​​​​​​For all those who found themselves uprooted, cut off from the life they had known, powerless in the face of everyday problems, thinking about the future was just too much, for months, even years. But something stronger than resignation drove some to reclaim their ability to look to the future. 

A different future began to appear on the horizon, thanks to the experience gained over the recent years, mutual understanding, freedom to make choices, hopes, and dreams. A future with increased vigilance with respect to the potential risk presented by the damaged power plant. Some even plan to continue carrying their dosimeter in the coming years, just in case. At the end of 2015, despite tremendous efforts to decontaminate, remediate, and rebuild, the situation in many parts of the prefecture of Fukushima, such as Hamadori, was still far from back to normal, and would be for a long time to come. 

But things were changing, and for most participating in the meetings of the Fukushima Dialogue Initiative, regaining some amount of control over their lives was no longer just a dream. “We managed to get to a point where people taking action were able to express themselves and explain what they were doing,” explained a participant. “I have the impression that people in the​ prefecture of Fukushima, to a certain extent, have regained their self-confidence,” Professor Ohtsura Niwa added. This trend became more and more clear with each meeting, as confirmed by the participants. “Many here are starting to look to the future. But that doesn’t mean we can forget those who are still suffering too much to think about tomorrow,” countered another. “We have to develop new ideas, and new programs. With this insight, we can make something better than anywhere else in the world. I feel we've been given the chance to do this.” - Kuni Kanno, farmer in the village of Iitate

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CHILDREN, STILL A MAJOR CONCERN​​

They are the very essence of the future, the focus of concerns and the main reason for the ongoing efforts. Their education, which sometimes has a tendency to create divergences within the family, is a challenge for parents, who only want the best for their children. Education has become a real headache for those living in Fukushima, on contaminated land, or in exile, in a place where everything is foreign to them. 

Health, education, personal development… each aspect of the life of a child is an​ hesitation in parents’ minds, a doubt as to whether it was the right decision for their child. There, more than anywhere else, being able to speak with pediatric professionals and radiation protection experts proved crucial for parents seeking new points of reference to organize the everyday life of their children. 

With their individual and collective experience since March 2011, it was clear that the families of Fukushima were particularly conscious of their environmental legacy. “If I give up, my son will have no choice!” stated Shinya Endo at the end of the 9th meeting of the Fukushima Dialogue Initiative, meaning that if he stopped cultivating the rice paddies inherited from his ancestors, his son would never be able to decide whether to take over. For Mr. Endo, pursuing his business and the transfer of his land from generation to generation are a way of maintaining tradition. His declaration during the meeting bore witness to the importance he places on this. ​

COMMUNITY AND COOPERATION

In a country used to counting on the strength of its social ties, families and communities found themselves torn apart, only aggravating the feeling of powerlessness and abandonment. As time passed, however, the community gradually became the breeding ground of cooperation. Living conditions began to be restored through measurement of radioactivity, discussion of results, meetings with experts, acquisition of knowledge, decision-making, and provision of information and feedback on progress, projects, and initiatives. 

After the disaster, Fukushima’s residents increasingly worked together to improve their living conditions, with community support, sharing their experience with others. This of course required them to recognize differences in values and approaches - this being the very foundation of mutual understanding - and in people's temperaments, be they optimistic or pessimistic, outspoken or reserved, and to respect each person's right to make their own decisions. 

Maintaining community life when the community’s members have been scattered remained a challenge for many cities. Is it possible to think of a unified future in such a context? ​

​​The Fukushima Dialogue Initiative is a unique example of democracy in action, where a community is no longer a herd of passive followers, but a group of individuals capable of making decisions, for themselves by their own free will and for others based on respect and mutual trust.​​​

Boiling down four years of discussions and experience to a few lessons learned is not easy. In any case, the human adventure shared throughout the 12 meetings of the Fukushima Dialogue Initiative was a confirmation of some majors lessons learned from the work performed in the contaminated territories after the Chernobyl accident, in particular in Belarus and Norway. 

First and foremost among them was that it is essential for residents to be able to measure, by themselves and for themselves, the presence of radioactivity in their immediate environment​. Sharing the results of these measurements in a public setting - a space where residents could ​express their concerns and reactions, worries and hopes - gradually led to the establishment of local initiatives, allowing people to regain some control over their daily lives and freeing them to make decisions according to their own wants and desires. 

In the long run, this interaction, this cooperation in local initiatives and sharing of expertise by experts and the communities themselves, made it possible to implement radiation protection measures to improve residents’ living conditions and, ultimately, to restore their dignity and sense of wellbeing. 

