Somewhere out there is a list of about 1,000 names, perhaps all in one place, perhaps divided between any number of files, binders and piles of paperwork. One the one hand, it is mostly a list of victims; those whose houses and loved-ones were swept away by the March 11 tsunami, or who’ve been chased from their homes by the invisible horror of radiation. On the other hand, it is a list of individuals making tireless efforts; manning the front lines in work to contain the meltdown disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant.

Most of the workers at the plant hail from the surrounding Hamadori region of Fukushima Prefecture — hit hard by the March 11 tsunami and then again by the imposition of the exclusion zone around the power station. Their new double identity, victim and tireless worker, has inspired a complex range of feelings among many of them.

One such worker is a man in his 40s whose home and employer’s office both lie inside the 20-kilometer exclusion zone. An employee of a subcontractor working at the plant, when he leaves the evacuation center where he and his family now live, he tells his little boy he’s going to “clean up some bad stuff.” The 4-year-old, still too young to understand anything of fuel rods, meltdowns or radiation, replies, “Do your best, Daddy!”

The man has been a nuclear worker for almost 15 years, but his job at the plant is harsher than anything he’d ever imagined before. Inside his protective suit, sweat pours ceaselessly off his body. His mask clouds up almost instantly, while the elastic band holding it in place pinches painfully. The turbine buildings where he works are dark, damp and fearful places assaulted regularly by aftershocks, pushing up his pulse and his discomfort with it.

The man’s wife and the rest of his family were dead set against him working at the plant — site of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

“You don’t know what kind of diseases you’ll get later,” they told him, and in late April he told his boss he was going to quit. His boss did not try to stop him, but as they were talking he remembered the faces of his subordinates, and a frantic local employee of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) saying, “I just don’t know what to do.”

“Everyone I know is working insanely hard at the plant,” he thought. “Someone has to do this.” And so he stayed, and continues his daily trips into the dark maws of the turbine buildings.

A 34-year-old man from the nearby town of Namie also tried to explain the complicated feelings that went along with being both disaster survivor and front-line emergency nuclear worker.

“I’m fortunate just to have a job,” he told the Mainichi. “Farmers and shopkeepers have lost everything, even their livelihoods.” However, he also said he has no intention of trying to return to his home inside the exclusion zone.

The man works for a secondary subcontractor, and when his community was ordered to evacuate he went with his family to live with relatives in distant Kyushu. At the beginning of April he got a position at TEPCO’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in Niigata Prefecture, and he moved into an apartment with his wife and baby son in the city of Kashiwazaki. Just three weeks later, however, he was summoned back to work at the Fukushima No. 1 plant. His job: setting up equipment to purify water badly contaminated with radioactive substances.

“The ones who caused the accident are now the ones making a living trying to repair it. Ironic, isn’t it?” he says. He adds, however, that he is worried about how long the crisis will continue.

Another worker from Namie is trying to keep his family together as best he can while at the same time doing his job at the plant. The 40-year-old treks back and forth between Fukushima and a Tokyo Metropolitan Government-run apartment where his wife and 2-year-old son are now living — the family’s fifth home since their residence was destroyed in the March 11 tsunami.

After dinner one night in late March, the man’s 29-year-old wife said that at the very least she wanted to move back to Minamisoma, her hometown that is partly covered by the nuclear crisis exclusion zone. Hearing this, the man decided to join the operation to bring the plant under control.

“If we can’t solve this crisis, my wife will never be able to go home again,” he thought. “I’m ready to do this job until the reactors are decommissioned.”

Meanwhile, a 64-year-old worker from the town of Okuma — about 5 kilometers from the crippled plant — told the Mainichi he was asked to take a job laying cable at the plant. The man, a 40-year veteran of the nuclear power industry, was living in his fourth refugee shelter at the time. He left his 63-year-old wife there and took a room at an inn in the coastal city of Iwaki, south of the plant, from where he now commutes to work.

“Okuma exists because of TEPCO,” he says. “I’ve put food on the table for all this time because of nuclear power, so I have to be ready and willing to do my part in a time of crisis.”

“It just billows out, so much of it,” the 64-year-old says, referring to the steam he sees rising from the No. 3 reactor every now and then. “It’s not a good feeling, seeing that.”

Despite being a nuclear worker for so long, his job at the Fukushima plant marked the first time he ever had to take anti-radiation potassium iodide pills. He says his wife worries about him, and that he was scared at first, too. “But I got used to it pretty quickly,” he says. “If you’re nervous all the time, there’s no way you could hold out physically,” he adds with a resigned laugh. He ends his comments, however, with a bit of swagger.

“The TEPCO guys aren’t used to being on-site. We’re the only ones who can look after them,” he says.

Mainichi Shimbun