On March 11th 2011, a devastating earthquake followed by a maximum-level tsunami led to nuclear meltdown and radioactive leaks at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi atomic power plant. Nearly a year and five months after what became the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, things are still bleak inside the 20-kilometre exclusion zone established around the plant.
Photo-reporter Antonio Pagnotta made clandestine visits to the zone over a period of 11 months. What follows is an interview with Pagnotta and the first of his portfolios, which recounts the life of the last man still living in the exclusion zone.
It was not Pagnotta’s first such infiltration or brush with radioactive contamination. Back in 1997, after an accident at Japan’s Tokaimura nuclear power plant, he scaled a wire fence at the plant without the guards noticing, and got inside to take pictures. His bravery led to the public exposure of the malpractices of the plant’s operator Donen, and the subsequent closure of Tokaimura.
After the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe he visited the zone several times between April 2011 and March 2012, entering on foot at night "to be able to work without interruption" and photograph what he saw.
In daytime 2,000 workers go into the power station daily, and police patrol the area. "There are also people who come to look for things in their former houses. I photographed a refrigerator which the inhabitants had arranged to be moved from the zone even though it was contaminated," he said
Abandoned animals roam freely inside the zone. There are 2,000 cows there, as well as pigs, dogs and cats living wild – along with outsize spiders.
Pagnotta describes the scene as a "slow apocalypse", a landscape from which most life has fled. It is an apt term, as his photos recall so-called post-apocalyptic science fiction scenarios of the aftermath of cataclysms that have destroyed human civilization, like nuclear war, global epidemic or a meteorite colliding with Earth.
But Fukushima is not science fiction. Pagnotta’s pictures of a supermarket in Tomioka, the town where a second plant, Fukushima Daini, is based, would not be out of place in a film like Terminator. Nevertheless, they have never been published in Japan. "The media were not interested," Pagnotta says, “I think people prefer not to know."
Outside the exclusion zone there is a semblance of normality, even in areas where levels of radioactivity are far higher than normal, like Iitate, a village that was evacuated six weeks after the disaster.
Decontamination work is amateurish – contaminated soil is swept up by people using everyday tools and without protective clothing, and is buried in schoolyards and other public places.
"The Japanese government is in denial," Pagnotta comments. "It is limiting the economic damage and sacrificing its citizens’ health and safety. It is not seeking to monitor the real state of the population’s health. And it is building ignorance. I fear all that will lead to a vast health disaster. I see Japan as an enormous slaughter house."
The ostrich and Fukushima’s Dr Doolittle
Pagnotta met the last inhabitant in the exclusion zone, Naoto Matsumura, 54. He was a farmer in Tomioka, an abandoned town in Fukushima prefecture which counted nearly 16,000 inhabitants before the nuclear disaster.
After briefly fleeing the radioactive cloud, Matsumura returned to live in the zone – for reasons of honour, he said – and is still defying the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), a giant of Japan’s nuclear industry and operator of the Fukushima plant. His life now consists of tending the town’s graves and taking care of domestic animals that have been abandoned to their fate.
An ostrich, the sole survivor of an ostrich farm, comes to Matsumura’s house to be fed. By an ironic coincidence, Tepco had chosen an ostrich as its mascot. Both the company and the Japanese government have been accused of having their heads in the sand when they were warned of the potential dangers of earthquakes and tsunamis for Fukushima, years before the disaster.
For the first of Antonio Pagnotta's portflios of life in the Fukushima exclusion zone, click here: The sole resident of post-Fukushima ghost town.
- Antonio Pagnotta, 55, is based in Italy. He frequently visits Japan, where he has worked as a photographer for more than two decades, covering a wide variety of stories, including the Aum Shinrikyo sect’s nerve gas attack on the Tokyo underground, and is renowned for his coverage of issues of nuclear safety in the country. He has also produced a series of major feature reports in his native Italy, where his work has been showcased in several exhibitions, including a 17-year reportage of the reconstruction of Basilicata, a quake-destroyed village in the south of the country. A freelance contributor to the Cosmos photo agency in Paris, his portfolio page can be found here.
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English version: Sue Landau
(Editing by Graham Tearse)
