Features

by Junichiro Hayashi, Staff Writer


“I’m scared.” These were the spontaneous words spoken by Naomi Toyoda as he held his camera in his hands. In a flash, his radiation counter had leaped off the scale. It was March 13, 2011, two days after the Great East Japan Earthquake, and Mr. Toyoda was standing in front of a hospital in the town of Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture. The hospital is located only three kilometers from the Fukushima No. 1 (Daiichi) nuclear power plant, which had reportedly been hit by a crisis which included a core meltdown. He had no way of knowing the precise level of radiation around him, a circumstance he had never faced before in his career, despite experiences covering other nuclear disasters elsewhere in the world.

In a state of shock, Mr. Toyoda reminded himself: “If I don’t take photos now, I’ll have nothing I can convey as a photographer.” Since then, he has visited the disaster area 14 times. On numerous occasions he has spoken with people living in temporary housing and farmers anguishing over radioactive contamination, and recorded the scars of the disaster in his photographs.

The people he has photographed include farmers who were throwing away the vegetables they could not sell, a man who was crestfallen to hear that his fellow dairy farmer was going out of business, and an elderly couple who were seeing off cattle that had to be culled.

“My intention is to face the people’s feelings and lives directly, not out of sympathy,” Mr. Toyoda said. Over the past year he has taken thousands and thousands of photos.


Mr. Toyoda hopes to convey the danger of radiation, despite its invisible nature. “A photo is a slice of the setting,” he explained. “I ask myself: ‘Am I capturing the essence of the situation with this shot? Can I help people conceive what the actual conditions are like in the disaster area?’” He added, “I’m not totally confident I can do this, but I’d like to convey as much as I can.”

Just ten days before the earthquake struck, Mr. Toyoda was winding up a visit to Ukraine as part of his continuing coverage of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. He was in Shinjuku, Tokyo, in the middle of a meeting about a documentary program, when he felt the violent tremors of the earthquake. Concerned about the nuclear power plants in the disaster zone, the next day he and his colleagues headed for the Tohoku area by car with their camera equipment. On their way north, they heard over the radio that there had been an explosion at the Fukushima plant.

“It was so frustrating, and I felt helpless to do anything,” he recalled. In his work, he has covered the issue of depleted uranium shells used by U.S. forces during the Gulf War and the Iraq War. His interviews have included patients with thyroid cancer and families experiencing congenital birth defects, problems thought to be caused by radiation from the depleted uranium. “Intellectually, I knew the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and nuclear power, but I just never imagined that a serious nuclear accident would occur in my own country,” Mr. Toyoda said.

He cannot forget the words uttered by some of the disaster victims he has encountered. In April of last year, one woman left her hometown after saying, “It’s as if I were fighting an invisible war.” Then, in June, a dairy farmer committed suicide. Mr. Toyoda felt at a loss when he saw the message “If only there hadn’t been any nuclear power plants” scrawled on the wall of his manure shed.


“At times I can’t help feeling pessimistic about reconstructing the local communities which lie in the disaster area,” he said. “But when I interview people there, they’re bursting to tell their stories. It seems to me their anxiety and stress is just overwhelming.”

Despite the difficult conditions, some have maintained a positive outlook. Among them is a dairy farmer from Fukushima who is temporarily living in Yamagata Prefecture. The farmer, in his thirties, has vowed to start life over in a new location. Others are proposing the idea of building new villages which adopt the names of their old hometowns, following the example of the people from the village of Totsukawa, Nara Prefecture. After their village was swamped by a great flood in 1889, about 2,500 villagers moved to Hokkaido and built the town of Shintotsukawa (“New Totsukawa”). “Each person is facing up to the reality and trying to ponder the future, though their thoughts are still uncertain,” Mr. Toyoda said. “It’s a demonstration of people’s resilience.”

Mr. Toyoda has held exhibitions of his photos in Tochigi and Yamanashi prefectures, as well as in Tokyo. At the end of February, he spoke in Hiroshima, the talk entitled “One Year in Fukushima.” He has visited Hiroshima several times since covering a rally in 2003, in which 6,000 people stood together to form a “human message” protesting the Iraq War. On this occasion he spoke to an audience of more than 100, saying, “What should we do? The answers won’t come easily, but each one of us has a duty to reflect on the situation and take action, in line with our capacity.”

“I’m not sure what Fukushima will be like in the future, but I want to help support its reconstruction,” Mr. Toyoda said. “I’d like to continue taking photos that can be useful records of this time in 50 or 100 years.”

Profile

Naomi Toyoda
Born in Kawanehoncho, Shizuoka Prefecture, he graduated from Chuo University in Tokyo. He started his news gathering activities by covering Palestinian refugees in 1983. He has visited some 70 countries, mainly in the Middle East and Asia, covering such issues as regional conflicts and depleted uranium shells. He has also published a number of books, including Fukushima genpatsu shinsai no machi (“Fukushima: Site of the Earthquake and Nuclear Power Plant Disaster”).

(Originally published on March 6, 2012)