Nuclear Ghost by Ryo Morimoto;

Author:Ryo Morimoto;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520394100
Publisher: University of California Press

THE PROOF OF LIVING IN THE WORLD

Between 2013 and 2016, before the state decontamination project demolished her house, I often accompanied Naoko into the evacuation zone to tend to her house in Odaka and till her land. We used Route 6, the former Route 6, and sometimes a mountain road in the west, which the locals call Sanrokusen, to observe different locations in the city as we drove to her residence. The drives made visible the city’s emerging wastescape, located either on the coastal side along Route 6 or on the mountainside along Sanrokusen.11

While radically changing the local landscape, decontamination achieved the two radiation-safety principles of distance and shielding, leaving the residential areas in the central part of the city largely unaffected by the visible presence of frecon baggu. Since 2019, special vehicles have transported black bags one by one to the newly established Interim Storage Facility around the 1F property between Ōkuma and Futaba towns, so that it is further removed from residents.12 By the summer of 2021, all decontaminated waste within Minamisōma had disappeared from sight. Once inside the storage facility, frecon baggu also disappeared. There, workers at the state-owned Japan Environmental Storage and Safety Corporation ripped each bag open, incinerated burnable waste to reduce its size, and buried soil-based waste in ditches. Although currently there is no concrete plan to host nuclear waste for perpetuity nor any municipalities willing to do so, the state has promised to move all decontaminated waste out of Fukushima by 2045, thirty years after the first frecon baggu arrived at the facility.13

Upon each visit to her house, Naoko would enter her former bedroom, open the dresser drawers, and quietly contemplate the items within. She would remove a few things from a drawer and place them on the floor, as if to indicate her willingness to transfer them somewhere, and then she would clean up around the Buddhist altar in the adjoining room. The shiny appearance of the golden altar and its large size indicated her family’s faith in Shin Buddhism. As she offered incense, the smoke would rise to the wall where memorial portraits of her deceased family members hung. Dusting the photographs, Naoko joked how she would soon join them but added that for that to happen, she first needed to return to her home. When she first joked about it in 2013, she was already in her late seventies.

Since the TEPCO accident, she had thought about how her evacuated home had become not just an important place to live her life but also the only place where she wanted to rest after her death. Naoko never doubted that she would eventually join the cremated remains of her deceased family members resting in the family grave on the property, a few hundred meters from the house. The altar, memorial portraits, and the nearby grave together articulated Naoko and her family’s multiple relationalities, temporalities, and territories archived in the place she called home. The accident threatened to sever her tie to it as it had denied her the right to choose where to live and die.

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