Kneeling among brown weeds and scattered debris, Miho Suzuki, 24, placed a bouquet of flowers on the remains of the home she shared with her parents and brother in the Ukedo district of Namie.
Then she began searching.
Suzuki's father, Fumio, and mother, Toshiyo, then aged 63 and 60 respectively, have been missing since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the port town.
"I want to find their remains and raise a tomb in Namie for them," Suzuki said.
April 1 was her first chance to do so. That day, the government lifted the entry restrictions it had imposed due to high radiation levels from the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, just a few kilometers away.
"I have no clues, but I cannot help but search for them," Suzuki said, looking under a collapsed levee, between pieces of debris and anywhere else she could reach.
At the time of the disaster, Suzuki was working in a clothing store in Minami-Soma, a neighboring city to the north of Namie, in the same prefecture.
She tried to drive home but was stopped at an intersection near her house by local fire brigade members. "Ukedo has vanished," they said. Her house was located only 100 meters from the port.
The next morning, with an explosion occurring at the nuclear plant that she used to see every day, Suzuki was evacuated to a mountainous district in Namie. She was given no time to look for her family.
She started her lone life as an evacuee there without seeing her house even once following the earthquake and tsunami.
In mid-April 2011, her brother Kiyotaka, then aged 24, was found dead on a road about 300 meters from their home. His car was parked in the yard.
Suzuki thinks her parents were both at home with Kiyotaka because her mother and father did not have driver's licenses.
"It is a blessed relief that my family stayed together in their last moments," she said.
For now, time seems to have stood still in Ukedo, with washed-up fishing boats and the bare steel frames of buildings still dotting the landscape. Exhaust stacks of the crippled power plant loom in the distance.
"Everything remains the same as the day the tsunami hit," Suzuki said. "Nothing has changed."
But as evacuation zones are reviewed and a path to residents returning to Fukushima becoming clear, debris removal work is beginning in earnest.
Suzuki has mixed feelings, swaying between delight that her hometown is recovering from the disaster and her own hope of finding her parents' remains, even if they are only small pieces.
"I feel as if (the clearance work) will remove even the traces and bones of my parents," she said.
Suzuki said she will continue her search. But she added that even if radiation levels in Namie fall enough to live there safely, she will not return, because her family is not there.
Tuesday 2 April 2013
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/quake_tsunami/AJ201304020238
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