The truth, however, is that Japan does need them, at least until a substitute is found to replace the 30 per cent of the country’s power supply produced by nuclear plants. The facilities are also knit into the economic fabric of the communities they’re in, accounting directly or indirectly for about 65 per cent of the local government’s revenues in Kariwa and 20 per cent of those in the nearby city of Kashiwazaki, which has a population of 92,000.
The plant also employs 7,600 people, with about half of those workers hired from the surrounding communities. “The truth is we need [the nuclear plant.] We can’t live without it,” said Akio Nakagawa, a 69-year-old taxi driver in the regional capital of Niigata
In an effort to pacify its critics, TEPCO held a simulated earthquake drill in January at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, the first time it had done so at any of its plants. But while TEPCO said the plant passed the test, which was based on a 7.0 tremor, it did little to mollify local residents.
“The information comes only from TEPCO. They never allowed a third party to conduct any tests, so we don’t know what to believe. … We feel that the reason they didn’t test for a 7.5 or 8.0 magnitude quake is because the plant couldn’t stand it,” said Chie Takakiwo, a 65-year-old retired high-school teacher. She spent her Saturday afternoon attending an information session held by an anti-nuclear activist who visited the Fukushima region last week, taking photographs of the evacuated villages, as well as radiation measurements with a Geiger counter
Though activists hope that the Fukushima disaster will force Japan to move away from its reliance on nuclear power, some in Kariwa say that won’t happen quickly enough for them to feel safe. Lung-cancer rates among women are 40 per cent higher in the village than the national average. The stomach-cancer rate among men is 83 per cent higher.
“I want to sell my home and move somewhere else. Japan is an earthquake-prone country, so a quake could happen at any time and cause a nuclear disaster,” said Fumiko Toyama, a 62-year-old whose home was flattened in the 2007 earthquake. She rebuilt in the same spot, about seven kilometres from Kashiwazaki-Karima, but only because her elderly mother refused to live anywhere else.
Though she hasn’t been able to convince her mother yet, Ms. Toyama says she’s contemplating a move inland to the mountainous Nagano area, which she believes is the point in Japan farthest from the fault lines, tsunamis and nuclear plants that haunt her imagination.
“We’ve been trying to tell TEPCO that [something like the Fukushima disaster] was going to happen, but they never listened to us,” said Yukio Kondo, a 57-year-old Kariwa resident who helped found a women’s group opposed to the nuclear plant. “We strongly believe that what’s happening in Fukushima could happen here.”
