Fukushima: A photographer's 10-year journey through wreckage and recovery
Photographer Ko Sasaki drove me through the Fukushima evacuation zone in the summer of 2016. I had been there twice before to record programs for National Public Radio and NHK, but I was hired by both to report post-disaster stories of resilience and show what had changed since the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. Sasaki was showing me what hadn't.
Sasaki's photographs appear in The New York Times, Forbes magazine, Wired and other mainstream publications. But his obsession with Fukushima and its people comes from a personal commitment: He feels that the region is still being exploited, mistreated and misrepresented by Japan's government and corporate officials, who cling to tatemae (public face and behavior, or "keeping up appearances"), he says, without a hint of honne (genuine inner sentiment and emotional truth).
2011
He is galled by the government's plan to start the Olympic torch relay in Fukushima. It will bring nothing to the people who are still suffering, he points out, and will do next to nothing to revive the local economy or raise real awareness of the ongoing struggles, psychological and otherwise, in the wake of nearly 19,000 dead or missing.
In October of last year, the Japanese government announced that it plans to dump water from the storage tanks into the sea off the coast of Fukushima after 2022. As of September last year, the stored water totaled 1.23 million tons, with an additional 180 tons of water contaminated every day. The water has been filtered and the government claims it is no longer contaminated.
2019
But Sasaki says that the plan is careless and insensitive. Next year, when the evening news reports that Fukushima's water containment tanks have been emptied into the sea, consumers across Japan will reject any claims to the safety of the region's products, science be damned. Every effort to win public trust will be washed away with the water.
In 2016, through our meetings with survivors in regions surrounding the nuclear plant, our drives around vacant coastal back roads and slow strolls through abandoned schools and dilapidated gymnasiums, shops, restaurants and cemeteries, I felt a kinship with Sasaki, a sense of why he felt this ongoing story was so urgent.
For me, too, the mission feels personal. My Japanese grandparents are both from northern Japan, where they raised my mother and uncle, and where I attended kindergarten. After 3/11, my mother, who now lives in the U.S., asked me what happened to Rikuzentakata, a coastal city devastated by the wave. "That was where I first saw the ocean," she told me, recalling a childhood visit with her father. "It was at night at the inn dad had reserved. The moon showed the sea to me."
Sasaki's vision of Fukushima is of a land in limbo. His photographs show life frozen in place, bodies broken, habits numbly reinhabited, technology harnessed for useless display. His pictures are photo-ops of missed opportunity. "Life goes on," we like to say, and it does, but Sasaki's photos of Fukushima over the past 10 years speak a more essential imperative: You must change your life.
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