A month ago, Chiho Kaneko spoke about her recent visit to Fukushima. Through her stories and photos it was easy to connect with the lives of the people she met.
Particularly moving was the story of a woman who had left a teaching job to start a sustainable community in a town 30 miles from the reactor. Her home, pictured here, could have been mine. She looked out her windows, surrounded by nature … but after March 11, 2011 she could not hang her clothes outside. She could no longer grow her own food. She could not even burn wood in her wood stove, for fear of releasing radiation.
It will soon be two years since the tragedy in Fukushima began on to unleash radiation on Japan (and the world). We must not forget the people of Fukushima. Their lives could be our lives. Vermont Yankee is the same make, model and just one year difference in age to the Fukushima reactors. What would it be like to leave your home, your community, and your land behind – forever?
A Fukushima home in the snow… could this be Windham County or the Pioneer Valley?
The SAGE Alliance is organizing two events to honor the people ofFukushima, and to try and get through the media blackout about what is happening in Japan.
VIGIL: SAGE Alliance will host a solemn vigil at the gates of Vermont Yankee on Sunday, March 10 at 11 am.
VOICES OF FUKUSHIMA: Towns around Vermont Yankee are “adopting” a Fukushima evacuation town for the day. Affinity groups are organizing events in the towns for either Saturday, Sunday, or Monday March 9, 10 or 11. SAGE will provide flyers about Fukushima, and coordinate press. Some groups will simply stand on a busy street corner with banners and hand out the SAGE flyers. Others plan to create refugee camps on their town green, wear face masks, and create posters with photos of their own town, and their adopted town in Fukushima.
Please take a look at the map, and consider adopting a town like Tomioka, Hirono, or Minamisoma and organize an event for your town. The map shows distances from Fukushima towns to their reactors and a list of our towns their distances to Vermont Yankee. You can click on the map and enlarge it, or Go here for a full size map.
Click here for a list of ideas of things your town could do, information about life as a nuclear refugee, and links to articles and photos of the towns. Let us know what you are doing, when and where, so we can create some press coverage of the two days — email safeandgreencampaign@gmail.com .
For example, Brattleboro will adopt Namie, a town of 22,000 people, for the day. Namie 5 miles north of the Fukushima reactors, similar to Brattleboro’s distance from Yankee. We will walk through our local farmers market silently, wearing face masks, carrying radiation detectors, with Nuclear Refugee signs on our backs. We are making posters with quotes from articles and with photographs of Namie we found on the internet. We will hand out flyers SAGE Alliance is giving us with facts and stories. We hope will bring home the reality of life as nuclear refugees in 2011 and 2013.
“After the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, winds blew radioactive contamination directly towards Namie for three days, exposing its citizens to high levels of radiation. No one was warned.” [Greenpeace]. “… Mayor Baba had to organize the evacuation himself, and no one warned him or his citizens that their evacuation route would prove identical to the direction the radioactive cloud would take as it spread. The citizens of Namie fled — and the radiation followed. For four days in March, they found themselves precisely at the spot where the most radioactive fallout landed. Namie’s residents now live scattered across 44 of Japan’s 47 prefectures. ” [Speigel]. Families from Namie have relocated four to seven times since March 2011.
Read more about Namie, from ‘Cesium Tours:’ Fukushima images one year later
------- Voices of Fukushima
When:
Mar 9 2013 - 9:00am to Mar 10 2013 - 9:00pm
It will soon be two years since the tragedy in Fukushima began on March 11, 2010. We must not forget the people of Fukushima. Their lives could be our lives. What would it be like to leave your home, your community, and your land behind - forever? Fukushima in the snow could be of Windham County or the Pioneer Valley.
The SAGE Alliance is organizing two events to honor the people of Fukushima, and to try and get through the media black out about what is happening in Japan.
VIGIL: A solemn vigil will take place at the gates of Vermont Yankee on Sunday, March 10. Details will come soon.
VOICES OF FUKUSHIMA: Towns around Vermont Yankee are "adopting" a Fukushima evacuation town for the day. Affinity groups are organizing events in the towns for either Saturday or Sunday, March 10 or 11. SAGE will provide flyers about Fukushima, and coordinate press. Some groups will simply stand on a busy street corner with banners and hand out the SAGE flyers. Others plan to create refugee camps on their town green, wear face masks, and create posters with photos of their own town, and their adopted town in Fukushima.
Please think about organizing an event for your town. Here is a map of Fukushima, with distances of Japanese towns from the reactors and a list with distances of our towns from Vermont Yankee, and a list of ideas for events and information about life as a nuclear refugee.
For example, Brattleboro will adopt Namie, a town of 22,000 people, for the day. Namie 5 miles north of the Fukushima reactors, similar to Brattleboro's distance from Yankee. We have found articles and photographs on the internet about Namie and will create an event in downtown Brattleboro.
Voices of Fukushima | SAGE Alliance
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