He's there lest you forget Fukushima

Fukushima No effort has been made to repair the facade of the Matsuya pharmacy on Tomioka's main street, while the glass and plastic panels from the game centre still lie shattered on its forecourt one year after the earthquake.

A few miles south, other communities on the coast of Fukushima prefecture are making plans to rebuild. But Tomioka is just eight miles from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant — well within the 13-mile exclusion zone — and residents have long since fled.

Only Naoto Matsumura remains in Tomioka, without electricity and running water and braving the loneliness and the constant threat of exposure to elevated levels of radiation to feed a menagerie of animals. After a year, Matsumura, 52, appears to prefer the company of his animals to humans.

"The next day, I heard the explosion at the plant," says Matsumura recalling the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami.

Living with his mother and father and a couple of locals in the house, they heard more explosions. Finally, they decided to head south. "I knocked on the door of my aunt's house in Iwaki, but she wouldn't let any of us in because she said we were contaminated. "So we went to a nearby shelter, but they wouldn't let us stay there either, so we went home," he says.

In April, Matsumura's mother was taken ill and the rest of the family went to stay with relatives outside the original 18-mile recommended exclusion zone.

"We couldn't take the animals with us, so I stayed behind," he says. Initially, he was caring for about 60 pet dogs and 100 cats abandoned by their owners. Matsumura's ‘ark' now has some 60 cats and several dogs besides an ostrich, the sole survivor of a farm. The police that patrol the no-go zone called the ostrich Boss and it took Matsumura a whole afternoon to coax the bird the five miles to his house after he found her foraging for food.

Police advice

Matsumura drives his white pick-up across a desolate landscape, looking for other animals to help. The only sounds are birds and the wind in the telephone wires. Cattle have learnt where he leaves feed and are waiting for him. "The police tell me that I should leave, but that would mean there is no one to take care of these creatures," he said.

But Matsumura's bigger fear is that the town where his family has lived for five generations will wither away. The government has said it might take 40 years to clean the area of radiation.