(3) In the 17 characters of "false reconstruction" felt in decontamination

Susumu Nakamura (53), a high school teacher, Fukushima City

　"Exposure", "Dose", "Nuclear", and "Temporary". In December 2019, Susumu Nakamura, 53, a high school teacher in Fukushima City, self-published his haiku collection, "Difficult Heibon." There are many words in the collected phrases that remind us of the Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident.

　"Decontamination" is one of them.

　　　Expressing the sadness of Fukushima, which is contaminated by radioactivity, from the point of view of the people living in 17 characters. "I never thought the day would come when I would use the word 'decontamination' in my own haiku." The unprecedented disaster was also an opportunity to change his style.

About 25 years ago, I stepped into the world of haiku after picking up a seasonal book. He studied under the late Tota Kaneko, a haiku poet, and wrote many poems about the natural scenery of Fukushima.

In March 2011, the radioactive materials released by the nuclear accident fell on Fukushima City, which is more than 60 kilometers away. Air doses of 24 microsieverts per hour, equivalent to 600 times the level before the accident, were measured, and citizens were terrified of radioactivity.

　My eldest son was in kindergarten at the time. He closed the windows and turned off the ventilation fan to avoid exposure. Still uneasy, he evacuated his wife and children to Kawanishi-machi, Yamagata Prefecture.

　Anxiety about radiation and changes in my life overlapped, and I lost my motivation to create. "Everything, including the season words, was contaminated. Even when the cherry blossoms bloomed, the image of being exposed to radiation haunted me. I didn't feel like writing with the values ​​and sense of the seasons I had until now."

　My feelings changed in May of the same year.

Suddenly a thought popped into my head. The motif is Kaneko's .

"Let's create a haiku that only I, who lives in Fukushima, can create, not a haiku that I imagined in the saijiki." She began to actively write about the reality of the disaster area.

　Home decontamination will begin in November 2015. A city contractor meticulously washed the roof and gutters with a high-pressure washer to remove topsoil from the garden. There was no storage space in the area, so the decontaminated soil was buried in a corner of the parking lot of his home.

　 　Finding ants wriggling on the ground filled with decontaminated soil, he wrote a poem. She felt the absurdity of allowing innocent small animals to coexist with radiation. At the same time, it seemed to me that the human beings who are at the mercy of the nuclear accident are as small as ants.

　The decontaminated soil in the parking lot was excavated in September 2019. Large piles of sandbags that had piled up in temporary storage areas throughout the city were also gone, leaving the land vacant.

　The decontaminated soil has indeed disappeared from the city, but it is being transported in large quantities every day to the interim storage facility built around the first nuclear power plant.

　Is this decontamination? Isn't it just a "transfer of dyes" that simply moves the place of storage? It seems that the essential problem of what to do with the decontaminated soil has not been solved at all.

　The government rushed to remove the decontaminated soil in order to show that everyday life had returned to normal. Do not"

　I made a poem with such thoughts in October last year.

(honorifics omitted)

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