learning Journey, I returned to Tokyo to visit ICU and to see my “sister” Keiko Yano, a fellow ICU student in whose home I lived for part of my JYA year. Keiko and I visited campus, and were able to meet with professors Etsuko Kato and Mutsuko Murakami, who welcomed us warmly on a very rainy day. They described various ways they connect students with people in the Tohoku disaster area through anthropological field study and through service learning programs. Back on campus, the students share those experiences through their writings, presentations, and exhibits. Conferences and workshops for both faculty and students are sometimes held as well.

Keiko and I also met with Shimpei Suga who leads monthly trips of students to volunteer in Tohoku, continuing to bring still needed help to residents of the disaster area. ICU student Tim Fraser shared with us his experience of participating in some of those trips. Finally, we met with Dr Kazunori Hashimoto, ICU professor of psychology, and Dr Hidefumi Kotani, founder of the counseling/trauma education clinics in Sendai and Koriyama. From both men we learned of the enormity of ongoing need and the scarcity of resources for helping the survivors of the disasters recover from their traumatic losses and go forward.

In May 2013, I promised not to forget the people of Tohoku, and I don’t believe I ever will. However, in the 4+ years that have passed since the disasters, world attention has moved on, and many people are feeling forgotten. It is important to them that I share some of their stories and their wisdom with you. I am glad to learn that ICU faculty, through fieldwork and service learning, are finding ways to connect ICU students with disaster survivors. There is much support and learning to exchange! Our world is changing, with many disasters occurring across the globe. A Tohoku scale disaster could someday happen to us. Can some of the hard earned wisdom of Tohoku survivors help to guide survivors of other catastrophes that will occur elsewhere? They fervently hope so. What a rich experience it can be for ICU students—and the rest of us—to learn the struggles and triumphs of Tohoku survivors as they find ways to go forward after all was lost, and as they share the importance of recovering and building community in order to do so.