Land Of The Rising Core Temperature: Two Years Later

It's hard to believe today marks the second anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, but two years after the earthquake and tsunami flooded the plant, refugees are still coping with depression, anxiety, and pretty much full-blown PTSD.  Kenichi Togawa and his family are all too typical, as NPR's Geoff Brumfiel discovers.

At first they lived in a gymnasium in Kawamata town, about 30 miles away. For months, they slept in an open room with many other families and shared shower facilities and eating areas. People cut in line to get food, and others got angry when the kids played too loudly. "We were just like dogs and cats without chains," says Yuka, Kenichi's wife.

That was tough, but their current situation isn't much better. All five family members live in a tiny, temporary house that's roughly 300 square feet. Sixteen-year-old Rina says she often has arguments with her younger siblings, especially when they're settling down to sleep at night. "[The room's] just so small, we hit each other by mistake," she says.

Yuka is grateful to have a roof over her family's head, but she doesn't think of it as a home. "This is temporary," she says. "We leave our house in the morning and we come home and it's temporary. It's like floating in the air." She worries about her children. For now they are healthy, but she fears they may become sick from radiation exposure.

Kenichi is also having a tough time. He is more isolated now than he was before the accident. He spends hours each day playing video games. He has put on weight and drinks more than he used to. Other evacuees are doing worse. Many don't have jobs, and some have taken up drinking and gambling, according to Hiromi Yamamoto, an English teacher from Namie who fled to nearby Iwake City.

Public health officials believe that the stress and isolation the nuclear accident has caused may be more dangerous than the radiation itself. Big disasters are very difficult to recover from, says Ronald Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School who has studied the emotional fallout from Hurricane Katrina. Over the course of years, mental health problems can get worse and worse. "If it's something that goes on for a long, long time as Katrina did, that's where you get into trouble," he says. "The Japanese situation looks like it might be a similar sort of thing."

The Japanese nuclear Katrina.  Cheery, eh?  And yet two years later, the reality is only now sinking in that the refugees from Fukushima will never be allowed to go back home.  I'd be depressed too.  Japan's government has basically failed here, even worse than we did with Katrina.

So who knows at this point what the real legacy of Fukushima will be?

Also, be sure to read over the rest of my Fukushima posts from 2011.  The problems are still there.  They will be there for a very, very long time.