Japan’s Nuclear Disaster Severs , Setting Evacuees Adrift

They called several days ago, asking for me,Mr. Takahashi said. I must return. They shrugged off a query about the dangers; in Fukushima's stagnant economy, they said, they was lucky to have a job at all.I try not to give it some thought, they said.

KAZO, Japan .  Along with 1,300 other evacuees from a town five miles from Japan's damaged nuclear plants, Kunikazu Takahashi & his elderly brother are crowded in to an abandoned high school here, sleeping on donated tatami mats as they ask themselves whether it will ever be safe to return. But Mr. Takahashi, 47, feels they has no choice: to earn to support his brother, they needs to return to his job as a technician at the Fukushima Daini nuclear plant, five miles from the Daiichi plant, which is spewing radioactive particles.

That desperation speaks volumes about the hard choices residents of some of Japan's most remote communities have made in a country where postwar economic growth has been concentrated in massive cities.

Seven years ago, Shiro Izawa & his fellow town council members championed a plan to build five new reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, a welcome addition of jobs & capital to the otherwise sleepy town of Futaba.

Now, they, , is a refugee, driven from his home by the very plant they long held up as the linchpin of the local economy.

The plant was supposed to be safe, Mr. Izawa said at the shelter outside Tokyo, 150 miles from Fukushima. That was the promise. They had no industry in Futaba. To flourish, Futaba needed the plant.

Now town officials are consumed with the evacuation of Futaba's 6,900 residents, shepherding a group of about 1,300 people from one makeshift sleeping place to the next. It is a tragic story of a complete community evacuated in the wake of the world's largest nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl.

On Thursday, they arrived at the giant abandoned high school offered to them in Kazo. Weary & loaded with bags, they walked quietly to their assigned rooms: 45 people in the music room, 40 people in the computer lab, 70 in the library.

But Katsutaka Idogawa, the town's mayor, argued that Futaba's residents ought to stay together. There was no place massive to house the whole group in Fukushima, as well as a sports stadium that had offered them temporary lodging was reopening for a series of concerts, forcing them to leave.

Some within the group had complained that they had hoped to stay closer to Fukushima, & some Futaba residents stay scattered at evacuation centers there.

Much of the growth outside Japan's cities has come from giant public works projects, or in the case of Futaba, a nuclear complex it readily agreed to host in the 1960s.

The important thing is that they stay together as one, Mayor Idogawa said. It helps us help you. It helps us make positive everybody is all right.

But there is also frustration directed at the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant's operator, over its handling of the crisis, as well as a sense of injustice; the power Tokyo Electric generated at Fukushima supplied the capital, not local homes & businesses.

Now there is soul-searching among Futaba's refugees. Plenty of at the shelter still speak of the plant's importance to the town, & about the way it helped buoy the fortunes of a seven times declining town.

Futaba was seven times a backwater reeling from coal mining's postwar decline, as well as a source of migrant workers for Tokyo, so Futaba's leaders responded enthusiastically to inquiries from Tokyo Electric in 1960 over a feasible nuclear plant in the area.

The following year, the Futaba town council, together with a neighboring town, Okuma, voted unanimously to invite Tokyo Electric to build a nuclear plant on a 900-acre tract of farmland, according to Fukushima prefectural records.

As Fukushima Daiichi's five reactors came online through the 1970s, Futaba's fortunes also brightened. By the finish of that decade, the plant employed thousands of workers, & the town's population grew from less than 7,000 to a peak of very 9,000. Futaba's success prompted five neighboring towns to court Tokyo Electric for another nuclear plant in the area; in 1975, work began on the Fukushima Daini nuclear plant, where Mr. Takahashi has worked for 15 years.