Farmer defying Japanese authorities

Defying Japan, farmer saves Fukushima's nuclear cows

Angered by what he considers the Japanese government's attempts to sweep away the inconvenient truths of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Masami Yoshizawa has moved back to his farm in the radioactive no-man's land surrounding the devastated plant

SMH,

13 January, 2014

He has no neighbours, but plenty of company: hundreds of abandoned cows he has vowed to protect from the government's kill order.

A large bulldozer - meant to keep out agricultural officials - stands at the entrance to the newly renamed Farm of Hope like a silent sentinel, guarding a driveway lined with bleached cattle bones and handwritten protest signs.

"Let the Cows of Hope Live!" says one. Another, written on a yellow-painted cow skull, declares: "Nuclear Rebellion!" Inside the now overcrowded farm, bellowing cows spill from the overflowing cattle sheds into the well-worn pasture, and even trample the yard of the warmly lit farmhouse.

"These cows are living testimony to the human folly here in Fukushima," said Mr Yoshizawa, 59, a gruff but eloquent man with a history of protest against his government. "The government wants to kill them because it wants to erase what happened here, and lure Japan back to its pre-accident nuclear status quo. I am not going to let them."

Yoshizawa is no sentimentalist - before the disaster, he raised cows for slaughter. But he says there is a difference between killing cows for food and killing them because, in their contaminated state, they are no longer useful. He believes the cows on his farm, abandoned by him and other fleeing farmers after the accident, are as much victims as the 83,000 humans forced to abandon their homes and live outside the evacuation zone for 2½ years.

He is worried about his health. A dosage meter near the farmhouse reads the equivalent of about 1.5 times the government-set level for evacuation. But he is more fearful that the country will forget about the triple meltdowns at the plant as Japan's economy shows signs of long-awaited recovery and Tokyo excitedly prepares for the 2020 Olympics - suggesting his protest is as least as much a political statement as a humanitarian one.

"If authorities say kill the cows," he said, "Then I resolved to do the opposite by saving them."

The cows at the Farm of Hope are what is left of a once-thriving beef industry in the towns around the plant.

Entire herds died of starvation in the weeks after the residents left. The cows that survived escaped their farms to forage for food among the empty homes and streets, where they became traffic hazards for trucks shuttling workers and supplies to and from the stricken plant. Proclaiming the animals "walking accident debris", officials from the Ministry of Agriculture ordered them to be rounded up and slaughtered, their bodies buried or burned along with other radioactive waste.

Outraged, Mr Yoshizawa began returning to his farm soon after to feed the remnants of the herd he had been tending. He eventually decided to return full time to turn the farm into a haven for all of the area's abandoned cows. Of the approximately 360 cows at his 32-hectare spread, more than half are ones that others left behind.

He describes his horror on visiting abandoned farms where he found rows of dead cows, their heads fallen into food troughs where they had waited to be fed. In one barn, a newborn calf hoarsely bawled next to its dead mother. He said his spur-of-the-moment decision to save the calf, which he named Ichigo or Strawberry, was his inspiration for trying to save the others left behind.

He still searches the evacuation zone for the often emaciated survivors, pulling them by their ears to get them to follow him home. He tries to dodge police roadblocks; it is technically illegal for anyone to live inside the evacuation zone. Nonetheless, he has been caught a half-dozen times and forced to sign prewritten statements of apology for entering the zone. He has done so, but only after crossing out the promises not to do it again.

Mr Yoshizawa is no stranger to challenging authority, having protested against nuclear power before. But he says he felt particularly bitter after the Fukushima accident, which he fears could permanently ruin the ranch that he inherited from his father.

It does not help that his town, Namie, felt especially deceived by its leaders. After he heard the explosions at the plant, whose smokestacks and cranes are visible from his kitchen, he and many other townspeople ended up fleeing into the radioactive plume because the government did not disclose crucial information about the accident.

"I needed to find a new philosophy to keep on living," said Mr Yoshizawa, who is unmarried and lives alone on the farm. "Then I realised, why is Japan being so meek in accepting what authorities are telling them? I decided to become the resistance."

On a recent cold morning, Mr Yoshizawa used a small bulldozer to carry bales of yellow rice stalks to feed the cows, about two to three times the number that he says his ranch can sustainably support. The cows, mostly a breed known as Japanese Black prized for its marbled wagyu-style beef, hungrily mooed as they jostled each other to get a mouthful.

He says one fear is running out of feed. With the oversized herd having already grazed his pastureland to stubble, he now relies on contributions of feed and money. Another worry is what living amid the contamination is doing to the cows - and to him.

A checkup soon after the accident showed high levels of radioactive caesium in his body, though he said the level has decreased over the past two years. He tries to keep his contamination as low as possible by using filtered water and buying food on trips out of the area.

The cows, however, are constantly ingesting radioactive materials that remain in the soil and grass; because most of the donated feed he receives is from the region, it too is contaminated.

Ten of the cows have developed small white spots on their heads and flanks that he thinks are a result of exposure to radiation. Experts said they had never seen such spots before, but they said other causes are also possible, including a fungal infection from the overcrowding.

Mr Yoshizawa has attracted a small following of supporters, but he has his critics, too, who say he is keeping the animals alive in less-than-humane conditions in order to make a political point.

"Looking at the over-concentration of animals, I personally don't think this is very humanitarian," said Manabu Fukumoto, a pathologist at the Institute of Development, Ageing and Cancer at Tohoku University who studied the white spots.

Mr Yoshizawa notes wryly that the cows are living much longer than they would have if they had been led off to slaughter.

For now, the local authorities have come up with a very Japanese solution to Mr Yoshizawa's defiance: turning a blind eye. Town officials in Namie deny knowledge of him or anyone else living inside the evacuation zone - despite the fact that they have restored electricity and telephone service to the farm.

Mr Yoshizawa does not make himself easy to ignore. He continues to appear in Japanese news media, maintains a blog with a live webcam of the farm and holds occasional one-man protests in front of the headquarters of the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co.

"Not all Japanese are passive," he said. "My cows and I will show that there is still a chance for change."