Island Life

It has been one month now since Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) released their 6-9month cold shutdown plan for the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and not even the first stages of the plan have been put in motion. Perhaps the plan was only really published to the public for some peace of mind, but it seems since the start of this whole controversy TEPCO and the government have done nothing but feed the public false promises.

Kuni went up to the Fukushima area last week and was able to meet with some of the nuclear power plant workers along with local surfers and hear the real stories, the real truths. It was said then that the shutdown plans were totally unreachable and should never have been promised to an already wary public. According to the workers interviewed last week, areas outside the 30km exclusion zone have detected radiation levels higher than the evacuated zone of Chernobyl, and only now in various international news sources is this kind of information being made public. To the majority of the Japanese public, such honest truths remain hidden. The workers interviewed expressed their concerns for the health of women, children and each other, in both the short term and long term, within the 30km radius and throughout the rest of the Kanto area.

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End of the season in Vassiliki came early this year, regardless of the good weather tourists just did not come as much as they used to in previous years thanks to all the rioting and strikes Greeks enjoyed this year.

Lonely cat at Vassiliki bay

It is still quite warm, but the beach is already empty

Schools are already closed

There’s only so long a beach girl can survive Japanese mountain life. A year was the limit for me.

I was thrown into the middle of Japan when I first moved there for work 6 years ago. In the literal sense, the town next to me held a belly button festival every year as evidence to its central placement on Japan’s main island, Honshu. I pulled through thanks to rock river jumps, canyoning, hiking and snowboarding, but being the beach baby I am Japan’s waves were calling me.

12 months into my working holiday I set off from the mountains and toward the black sandy beaches of Ichinomiya, Chiba, to experience the Japanese surf scene. It didn’t take long to meet my new neighbors. My 1LDK (=as small as your bathroom) apartment was situated adjacent to a set of six beach-style cottages. The entire block was nicknamed mura by the locals, meaning ‘village’ in Japanese. Residents of mura included surfers who lived there full time, and surfers who came down on the weekends from Tokyo. We were all young, we all loved to surf. Every weekend was a party.

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