Kashima Hiospital of Iwaki Faced with New Needs Linked to Fukushima N-Plant Disaster (1)

Kashima Hospital of Iwaki Faced with New Needs Linked to Fukushima N-Plant Disaster (1)

March 11, 2012

Kashima Hospital of Iwaki City, Fukushima Prefecture, voluntarily served as a hub to collect and distribute relief goods for local tsunami-affected people in the first few months after the disaster, but as their extra mission came to an end, hospital staff had to provide services for new kinds of patients linked to the radioactive leakage accident at the damaged No. 1 Fukushima nuclear power station of Tokyo Electric Power Co.
Iwaki is 30 to 40 kilometers south of the ill-starred plant. The city has become one of places that accommodate those who evacuated from areas near the plant.
Relief activities by doctors and others at the hospital had been almost finished toward summer. Then, their business expanded to take care of evacuees from the regions around the nuclear plant. "The number of evacuees to Iwaki had amounted to tens of thousands," Fumie Nakayama, a key physician at the hospital, recalls. The evacuees came from various cities and towns and therefore, health insurance application systems for them differed from town to town. "This was why our services for the evacuees became very complex," she said.
The hospital itself lacked water not only for drinking but also for medical purposes just after the disaster, which occurred on March 11 last year. Meanwhile, thousands of affected people had remained at evacuation facilities in Iwaki even in early April. This prompted the hospital staff to call for relief goods through various channels from across Japan. Nakayama used mainly her network of friends at her alma mater in Tokyo.
Relief goods collected by Kashima Hospital, with about 230 beds, initially went to tsunami-hit coastal areas in Iwaki, including Toyoma and Usuiso, both fishing villages. People in the two communities never forget the assistance extended by the hospital in their hardest days after the disaster. “Their support was really helpful to us,” said one man who is in his 60s. He recalls a phone call from a Kashima Hospital nurse. The nurse called him and quickly said, “We just got some big-size men's shirts from a supporters’ group today. Come on, and you can get one. That must be good to you.”
"Our activity aimed at distributing a variety of daily necessities through what we called 'Shop Kashima' started spontaneously," said Hajime Tago, the chief of the medical checkup department of the hospital. Toward the middle of May, an increasing number of people came for relief goods, reflecting an influx of people from regions affected by the radioactive leakage accident, Tago said. (The photo at the top shows, from left to right, Mr. Tago, Ms. Nakayama and Ms. Keiko Sato, a hospital employee.)
Shop Kashima received up to 80 cartons of relief goods a day from across the country. Goods gathered by Shop Kashima had been distributed to a total of 663 families or 2,172 people by the end of June, according to Tago.
People in Toyoma and Usuiso, the fishing villages covered by the relief activity by Shop Kashima, are currently anxious about relocating to safer places at higher land. Residents there frequently have discussions with people at local public offices about where to build their new houses. But their discussions get nowhere immediately, because higher places broad enough to accept their relocation are limited near their workplace.
Tokuo Suzuki, the community leader of Toyoma, goes to a prefabricated house set up as a disaster headquarters for his area. He consults with other community people there about how to rebuild houses and rehabilitate their jobs for fishing. Ryuichiro Shiga, the community leader of Usuiso, the village next to Toyoma, is also faced with similar problems. Shiga, who lost his wife in the tsunami disaster, stressed the difficulty of narrowing gaps with public-sector people about where to build new houses, pointing candidate sites for the relocation on a rehabilitation map for his area. (The second photo from the top shows Mr. Suzuki and the third photo shows Mr. Shiga.)