photo by Reuters
A friend of mine from college has recently written to me from Fukushima. He and his family have just come back from the evacuation centre and seen their devastated village.
He said he had expected the local authority to have started clearing the rubble, after 3 weeks. However, he describes what he encountered was “like an end scene from ‘The Planet of the Apes’”. He continued to say “it is so detached from reality. A place where I once knew as land has now become a lake, smelling of sea water. As far as eyes can see, all manmade objects are broken into a thousand pieces. The only thing one can hear is a sound of distant helicopters.”
The area has not yet been searched for bodies. Mr Koizumi writes “I cannot find any words, as I know that there must have been many people who survived the tsunami. The rescue just didn’t come to them.”
He is grateful that he and his family survived together. However the Koizumi family still have a very uncertain future with the possible contamination of water and food by the radiation. His main concern is for his children’s health. How he can protect his children from this invisible threat is the biggest question, Mr. Koizumi says “there is no answer.”
