I would love to begin with the definition of terms.
Me : Emotionally neutral. not meant to criticize anyone but Tepco and Japanese government.
Japanese : People living in Japan regardless of the DNA type.
Survivors are pressured. Japanese style of the society is starting to kill themselves.
Imprisoned wife(husband) and children.
In the family, where the husband works at a company and the wife stays at home to look after their children, more and more wives and children feel like they are imprisoned.
In those typical style of the family, husband has the control over the wallet mostly. However, because they spend most of day time at company, they tend to have group mind. Especially when they work for typical Japanese company, they are not allowed to put higher priority on their health, private life, or even family. Even when the company is not making profit at all, those Japanese workers are expected to devote everything to the work. After 311, a lot of the company workers were forced to be exposed by commuting and working outside. In that culture, “giving a trouble to others” is thought to be the worst taboo. Even if they have 39℃ of fever or have their child sick, giving a trouble to the company, such as calling in sick or commuting after sending their child to a hospital is not happily accepted. Not to mention, radiation is not exception. Still radiation is considered to be an “imaginary” problem. Talking about radiation is thought to be like talking about UFO.
On the other hand, house wives have more time. Because internet infrastructure is well maintained in Japan, they can access to the variety of information.
Since 311, the only source where we can get correct information has been Social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook or Mixi. Things changed on 3/11/2011. Right after the disaster, NHK, TBS, and other TV channels broadcast their news programs on the internet such as Ustream. Usually NHK requires you to pay the monthly charge. It was their charity service to spread the news for people who don’t make a contract with NHK. On those websites such as Ustream, you can talk to other viewers by using the service of Twitter. Viewers therefore exchanged live information beside the non-stop disaster reports of mass media. Meltdown, explosion of the depleted uranium factory in Chiba, those information was spread on Twitter several months before mass media reported.
House wives who got to learn how to collect information on the internet accumulated knowledge, and understood that they have to evacuate to save their children. Now those Japanese house wives are the people who are the most familiar to physics in the world.
After the historical concealment of Japanese government, they no longer trust the public announcement.
Government measures radiation contained in food but the data is not trustworthy.
Government measures radiation but it’s only cesium, beta nuclides such as Strontium or Tritium, and alpha nuclides such as Plutonium or Uranium are ignored.
The safety limit of food is set to protect food producers, not consumers.
From the historical issues of public pollution, they are aware that Japanese government will not compensate for the victims.
Children are forced to eat school lunch, even milk or mushroom, and the radiation measurement is full of flaws.
However, when a wife offers her husband to evacuate, husband goes hysterical. They turn down the wife’s offer for financial reasons, such aswork, house mortgage, educations cost etc. Then wife offers him to evacuate only with the children. Husbands yet refuse for financial reasons again, such as living apart costs too much. Not to mention, if they have cancer and get hospitalized, it would cost more than living apart. The fact is, this is not the true reason for the man to refuse evacuation.
As wives try to persuade their husbands more, they get to a conclusion. The husband doesn’t want to be apart from his wife. It is easy to judge this is not affection. If they love their wives, they must evacuate soon as possible. It is dependence. Those husbands depend on their wives like a son depends on his mother. This is similar to what they call mother complex.
Even if the wife manages to evacuate with her children, the family roles are swop. Wife plays the role of man. Husband plays the role of (bad) woman, in other word, possessed by his own internal female personality. I often hear that a husband in Tokyo calls her, no his wife in Okiwana to ask for divorce. The wife will suffer from poverty and the child will be sent back to the contaminated zone. In the current legal situation of Japan, the evacuated mother won’t be given the right to take over her child. She is more likely to be considered to be mentally unstable. This is how a husband pressures his wife financially. After repeating this a couple of times, sometimes the husband finds another woman for the replacement of his wife and his mother.
When the husband is a “house husband” and the wife works at a company, it happens oppositely.
Imprisoned young generation
It’s not only husband to be dependent. Parental generation (60s~) is also dependent for their own children generation (4os~).
Parental generation attacks their own children generation for evacuation.
Old people, especially above 60s have been trained to accept the propaganda without questioning. They are not familiar to the internet either, so they are isolated in terms of information. Mostly their source is only two, NHK, and Yomiuri newspaper. (Sometimes it’s Asahi or Sankei etc..They are very similar.) They believe the Japanese situation is safe, Fukushima is over.
They can not understand why their children (40s, 30s, 20s) evacuate. Though they could evacuate too, because they think much of the concept of “home land”, they find their own children “renegades”. They are even hurt because of their children leaving them behind, they pressure on them. They try to attack the renegades verbally, such as by calling paranoid or selfish. If it’s a wife leaving her husband in Tokyo, like in the case above, they call her un-loyal wife etc. Because they don’t understand the radiation risk for the children, they even call mothers child abuser when she evacuated with her child.
Most of the evacuated people don’t have confidence in what they do. They are full of doubt toward themselves. It is not strange because the world is full of propaganda. They decided to leave only based on their intuition and information on the internet. For some people, internet still looks like a place full of lies and fraud. They can’t be 100% sure even for what they have learnt from the internet. Those harsh words of their parents therefore hurt the children generation to make their evacuating life even harder adding to the financial issues.
Iori Mochizuki