Japanese town seeks a transplanted future

IN KAZO, JAPAN — The town of Futaba is either a place without people or a group of people without a place. Japan’s nuclear disaster contaminated the town’s 20 square miles, leaving the land uninhabitable, perhaps for decades. The disaster also forced the evacuation of 7,000 people from the town, with many of them still living at an abandoned high school more than 100 miles from home.

For months, those people waited to hear about their chances of returning home. But now that a return to Futaba — on the doorstep of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant — seems almost inconceivable, town officials have recently posed a new scenario: They’d like to rebuild Futaba somewhere else.

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 More than six months after the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan, many residents are reluctant to go back to the cities and towns where they had lived.

“What we are trying to do is unprecedented,” said Oosumi Muneshige, a chief assistant to the mayor. “We’re looking for a place where everybody can live together — basically a reconstruction of what we had before.”

The possibility of reestablishing a town on new land, perhaps in a different prefecture (or state), creates a tangle of legal and funding questions that the central government has yet to sort through. But for evacuees, the possibility also reflects a welcome alternative to the purgatory of the past six months.

Japan’s triple disaster — an earthquake, a tsunami, a series of meltdowns at a nuclear facility — left more than 300,000 people homeless, but it’s those from Fukushima, the prefecture that is the site of the plant, who face the most distressing questions about where and how to rebuild. In the earliest days of the crisis, tens of thousands who lived within 12 miles of the oceanside plant fled to the north, west or south. Roughly one in three stayed in safer, inland parts of Fukushima. One in every 12 wound up in Tokyo.

The municipal offices of the eight townships closest to the plant also relocated, opening temporary headquarters in whatever rented space they could find. But Futaba, located along the Fukushima coast, was the only one of those townships to relocate to another prefecture, according to a recent research report on the nuclear emergency’s diaspora. The town now operates on the second floor of a four-story school building in Kazo, with some employees stationed at wooden laboratory desks. Almost 800 Futaba evacuees live at the school, using classrooms for bedrooms.

When Futaba’s people moved to this spot in late March, most held out hope for going home. Then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan visited in mid-May, and evacuees pleaded for information about their chances. “That is the number one question I’ve received from everyone,” Kan said. “Eventually, I should be able to clearly tell you.”

Clarity emerged last month when the government released a report on radiation readings in towns closest to the plant, with levels high enough to leave them off-limits for decades. Some residents were “devastated” by the news, evacuee Kyoko Izawa said. A few argued with their roommates, debating what it meant. For others, like Izawa, 87, it merely confirmed what they had come to fear. If there would someday be a homecoming, she wouldn’t live to see it.