Routine made futile
Seeking comfort in familiar routines, the couple, helped by their son, milk their cows twice a day just as before. Mineko Okubo wears a face-mask, but not her husband or son.
The exercise is laborious, and futile: Nobody will touch their milk now. The collection truck hasn’t been round since March 13. The family drinks a few glasses a day and offers hot milk to rare visitors, who decline their hospitality.
The rest gurgles down a drain outside the cowshed.
The waste is relieved by a small, grim consolation: starved of feed because the farm no longer gets the supplies it needs, the Okubos’ cows produce only half as much milk a day as they did before.
The farm, which made a million yen profit last year, now earns nothing — and devours the Okubo’s energy and remaining resources.
Their herd of 35 wagyu — cows for Japanese beef — still needs to be fed, but can’t be sold because of a ban on possibly contaminated animals going to market. Each cow used to be worth over $7,000 at livestock market in Sendai, a big city to the north, but “they are now worthless,” said Motoo Okubo.
Killing the cows would save money on feed but, he said, that is not an option: “Where would we bury them all?” Rigid Japanese rules require that each dead cow be inspected for disease and then sent for cremation in a distant city. Trucks that used to cart away dead animals no longer visit Minami Soma.
Fearful that drinking tap water may be hazardous, the Okubos now rely on water drawn from a well, which they hope is deep enough to avoid contamination, a concern that jumped sharply Saturday when the government announced that highly radioactive water is leaking from Fukushima-Daiichi.
With only themselves and old habits for solace, the Okubos get up at dawn to tend to their animals, just as they’ve done since 1967, defying a danger they can’t see when they venture outside. Three cows have given birth. And, so far at least, the Okubos are healthy: a recent radiation screening declared them clean.
“Our whole life is outside looking after cows,” said Mineko Okubo. “I will do that until I die.”
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