By Ryota Iijima in Fukushima City
March in Japan is the last month of school year. The six, ninth and 12th graders, along with college seniors, are to have the ceremonies to leave their schools sometime in March. It’s a very important day for them and their parents.
But it’s been very different this year in our part of Japan, because of the great earthquake.
When the long and hard shockwave hit our town of Fukushima City, on March 11th, children and teachers at my son’s school are rehearsing the ceremony in the gym. After the first shock, they quickly went out into the school ground and kept standing for an hour in the cold, while strong aftershocks came on and on.
Then the snowstorm started. The classes were dismissed. The students went home. No one was physically wounded.
After that, the water supply in our town stopped. The electric power lines were broken in some parts of town. We had a night of fear, with strong and frequent aftershocks. We listened to the radio giving the news of killer waves devastating the towns in the northeast, all the railroad trains stopped, nuclear reactors 40 miles southeast in danger, gasoline running out quickly, with no supply, hourly reports of radiation, etc.
We went through a cold week without running water, taking stored food. A phone call came from my son’s school, saying that the graduation ceremony was cancelled. Our university, my workplace, also cancelled the graduation ceremony. Spring holidays became a survival camp.
April in Japan is the first month of school year. The new first graders come to elementary schools, the seventh to junior high, the tenth to senior high schools, as freshmen, under cherry blossoms. Their first day at the new school is a beautiful moment of joy and hope.
My son got up early on April 6, had breakfast with us, dressed in new clothing, and went happily with my wife to the nearby junior high school. It was the warm day of new start for us, under the cloud of radiation.
The university where I teach English put off the start of new semester till May 9th. A report came that all the students, teachers and office workers at the university were alive. I was happy looking forward to free days, reading and getting ready for the new classes.
April, however, has been a cruel month this year. From April 6th to 11th, we had a series of strong aftershocks. Though we had dinner for our son’s birthday between the shocks, the ones which hit us on April 11th were especially hard and frequent. We were truly shaken. The local trains, which had been back to normal, stopped again.
But the railroad people kept on working over the weekend. The trains started moving again in a few days.
The PTA of the elementary school called for an informal graduation ceremony on Sunday in late April and 80 percent of the former six graders, who were already at junior high, came back to their alma mater and had one hour of reunion.
Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art, which had been shut after March 11th, quietly opened again on April 26th, with pencil drawings and painted cels from Studio Ghibli, Tokyo. The Ghibli exhibition in fact had been started in late February and was stopped by the earthquake. So the new opening of the museum with Ghibli artworks intact might be like the coming back of Nausicaa, in this time of natural devastation and nuclear fallout.
This museum, situated between the heart of the town and a green mountain, is a meeting place of nature, culture, past, present and future. It keeps Ben Shahn’s painting of Aikichi Kuboyama, who went dead because of the radiation caused by the Bikini nuclear explosion. Shahn’s picture was used last year as a part of special exhibition of objet d’art, building up imagery of Apocalyptic future programmed by the contemporary Japanese artist Kenji Yanobe.
So we keep going on in this town, sharing moments of joy and facing many problems. The biggest problem is fear of radiation. Although the risk of nuclear fallout giving a long term damage to the health of our children is turning slowly from probable to possible, some parents are unhappy with the national government letting the children run and jump in the school ground, where the level of radiation is higher than other places. Some public parks in Fukushima City and Koriyama City in Fukushima Prefecture have “DANGER” signs. Some of our friends are going away; others are coming back.
Level of radiation: 1.54 microsieverts / hour.
Ryota Iijima teaches American literature and English language at Fukushima University, Japan.