"We are going backward" - Minamisoma Mayor Sakurai

November 5, 2012

Mayor of disaster-hit Minamisoma urges national gov't to learn from tragedy

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20121105p2a00m0na008000c.html

Minamisoma Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai says Japan is moving in the wrong direction despite last year's twin natural disasters and nuclear crisis which he says provided the country with an excellent opportunity to change itself for the better.

"I seriously question whether politicians on the national level really understand the reality we are facing," he says, adding that the Fukushima tragedy could have been a golden opportunity and a turning point for Japan.

Nearly one year and eight months after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami triggered the disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant near his city, Sakurai and his staff are still working nonstop.

He paid a visit to Tokyo recently to prod the central government to speed up the radiation decontamination process. But he says his talks with officials of the Reconstruction Agency and the Environment Ministry on Oct. 31 made little headway due to the difficulty in securing temporary storage facilities for contaminated soil before finding long-term storage facilities.

Sakurai is as frustrated with the protracted decontamination work in his city as the way the government, mass media and business leaders are treating the Fukushima nuclear disaster like a thing of the past and are supporting the restart of nuclear reactors.

When Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda signaled his intention in June to go along with the restarts of the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at the Oi Nuclear Power Plant, the mayor was meeting with residents living in temporary housing and evacuation centers. "They asked me, 'Are we completely abandoned?'" he recalled.

Minamisoma Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai meets the media at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo on Nov. 1. (Mainichi)

Sakurai says he was also dismayed by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's remarks on Oct. 9 in favor of reviewing a nuclear zero option policy after he visited Minamisoma as the new president of the main opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and cheered up people in disaster-hit areas on Oct.3.

"We need to change the system that we have here in Japan in which Japanese politicians and Japanese mass media basically work together," the 56-year-old mayor told reporters at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan (FCCJ). "But the reality I feel is that we are moving in the completely opposite direction. We are not changing the system for the better. We are going backward. We are moving toward the way things were."

Sakurai posted a video critical of the Japanese government's response to the nuclear crisis on YouTube on March 24 last year, drawing attention from around the world. The U.S. weekly magazine Time picked him as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2011.

Minamisoma's population of 71,000 dropped to less than 10,000 in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear crisis. At present, about 45,500 people live in the city. The city lost 636 residents to the tsunami triggered by the magnitude 9.0 temblor and 350 others lost their lives during forced evacuations and under disaster-related circumstances.

Sakurai says his city wants to focus on a shift to industries to nurture renewable energy sources. Referring to anti-nuclear rallies every Friday near the prime minister's office, he says, "I feel very strongly that politicians must reflect in their policies the feelings of the Japanese people. The revival of Japan depends on the revival of Fukushima."

In the meantime, he says he will continue to jog nearly eight kilometers every morning before work "to maintain a kind of psychological balance." (By Shiro Yoneyama, Staff Writer)