Before, during and after: the ghosts of Fukushima

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/world/asia/fukushima-japan-nuclear-anniversary.html

When nature breaks loose, it shows no mercy. It crosses cities, villages, devastates homes, industries and businesses without distinction. On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 pm, an earthquake of a magnitude of 9.1 on the Richter scale was triggered on the west coast of Japan. It sets off a series of events that will forever disrupt the life of the Tōhoku region, leaving it scarred by uncontrollable forces.

Once again, I invite you to explore a space in the land of the Rising Sun, through abandoned cities, a nuclear power plant hard hit by the disaster, but by the spirits of the disappeared who still haunt the abandoned spaces to this day.

A place prone to disaster

Four main factors contribute to the high rate of natural disasters in Japan. First, the country is often subject to extreme weather variations, such as heavy seasonal rainfall, typhoons and heavy snowfall on the Japanese coast. In addition, Japan’s topography is particularly rugged, with many steep slopes and fault lines. Then, Japan is located near the Pacific seismic belt, which causes frequent earthquakes. Also, the presence of a complex coastline makes Japan vulnerable to tsunamis. Finally, Japan is located directly in the Pacific belt where almost all the volcanoes in the world are concentrated (83 of them are active, which is 10% of the world total).

The Tōhoku region, the one hardest hit by the March 2011 disaster, includes six prefectures, namely Akita, Aomori, Fukushima, Iwate, Miyagi, and Yagamata. This region is particularly mountainous, as it is crossed from north to south by the massifs of the Ōu Mountains range. This chain includes the Iwate Mountains (2038 meters), the Hakkakoda Massif (1585 meters), the Zaō Volcano (inactive, 1841 meters), Mount Azuma-kofuji (1705 meters) and the Adatara Volcano (1718 meters, last erupted in 1996).

The climate of this region is relatively harsh compared to the rest of Japan, very snowy and foggy. The western slope goes through very cold winters and short summers, which are hot and stifling. The eastern slope is influenced by the Pacific Ocean and has higher precipitation.

Finally, the Tōhoku region is home to several nuclear power plants, including the Fukushima plant in Onagawa, which is much closer to the epicenter of the March 2011 earthquake, but whose three reactors withstood the quake. The plant even served as a refuge for survivors of the disaster.

An unpredictable tragedy?

Although the Japanese seem to be accustomed to the presence of natural disasters, nothing could have prepared them for the March 11, 2011 earthquake, which created one of the worst tsunamis and nuclear cataclysms in Japanese history.

The first disaster to mark the fateful day of March 11, 2021, was a 9.1-magnitude earthquake that occurred off the northeast coast of the island of Honshū. Its epicenter is located 130 km south of Sendai, the capital of Miyagi Prefecture, in the Tōhoku region, which is located about 300 km northeast of Tokyo. The maximum seismic intensity is recorded in Kurihara and is 7 on the Shindo scale (the seismic intensity scale used by the Japan Meteorological Agency).

Map of Japan showing the March 11, 2011 earthquake. Credit: W. Rebel via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0. – https://thebulletin.org/2021/03/a-fukushima-lesson-victim-compensation-schemes-need-updating/

The earthquake first occurred 30 km below the ocean floor, off the coast of Japan, and then propagated through a fault that separates the tectonic plates to the Japan Trough at the bottom of the sea. The earthquake releases an energy equivalent to 8000 atomic bombs of the force of the one that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945, but also comparable to burning all the earth’s oil reserves in one single blow…

This earthquake then causes a tsunami, whose first sign is not a wave of several meters high, but a trough (or depression) that reaches the shores of cities and villages, before the crest. Curiously, the waters recede until sometimes touching the seabed, giving a false sense of security. But, a few moments later, the energy produced by the tsunami manifests itself in the form of a titanic curtain, which goes from a speed of 800 km/h to 80 km/h, clumping and rising with the sea floor, creating an unimaginable capacity for destruction.

