In a couple of days, it will be the 15th anniversary of the Big Eastern Japan earthquake and the subsequent accident of the 1st nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Among all 6 reactors at the plant damaged seriously, nr 1 to 3 have undergone hydrogen explosion while nr 1 and 3 have melted through the pressure vessel and possibly the containment vessel. It has spread enormous amount of radio active substances all around. Fallout has occurred at various regions in the vicinity within a few days. It has turned out the biggest nuclear power plant accident ever in the history.
While listening to the news of the on going destrution due to exposed nuclear fuel in the reactors not controllable without water cooling, I was eagerly pulling the weeds in the farm as if trying to empty my mind. Knowing the melt through had occurred, I felt as if the ground I was standing was going to collapse. There were people having lost their home as well as their community and homeland at that time. It was beyond our imagination.
Around that time, an old farmer aged 102 years old has killed himself at his home. He was living in a village in the highland of Fukushima, 20 or 30km inland from the coast of the Pacific ocean, that is, approximately the distance from the crippled nuclear power plant. It was when the habitants of the village heavily contaminated with fallout were ordered to migrate there out to another place in order to avoid maleffect from it. He and his father had cultivated the property keepng nose to the grindstones in the severe environment for decades. Recently a journalist named Osamu Aoki, wondering what has brought such a tragedy, has interviewed the family and related people and investigated on it. Having spent almost 10 years commuting to the village, he has finished recently a reportage on how he has lived and died there.
The nuclear power accident with fallout there seemed to be the main reason. It has deprived him of the most precious ground for living and of the community he had lived. There seemed to be another reason related with his younger brother who had died in Iwo-jima in the end of WWII. The old man seemed to have regretted why it was his younger brother, but not himself, who had been sent to the hopeless battle field. It was an excellent reportage making us consider of the relationship between us and the power of the state. At night of his killing himself, he uttered he had seen something wrong to his daughter in law.
As I have written about it elsewhere in this blog, my mother used to be in a nursing facility in Sendai north of Fukushima. They have lost the infrastructure for a few days. Thanks to the personel's selfless efforts, my mother has survived it. But, possibly due to the stress she had then, she has eventually died in the end of the next month. I could not help overlapping her with this old farmer, even though the latter was in a much worse situation.
Recalling of all these absurdity and tragedy, I would spend the coming few days. I would never let them go as they want like the avid power company and its management personnel with the interest group in the politics, the business world and the academies. They are still plotting to plot reruning the nuclear power plants and even building new ones all around our country only for their profit.
