Like many of her neighbors, Satomi Inokoshi worries that her gritty
hometown is being spoiled by the newcomers and the money that have
rolled into Iwaki since the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost three and a
half years ago.
“Iwaki is changing - and not for the good,” said Inokoshi, 55, who
echoes a sentiment widely heard in this town of almost 300,000 where the
economic boom that followed the nuclear accident has brought its own
disruption.
Property prices in Iwaki, about 60 km south of the wrecked nuclear
plant, have jumped as evacuees forced from homes in more heavily
contaminated areas snatch up apartments and land. Hundreds of workers,
who have arrived to work in the nuclear clean-up, crowd downtown hotels.
But long-time residents have also come to resent evacuees and the
government compensation that has made the newcomers relatively rich in a
blue-collar town built on coal mining and access to a nearby port.
Locals have stopped coming to the entertainment district where Inokoshi
runs a bar, she says, scared off by the nuclear workers and their rowdy
reputation.
“The situation around Iwaki is unsettled and unruly,” said Ryosuke
Takaki, a professor of sociology at Iwaki Meisei University, who has
studied the town’s developing divide. “There are many people who have
evacuated to Iwaki, and there are all kinds of incidents caused by
friction.”
Residents across Fukushima Prefecture hailed the first wave of
workers who arrived to contain the nuclear disaster in 2011 as heroes.
Cities like Iwaki also welcomed evacuees from towns closer to the
meltdowns and explosions. At the time, Japan’s stoicism and sense of
community were praised around the world for helping those who survived
an earthquake and tsunami that killed nearly 19,000 and triggered
explosions at the nuclear plant.
But that solidarity and sense of shared purpose has frayed, according
to dozens of interviews. Many Iwaki residents say they have grown weary
of hosting evacuees in temporary housing.
And the newcomers themselves are frightened, says Hideo Hasegawa, who
heads a non-profit group looking after evacuees at the largest
temporary housing complex in Iwaki.
“When they move in to an apartment, they don’t talk to neighbors and
hide,” said Hasegawa, who works from a small office located between rows
of grey, prefabricated shacks housing the evacuees. “You hear this hate
talk everywhere you go: restaurants, shops, bars. It’s relentless.”
The 2011 nuclear crisis forced more than 160,000 people in Fukushima
prefecture to evacuate and leave their homes. Half of them are still not
allowed to return to the most badly contaminated townships within 20
kms of the destroyed plant known as the exclusion zone.
Since April, the government has allowed some residents to return to
parts of the evacuation zone. But the area remains sparsely populated
and riddled with hot spots where radiation is as much as four times the
government’s target for public safety. Work crews in white
decontamination suits have poured radiation-tainted topsoil and debris
into black-plastic bags piled at improvised storage sites on roadsides
and public parks awaiting a shift to a more permanent nuclear waste
dump.
By contrast, Iwaki has prospered. On a recent Saturday, parking lots
near downtown were packed - along with restaurants near Taira, the
city’s downtown. Chuo-dai Kashima, a newly developed area in Iwaki where
many of the temporary housing units have been built, saw an almost 12
percent rise in land prices in the past year, according to government
data. That was among the highest increases across Japan and behind only
Ishinomaki, Miyagi, a coastal city that was destroyed by the 2011
tsunami and has only just begun to rebuild.
At the heart of the tensions is an unresolved debate about how much
people across Fukushima should be compensated for the suffering,
dislocation and uncertainty that followed the nuclear accident.
Some Iwaki residents grumble they are being forced to shoulder the
burden of hosting evacuees who receive far more compensation from the
government and do not have to pay rent on their government-provided
prefab temporary homes.
In January 2013, vandals threw paint and broke windows on cars parked
in evacuee housing at multiple locations. Less than a month earlier,
someone had painted graffiti reading, “Evacuees Go Home” at the entrance
to a city office.
Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), the operator of the Fukushima plant,
has paid almost 4 trillion yen in compensation as a result of the
nuclear accident. Payments vary depending on the amount of radiation
recorded in a particular area, a system that evacuees have complained
appears arbitrary. A family of four in one part of an evacuated town
might receive 10 million yen, while a similar family in a less
contaminated part of the same evacuated town would get just over half of
that amount, according to data from Japan’s trade ministry.
The radioactive plume that erupted after a partial meltdown at the
Fukushima plant travelled northwest, missing Iwaki. Most of Iwaki’s
residents evacuated for a while, but most then returned. Their
compensation was also limited: the majority received about 120,000 yen
each.
Many established residents in Iwaki complain government payouts to
the newcomers have been frittered away on luxury cars and villas,
locally dubbed “disaster relief mansions.”
“The food the evacuees eat and the clothes they wear are different,”
said Hiroshi Watahiki, 56, a chiropractor in Iwaki. “They can afford it
from their compensation funds. They have time and money to go gambling
since they’re not working.”
A poll in January by Takaki showed residents had conflicting feelings
about the evacuees. More than half of those surveyed expressed sympathy
for them, but 67% also said they “feel envious of their compensation.”
The tensions are unlikely to be resolved any time soon.
The government is planning to build 3,700 permanent apartments to
replace the temporary units for evacuees, most of them in Iwaki. The
first 1,600 apartments, however, are nine months behind schedule and
will not be ready until 2017, officials say.