This tsunami generated waves up to 15 meters high and peaks of over 35 meters recorded in Miyako. The tsumani alert of maximum level is launched by the Meteorological Agency of Japan, to Russia, the Philippines, eastern Indonesia, Micronesia, Taiwan and many others. Several months after the incident, NASA confirmed that the tsunami was formed by several waves that would have merged in the open sea, which explains its tremendous force.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct1wyv

A total of 54 of 174 coastal towns and communities on the east coast were affected by the tsunami, and 101 places designated as refuge areas were destroyed. The equivalent of 562 square kilometers was devastated by the tsunami and water from the tsunami was found up to 10 km inland. Within minutes, more than 120,000 buildings were destroyed and millions of Japanese lost access to clean water. In one day, more than 19,000 people lost their lives because of the tsunami.

An unparalleled nuclear disaster

In the path of the earthquake and tsunami is the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, built in 1971, which is one of the largest nuclear plants in the world. This plant contains 6 boiling water reactors, which are located near the coast. Like any nuclear power plant, the Fukushima plant was built to strict safety standards, but also to withstand Japan’s frequent natural disasters. However, engineers at the time could not foresee that two disasters would strike the plant simultaneously. The Japanese are on the verge of experiencing an event similar to that of the Chernobyl plant, which took place 25 years earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant

When the detectors feel the tremor, they immediately send control rods to the various cores, in order to absorb the neutron charges that fuel the chain reactions, and then shut them down. This obviously causes a loss of power, so the diesel generators start up to continue to supply power to the surrounding towns and villages. However, an hour after the first tremor, a wall of water more than 15 meters (50 feet) high broke over the plant. Fukushima is now flooded with more than double the amount of water that was estimated in the worst possible disaster scenario. Diesel generators, which are needed to move water through the plant and cool the cores, are caught in the flood and have stopped working.

Before the end of the day, the cooling water became too hot, the nuclear fuel was exposed to the air and the temperature in Reactor 1 rose to 2800 degrees Celsius, half the temperature of the Sun’s surface. In the following days, reactors 1 and 3 exploded. For the third time in history, one of the most dangerous elements in the world, corium, was created. This radioactive lava could have spilled into the containment compartments and eaten away more than 14 centimeters of steel before landing in the basement. To this day, the corium has not been found.

So, because of the explosions, the nuclear fuel is no longer contained and radioactive waste is released into the environment, with the explosions, the flood waters and through the reactors.

Disastrous consequences

Apart from the material damage, it is impossible to express in words the losses caused by this triple disaster. The power of water does not discriminate and devastates everything in its path, with no regard for the lives, memories, work, pets, banks, schools, hospitals and families of thousands of Japanese, whose lives will be forever affected by this fatal day.

The death toll was in the thousands, the majority of whom were elderly people, but also hundreds of school children who tried to flee from the impending threat. In Ishinomaki, Okawa Elementary School lost 74 children and 10 teachers who were caught by a wave while trying to reach the mountains. After the tragedy, while the morgues and crematoriums did not provide for the demand, mass graves were dug to bury the deceased. 2500 people are still missing to this day, and thousands more are injured.

In all, 200,000 people are homeless, which includes 80,000 people who had to be evacuated because of concerns about radioactive leaks from the damaged Fukushima reactors. The evacuees are forced to live for months in overcrowded evacuation centers, deprived of most of the things we take for granted in our daily lives, such as clean clothes or drinking water.

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/japan-tsunami-60-powerful-photos-earthquake-nuclear-disaster-that-hit-six-years-ago-1610819

The threat of radiation is not without concern for those affected. The massive wave of destruction caused by the Fukushima earthquake, tsunami and reactor explosion is paralyzing one third of Japan. Houses and condos built in Chiba Prefecture are sinking into the ground due to the abundance of mud and must be abandoned. Roads, railroads and dams also suffered major damage. All available engineers are monopolized in order to restore the power outages and allow the now homeless people to move to safer places.

Items as common as batteries, bottled water, rice and bread are becoming rare commodities and must be rationed. In the Fukushima area, the hardest hit by the disaster, people are crammed by the thousands in gymnasiums that miraculously survived the cataclysm.

