By Tim Kelly and Kim Kyung Hoon
FUKUSHIMA, Japan (Reuters) – Sakae Kato stayed behind a decade ago to rescue cats rescued by neighbors who fled the radiation clouds of the nearby Fukushima nuclear power plant. He will not leave.
“I want to make sure I’m here to take care of the last one,” he said from his home in the infected quarantine zone. “After that, I want to die, whether it’s a day or an hour later.”
So far, he has buried 23 cats in his garden, the most recent graves being disturbed by wild pigs roaming the populous community. He looks after 41 others in his house and another empty building on his property.
Kato feeds feral cats in a storage cupboard he heats with a paraffin stove. He also rescued a dog, Pochi. With no running water, he has to fill bottles from a nearby mountain source and drive to public restrooms.
The 57-year-old, a small owner of small construction businesses in his early life, says his decision to stay while 160,000 other people evacuated the area was partly fueled by the shock of finding dead pets in abandoned homes he helped break down.
The cats also gave him the reason to stay on land owned by his family for three generations.
“I do not want to leave, I like to live in these mountains,” he said in front of his house, which he may visit but technically may not sleep.
The two-storey wooden structure is in poor condition.
Rotten floorboards sag. It was peppered with holes where wall panels and roof tiles that kept the rain out were removed last month by a powerful earthquake, and it sparked frightening memories of the devastating earthquake on March 11, 2011 that led to a tsunami and a nuclear fusion.
“It could take another two or three years. The walls have started to lean,” Kato said.
Purification in lands near his home indicates that residents will soon be allowed to return.
He estimates that he spends $ 7,000 a month on his animals, which are part of buying dog food for wild pigs that gather near his home at sunset. Farmers regard them as plagues, and also blame them for destroying empty houses.
On February 25, Kato was arrested for freeing wild pigs raised by the Japanese government in November. When this article was published, he was still being held for questioning.
Yumiko Konishi, a Tokyo veterinarian who helps Kato, said local volunteers take care of the cats on his property, but at least one has died since he was detained.
FEAR LINGERS
About 30 km southeast, still in the restricted area, Hisae Unuma is also investigating the condition of her home, which withstood the earthquake a decade ago but is now close to collapsing after years of wind, rain and snow have been crushed. .
“I’m surprised it’s still standing,” the 67-year-old farmer said a week after the quake that damaged Kato’s home.
“I could see my cattle from there in the field,” she pointed to the living room, a view now blocked by a clutter of bamboo.
Unuma fled when the cooling system of the Tokyo Electric Power Co nuclear power plant, 2.5 km away, failed and its reactors began to melt.
The government, which has adopted Fukushima as a symbol of national revival amid preparations for the Tokyo Olympics, is encouraging residents to return to disinfected land.
However, long-standing fears about the nuclear power plant, jobs and poor infrastructure keep many away.
Unuma, now a vegetable farmer in Saitama Prefecture near Tokyo, where her husband died three years ago, will not return even if the government scrapes the radioactive soil from her fields.
The radiation levels around her home are about 20 times the background level in Tokyo, according to a dosimeter reading conducted by Reuters.
Only the removal of Fukushima’s radioactive nuclei will make her feel safe, a task that will take decades to complete.
“Note the threat of earthquakes, those reactors could blow if someone dropped a tool in the wrong place,” she said.
Before Unuma makes the four-hour drive back to her new home, Unuma visits the Ranch of Hope, a cattle ranch owned by Masami Yoshizawa, who is ordering the extinction of his irradiated cattle, in protest against the government and Tokyo Electric Power challenged.
Among the 233 bulls, there is still the last surviving bull of the 50 herd that Unuma used, and one of her last living links with the life she had before the disaster.
Her bull ignores her when she tries to lure him, so Yoshizawa gives her a handful of cabbage to try to tempt him.
“The thing about cattle is that they actually only think about food,” Yoshizawa said.
(Reporting by Tim Kelly and Kim Kyong Hoon; Additional Reporting by Akira Tomoshige; Editing by Pravin Char and Lincoln Feast.)