By SHIGETAKA KODAMA/ Staff Photographer
March 12, 2023 at 08:00 JST
Minami Suzuki, left back, her daughter Michiru, left front, and Tamami Henmi eat “futomaki” sushi rolls together in Tomioka, Fukushima Prefecture, on Feb. 3. (Shigetaka Kodama)
Editor’s note: This is the third installment of a five-part series looking at the lives of people in Fukushima Prefecture with a particular focus on their meals 12 years after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. Through their meals, the series depicts how the nuclear power plant disaster totally changed people’s lives in the region.
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TOMIOKA, Fukushima Prefecture--Chicken Salisbury steak was on the menu for Minami Suzuki and her 6-year-old daughter Michiru on a recent evening here.
The mother and daughter have found a welcoming home in Tomioka, located about eight kilometers from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
Suzuki, 32, returned home with Michiru at 6 p.m. on Feb. 3 and immediately began preparing dinner.
While Suzuki was making miso soup with garland chrysanthemum, their neighbor Tamami Henmi, 34, entered the kitchen.
Henmi was carrying peanuts given by a local farmer, boiled in salt. She and Suzuki have known each other from several years ago when they met through reconstruction work from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent accident at the Fukushima plant.
“We live close enough so the soup does not get cold,” Suzuki said. “We naturally often eat together. So, it’s surprisingly rare to eat dinner alone with my daughter.”
In 2019, Suzuki divorced her husband and moved to the town. In Iwaki, where she had lived previously, it was difficult to raise Michiru, who has a developmental disability, she said.
Although she got to know many people at work, she could not build a close enough relationship to share her child-rearing problems with them.
It takes four to five hours to get Michiru to sleep at night. She sometimes has not been able to fall asleep until after midnight.
Suzuki was afraid that people would say, “Can’t you just tuck her in?” She thought it was her own fault that she couldn’t do it.
Furthermore, Michiru sometimes panics when she goes out, so they were unable to participate in parent-child events.
Suzuki told herself, “I’m her mother so I have to solve all the child-rearing problems on my own.” She became more isolated.
“I couldn’t be open with people even if I tried to rely on them,” she recalled, “Maybe I was trapped in the concept of ‘children belonging only to family.’”
Suzuki was born in a small town in Yamagata Prefecture. Neighbors were so close to each other that they always kept their doors open.
Life in rural areas was comfortable as people try to solve the problems through their bonds and local ties.
Suzuki continued to seek such a life.
“Tomioka has the things I’m looking for,” she thought, although the town is still struggling with its recovery efforts.
Suzuki was attracted to a town where people help one another and moved to Tomioka.
Henmi also influenced her.
“I don’t have any children. But when I am with (Michiru), I feel as if she is my own child,” Henmi said. “Elderly people (in Tomioka) do not treat any child as a stranger."
On Feb. 3, the Suzukis and Henmi made “futomaki” thick sushi rolls for Setsubun, which marks the last day of winter on the lunar calendar.
They put seaweed on a bamboo mat, spreading rice on it. They placed spinach, produced in the town, kamaboko fish cakes and soboro flavored ground meat on the rice and rolled it.
“I opened my life to this community. Then, this community flows into my house,” Suzuki said. “I want to have a life with no borders.”
“So delicious!” Michiru smiled with a futomaki roll in her mouth.
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