Environmental impacts

One of the most significant impacts of a nuclear reactor explosion is the possibility of radioactive waste and radiation escaping into the environment. This was the case during the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, when radioactive waste and fumes affected areas that were more than 500 km away from the plant.

When the Fukushima-Daiichi reactors exploded, radiation spread in three ways: through the atmosphere, through waste blown into the air during the explosions, and the rest through the sea, via the cooling water. More than 300,000 tons of contaminated water ends up in the Pacific Ocean in the months following the explosions. This approach is very controversial since the coast of Fukushima is known to have strong sea currents. Therefore, the contaminated water has all the time to spread everywhere.

Even if the Fukushima-Daiichi disaster is comparable to Chernobyl, its impact on the health of the inhabitants and on the environment was less. Indeed, during the explosion of the reactors, the cores of the latter are preserved, thus reducing the risks of harmful radioactive emissions for human, animal and environmental health by 80 to 90%. Thus, the radiation is dispersed over (only) 60 km. The radiation dispersed by the explosion of the Chernobyl plant would have caused more than 4000 deaths. According to all the scientific and environmental reports of the Fukushima-Daiichi explosion, the latter did not cause any deaths.

However, as a precaution, the government distributed potassium iodide tablets to protect survivors from radiation.

Silent witnesses

Japan is one of the richest countries in the world for creatures (yōkai), legends and myths. The Fukushima disaster is unwillingly bringing back now-silent witnesses to the devastating tsunami. Within days of the disaster, survivors begin to see ghosts of the missing, many ghosts. Some call it a « ghost epidemic »[1]. Many of them wander the beaches, others stand on street corners with waterlogged coats. One of the most famous stories is that of a woman, presumably drowned, joining her friends for tea. After she left, the cushion on which she would sit would be soaked with sea water.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UHZugCNKA4&ab_channel=KyleHill

In the years following the tsunami, ghost stories reported by survivors became commonplace. After dark, many residents report seeing dozens of ghosts wandering through abandoned areas. Reports of apparitions became so common that academics began to look into the matter. Monks and priests were called in to exorcise and bless the places that had been deserted by humans, but were being invaded by ghosts. Some priests even have to exorcise people possessed by the spirits of the departed.

Richard Lloyd Perry, author of the book « Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and life in Japan’s disaster zone » reports a testimony of a survivor from the city of Kurihara, who now hates the rain, as he keeps seeing the faces of his missing relatives in the puddles.

In the summer of 2011, a cab driver was driving in an area particularly affected by the tsunami and was surprised to see a young woman wearing a heavy winter coat, reaching out to ask him to stop. The driver also notices that the woman’s coat is completely soaked. She asks him to go to Minamihama district. The driver asks the young woman why she wants to go to this area, where most of the houses are demolished and abandoned. The young woman replied, « Am I dead? Terrified, the cab driver turns around to see that the back seat of his vehicle is empty.

Stories of this kind are reported by the thousands and, even today, ghosts and apparitions wander around the prefectures affected by the tsunami.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UHZugCNKA4&ab_channel=KyleHill

What remains of it today?

The earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 remains the largest disaster ever known in the history of Japan. Even today, radiation zones are guarded by Japanese authorities. Those who want to explore urban areas or abandoned places must obtain permission from the local authorities and wear radiation suits and masks to be able to explore as they please. They find on their way, houses where the inhabitants left everything behind, even a meal, restaurants where there is still some food on the tables and even in the refrigerator, abandoned schools where the radiation level is still too high.

Areas less affected by the nuclear explosions are under surveillance but still accessible to amateur videographers and enthusiasts of urbex and paranormal experiences. More than 150,000 people were evacuated from their homes in the days following the disaster. In 2021, tens of thousands of people are still homeless, forced to live in shelters or to rebuild their lives elsewhere than in the affected area.

The lucky few who were able to return to their homes are torn between a sense of relief and fear. Of course, the persistent rumor of wandering spirits dissuades many residents from returning home…

Even 10 years after their lives were so abruptly cut short, for the survivors, all that remains in the aftermath of Japan’s worst natural and nuclear disaster are the memories of a life left behind and a land devastated by an untamable nature.