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Mother from Fukushima: It was very weird… plants with huge, huge flowers and gigantic stems — I brought deformed vegetables for radiation measurement, but officials didn’t test any and yelled 'Don’t you understand? We say it’s safe!' — 'All the beetles were disfigured and died'

Background

In January 2013, with my 4-year-old child, I evacuated from Fukushima to Niigata.
Where I grew up is about 60 km [~40 miles] from Fukushima Daiichi… it is now one of the most contaminated areas.
I still regret thinking why I didn’t move right then. I feel guilty thinking I wouldn’t have had my child exposed to radiation if I moved then.
After we moved, our health recovered tremendously… I try to behave cheerfully, but I feel totally hopeless when I think about our future.

Child’s Health Problems

My child started to become sick. When I took my child to a hospital, the diagnosis was a cold. But the coughs didn’t stop and, looking sluggish, my child seemed to be worse.
[My family] gave my child peaches, tomatoes, corn, bamboo shoots, and huge shiitake [they harvested]. They fed us dried persimmons, too.
At the kindergarten they encouraged children to go out to play and to my disbelief, they used local food for school lunch.
My child had cold symptoms all the time. He had frequent nose bleeding. He was always scratching his itchy body.
I found that something was wrong with my child’s eyesight. The doctor diagnosed it as ametropic amblyopi.

Personal Health Problems

On Christmas day, I was feeling dizzy and [at the hospital] I was told I had gastroenteritis.
I felt weak and couldn’t get up. I felt very sleepy when I worked. I had nausea. I found myself spaced out sitting in my car at a parking lot.
It felt as if a little electricity was running in my body all the time and I couldn’t figure out how to do simple tasks.
I went shopping and I couldn’t remember what I was doing, and stood in the store for hours… I couldn’t make decisions. I didn’t know what I was doing.
I took one month off from work, but my symptoms just got worse.

Community’s Health Problems

My friend who works at the water company told me that they detected cesium in beef stew in May, and all the children who drank milk threw up in September, and so on. They are told not to tell those stories.
I’m certain that the number of people who got sick rose. The number of funerals rose, too — totally healthy people suddenly died of heart attack and so on.

Plants and Wildlife

From the 15th to the 25th of March [2011], I evacuated to my relative’s house in Gunma prefecture. I remember the eerie feeling I had when I saw Mt. Akagi was yellow. Later I heard that cedar pollen grows big when exposed to radiation.
My family grows all the vegetables we eat at home and they love to feed them to my child. I saw disfigured dandelions around our fields. 50 to 60 plants grew at one spot and their stems were all put together into one gigantic wide stem, with huge, huge flowers. It was very weird. I had never seen anything like that. Tons of millet suddenly grew in the fields. It never happened before. Disfigured vegetables appeared.
I brought our disfigured vegetables to the municipal office for radiation testing. I was yelled at there, “Don’t you understand? We say it’s safe! Mothers must not act like that!” They never tested my vegetables.
A person who hatches beetle larvae every year said all the beetles were disfigured and died.

Four Winds 10 - News