Finally, these invaluable lessons must be preserved and disseminated both within the prefecture and beyond, to be called upon if a comparable situation occurs elsewhere in the world. ​

A GLOBAL IMPACT ON LIVES

The first lesson to be shared is that radioactivity is not just a matter of health effects from exposure. Its intrusion into daily lives has an impact on everyone on both a practical and psychological level, with the resulting sudden loss of control and each person left wondering what they can and can’t do safely. This underlying doubt when it comes to any activity - be it going out, coming home, opening the windows to air out the home, letting the children play outside, sending them to school - is a source of worry and creates a feeling of powerlessness.

Over time, this leads to tense relations among people who have lost their self-confidence and trust in each other, and particularly in authorities and experts.​ The feeling of living in a “soiled” environment, of being “tainted” by contamination can result in a loss of self-esteem. This was only aggravated by the growing feeling of exclusion that came with measures taken to improve the radiological situation (decontamination, traffic bans, restrictions on local food consumption, etc.), since these tend to create further ruptures in society. For those who decided - or were forced - to leave, the radioactivity felt like an invader who had chased them from their lands into an indefinite exile. The indescribable pain of being uprooted, and the ever-present dilemma: to return or not?

​​EVERYONE CAN CONTRIBUTE

If the radiological consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident literally paralyzed most residents, they also revealed strong character traits in many: a commitment to involvement, leadership, and dedication to the community. Their determined attitudes when confronted by a complex situation led to a united effort among residents, local authorities, experts, and advisers, to jointly identify paths forward. In certain areas, such as the city of Date, it was the local authorities who were the driving force (more: Date: leadership at work). In others, such as Suetsugi or Hippo (district of the city of Marumori, in the south of the prefecture of Miyagi), it was the residents who took the initiative (more: Suetsugi: when citizens take control of their own fate).

In both cases, however, broaching the subject of concrete problems of the residents required support from different types of experts. Many of them got directly involved as individuals, rather than as representatives of an institution. This unique situation played a key part in forging trusting relationships between residents and the experts who assisted them in long-term efforts, creating such close relationships with them that it was as if they belonged to the community.

​NO FRILLS! KEEP IT SIMPLE

Discussion between residents and experts on equal ground was crucial in helping Fukushima’s residents find new points of reference as they rebuilt their lives. The special feature of such dialogue was its emphasis on the residents, the creation of a resident-expert relationship entirely focused on the needs of Fukushima’s population; certain experts even willingly moved to Fukushima so they could better understand people’s concerns. They thus had an unrivaled vantage point from which to perceive people’s needs and expectations. 

The difficulty of speaking about risks and health effects from exposure to ionizing radiation is another lesson. What residents expected from experts was for them to demonstrate some humility, considering the uncertainty and limits of knowledge at the time, that they differentiate between science and opinion, and, above all, that they respect the values and choices of the people. Last, but not least, they wanted them to understand that protecting themselves against ionizing radiation was not the only problem they were facing. The goal of radiation protection was not to take control of people's lives, but to help them regain control over their lives.

EXPERTISE NEEDS TO BE SHARED

A key lesson of the Dialogue Initiative was that applying ready-made methods to resolve people’s real-life problems is of little help. To effectively address the issues faced by the residents in their everyday lives, it was necessary to implement a process allowing them to build expertise together. Above all, this meant identifying spaces where experts could come together with those struggling in tough situations, to listen to their questions, their concerns, their difficulties, and their expectations.

The shared expertise - or “co-expertise” - was also supported by joint assessments of people's circumstances and that of the community. This ensured the implementation of projects, with the assistance of professional experts and local authorities, to address problems identified as priorities for individuals as well as the community, critical analysis of results obtained, and communication of the experience gained.

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JOINT DEVELOPMENT OF A PRACTICAL CULTURE OF RADIATION PROTECTION

Through the sharing of expertise to address concrete problems, many of those who participated in the meetings of the Fukushima Dialogue Initiative gradually developed a practical approach to radiation protection. This approach was based on the availability of equipment allowing people to perform their own measurements and to become familiar with new vocabulary such as local dose rate, external and internal dose, food contamination, etc., all foreign concepts in everyday life until the day they had to learn them to interpret measurement results. 

Thanks to a practical culture of radiation protection, people can make their own decisions, to protect themselves and others (family, local community, etc.), discussing measurement results with assistance from experts. As they reclaimed their power to make decisions, many participants in the meetings of the Fukushima Dialogue Initiative started to make concrete plans again, much like their Belarusian predecessors, though with two large differences: first, direct access to measuring equipments to determine the radiological situations, and second, the ability to use social media to share information. 

Because of its practical nature, this culture of radiation protection provided for tangible improvements in living conditions in this contaminated area and allowed the residents to once again make plans for the future.