In research of Japan’s Triple Disaster, I stumbled across this documentary filmed by VICE called, The Last Farmer in Fukushima’s Post-Nuclear Wasteland: VICE INTL (Japan). It was filmed in the town of Tomioka, located within a 20km radius of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Reactor, and is not a designated evacuated zone. The city, once home to 15,000 residents, now only is home to one man Naoto Matsumura, 53 years old.
In the film, Matsumura describes the ghostliness of the town – the dead streets, darkness, and silence. He says that his initial feelings of coming back to the town were indescribable, ‘Lonliness doesn’t quite capture it.’ It is intriguing to watch the life of a lonesome farmer who came back to a town where everyone else deserted. The film captures Matsumura feeding his animals, which include 50 cows, two ostriches, dogs, cats and more. He says that he did not mean to stay in Tomioka, especially after reactor 4 burst he knew it wasn’t safe, however when seeking shelter at his aunts place in the south, his family was rejected because of her concerns of radiation contamination. Shelters were also too packed and turned them away. So after months, this is why he decided to come back to the town, to care for his animals. He says, “I had no choice but to stay” and speaks about his regret of leaving the animals behind.
Another farmer documented, Hasegawa Kenji, shows his temporary housing unit and show his original village of Iiatate, located 45 km from the nuclear power plant. Kenji says that he never dreamed that the radiation could spread so far, and due to his mayor’s short sight, he convinced people that it was safe to stay and that evacuation holds greater risk than the radiation.
A professor of nuclear physics, Koide Hiroaki speaks down on Tepco and calls them ‘an embarrassment to us all’ due to their failure to take responsibility for damage control, calling the mess an ‘ownerless object’. Farmer Matsumura elaborates, and says that Tepco staff are all brainwashed, similar to a cult, believing that nuclear plants are safe and accident proof.
It is fascinating and upsetting to witness a lonesome farmer living in an abandoned town with his radioactive animals. One scene in the documentary shows the barn in which over a thousand cows died. The remaining bones were all in tact, many showing the attach ropes that the farmers who evacuated failed to release when leaving. Therefore, many of the animals died in the stalls of starvation. A commendable effort of Matsumura to keep the remaining animals alive shows his dedication to the life he created in the town of Tomioka before the disaster. He is opposed to killing off the cows in the zone because they are still happy and whole families who are desired to be killed by the government for no reason. The cows were already deemed unsafe to be slaughtered for consumption, therefore the government has no purpose to kill them. Matsumura’s outlook on the rest of his life is light-hearted and he often laughs throughout the documentary about his extremely high radiation levels and eating contaminated mushrooms. The doctors at University of Tokyo told him that he would get sick in around 30 or 40 years due to the high radiation in his body, but he laughs it off saying that he will be dead by then anyways. It is truly remarkable how his spirits are still so high in such a deserted and depressing town where the effects of devastation are still very visible. This one farmer’s dedication to his town, but mostly to his animals is truly incredible. From the video, aside from the obvious signs of abandonment, everything seems very ordinary and routine in Matsumura’s life.
More examples of farmers who chose to stay and care for their animals in evacuation zones can be found here.
Many of these men think of cows as family and refuse to abandon them, therefore they live in the exclusion zones, away from the activities of the bustling urban centres in Japan, where many evacuees have started new lives.