When nuclear reactors damaged by Japan’s earthquake and tsunami last month sent radiation levels surging near his home 16 miles away, Nobuaki Fujioka and his wife took a seven-hour bus ride to an evacuation center. After two weeks of sleeping on a gymnasium floor next to 236 others, he still has no idea when or if he can return.
“Going home is all I think about,” Fujioka, 65, said, resting on a futon in Nagaoka city’s Nanbu Gymnasium, in neighbouring Niigata prefecture. “We are left completely in the dark about the future.” Fujioka, who is from Minamisoma city, is one of about 9,000 evacuees from Fukushima prefecture living in 84 shelters in Niigata and part of the 159,828 who remain homeless across Japan following the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami on March 11. While Prime Minister Naoto Kan has promised to submit a spending package this month to parliament to pay for reconstruction, few details on the ground are deepening a sense of uncertainty and hampering local planning efforts.
“More information is needed for decision-making,” Haruo Kawakami, head of Nagaoka’s risk and disaster management division, said in an interview. Without more guidance from Fukushima or the central government, the city can’t go ahead with long-term plans such as building temporary housing, he said, prolonging the time families live on floors and rely on volunteer assistance. Almost 55,000 homes were destroyed or damaged beyond repair by the disaster, according to the National Police Agency, and 27,688 are dead or missing as of 10 a.m. today. So far the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation has requested the construction of 30,000 temporary homes by the end of May.
Under existing law, victims whose homes are destroyed by natural disasters are entitled to one million yen ($11,886) for damages and another two million yen for rebuilding. Half the payments are issued by the central government with the rest coming from the prefectures.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said today Tokyo Electric Power Co, which owns the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant, is considering providing compensation for those forced from their homes.