A voice from exile – Life after Fukushima

Futaba, host of the Fukushima prefecture TEPCO Daiichi nuclear power plant, was evacuated in March, 2011. It has since remained empty. Only recently reopened to the public, Futaba now resembles that of a forgotten ghost town, waiting quietly for life to resume. For Matsueda Atsushi, a once proud Futaba resident, a return home is ridden with doubt and unease.

Matsueda Atsushi just turned 32 years when the earthquake hit on March 11^th. Born and raised in Futaba, Fukushima, Matsueda attended high-school in Tokyo and university in Korea where he met his wife. Eight months before the earthquake, they moved to Futaba with their two daughters Lily and Alice and purchased a home. At the time, Lily was four and Alice was one. Matsueda owned his own business, which supplied and distributed gloves and socks to the workers of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Daiichi (No. 1) and Daini (No. 2) nuclear power plants.

At 2:46pm on March 11^th, Matsueda had just left the Daini plant. After pausing on the side of the road for the ground to stop shaking, a single thought was on his mind: Is my family safe? He doesn’t remember thinking about the possibility of a tsunami, and he certainly doesn’t remember feeling concerned about the condition of the nuclear power plants. In that moment, he was focused solely on the most immediate task in front of him—home. As a Futaba local, Matsueda knew the roads well, but what normally takes him 20 minutes took instead 4 hours.

Back in Futaba, his eldest daughter Lily was at a friend’s house across town. His wife, who was at home and could not drive, panicked, not knowing how to get to her daughter and not knowing if she was safe. Fortunately, the neighborhood grandmother picked her up and together they drove to retrieve four-year-old Lily. Around 7pm that evening, the entire family was reunited. Unable to enter their home, which had nearly crumbled from the shaking, they spent the night in the car. To his knowledge, on the night of the 11^th, everyone from Futaba remained in Futaba.

Early the next morning, the self-defense forces, dressed in white suits and gas masks, called for the evacuation of the town. Residents were told at first to move north to Namie, a mere 5-km away. When asked in the interview what he took with him, Matsueda responded, “nothing.” He had no measure of the gravity of the situation and no sense of the potential permanence. He assumed, in fact, that the family would return home shortly. They stayed the next night in the Namie middle school gymnasium only to be pushed further out to Kawamata following the government’s establishment of a 20-km evacuation radius. In Kawamata the family stayed for three or four nights. “We all stank,” Matsueda remarks repulsed—no one had bathed for a week. Gradually, people dispersed to stay with friends or relatives outside of Fukushima prefecture. Matsueda began to notice fewer and fewer remaining families around him. He remembers the TEPCO employees in particular were quick to flee. Twice more the family moved. Once to Saitama to stay with an uncle, and then again to Shizuoka, where Matsueda had a friend who ran a yakiniku, Korean barbeque, restaurant and offered him work. The hours were long and taxing and he was alone. His wife and two children left for three months to Korea, to try to regain some semblance of stability.

Finally, an opportunity came to move to Tokyo. Matsueda found a government advertisement online that invited Tohoku evacuees to work and live in Tokyo. Temporary housing was provided for a handful of applicants lucky enough to receive a bid. Matsueda was just lucky enough.

In March of 2020, a small section of Futaba reopened to the public, but only for visits—no one is permitted to live there. Matsueda still lives in Tokyo with his family, though no longer in temporary housing. He does not think much about the past or worry about the future. The priority is getting his kids through school. Connections with friends from Futaba are thin. He doesn’t stay much in contact anymore. Everyone has similar stories to the Matsueda family. Everyone has shifted around. Nowadays, Matsueda explains, the cordial greeting with friends or acquaintances from Futaba is not “how are you, I haven’t seen you in a while” but rather “where do you live now?”