Feature: Volunteers fight to keep hope alive as evacuees languish in Fukushima shelters

A rag-tag team of around 60 people began to assemble on a gloomy, drizzly Sunday morning at a seemingly random service station just off a main road in Haramachi, Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture.

It's just past 8 a.m., clearly too early for some, with the youngest of the group being just under 4-years-old and the eldest well into her 60s, with every age represented and spanning some 10 nationalities, including a healthy number of Japanese. In rural Japan, such a diverse mix of ages and nationalities is something of an oddity.

Some are familiar with the scene, its history and what lies ahead and the newbies are quickly filled in by 56-year-old Californian Philip Duncan, who's in charge of the logistics and distribution for the Save Minamisoma Project (SMP), an organization that's been delivering essential food and fresh water aid every two weeks from Tokyo, to the thousands of refugees forced to stay in temporary housing, after rising radiation levels in their towns following the March 11, 2011, tsunami-triggered meltdowns at the infamous Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, meant that staying would be fatal.

Minamisoma lies about 25 kilometers north of the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant and the city was also inundated by the earthquake-triggered tsunami and suffered significant damage. Nevertheless, four years after the 2011 Tohuku Earthquake and Tsunami, Minamisoma is still playing host to a number of so-called "temporary accommodation" camps, in which tens of thousands of the total 157,000 people who were forced to evacuate from the vicinity of the nuclear plant, now reluctantly call home.

The camps vary in size and number of lots, but the structures are uniform in design and built from simple prefabricated iron or more often timber. If the camps were surrounded by high fences with razor wire and security posts, passersby would be forgiven for mistaking the shelters for low-security prisons or some kind of internment, or asylum seekers' camp. In fact, the reality is not that far off.

"Hope here is diminishing as the temporary housing concept was only support to be for two years, then it was extended by the government as decontamination work near the nuclear plant was so slow, meaning it would be impossible for those displaced to safely return to their homes and now nobody knows when these evacuees will be able to return," Hajime Yamamoto, who works for a notable Japanese construction firm, told Xinhua.

"A few years ago, hope still existed in these camps and that's what kept people going, but the residents now do not believe in anything Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO -- operator of the tsunami- ravaged Daiichi nuclear facility) or the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says, as it's all lies. Compensation rules keep getting changed as do living subsidies," said Yamamoto, who has assisted in charity and relief work in both Miyagi and Fukushima Prefectures since 2011 and has in fact relocated from Tokyo and dedicated himself to reconstruction work in Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture, a coastal town almost completely obliterated by the devastating tsunami four years ago.

Yamamoto went on to explain that in his opinion, decontamination work around the plant could take up to 30 years and this has torn families apart, with younger generations leaving the prefecture to rebuild their lives, vowing never to return, while older generations are desperate to return to the homes they built, the land they own and utterly desperate not to spend their final days in a wooden hut.

While the evacuees in Minamisoma welcome the delivery of fresh food and water, their smiles betray their true feelings. Their eyes are giving a glimpse into the pain and misery of their existence, particularly for the old and infirm.

As a wheelbarrow full of rice, potatoes, onions, biscuits, cereal and other basic food items, along with bottles of fresh water were delivered to the doorstep of one elderly lady's hut, she bowed deeply and said thank you. She apologized for the weather -- it had been raining all day, which sparked concerns that radiation in the area could have spiked -- but perhaps more profoundly she said, "thank you for not forgetting us," and, with bowed legs, hobbled into her makeshift hut.

The municipal government's concerns have, to an extent, prioritized the physical and mental well-being of children who were evacuated, and, as such, some of the elderly have been left with absolutely nothing as their younger family members tend to have relocated outside the prefecture, with some reluctant to ever return and a sense of community spirit in the shelters diminishing with each day, as it becomes ever-more apparent that their " temporary" situation has a distinct air of permanence about it.

When hope is all you have, the body and mind can fight on. Spirits can be lifted by the promise that one day things will be better, that things will return to the way they were.

But for the evacuees in Minamisoma, it would seem that along with their family, friends, jobs, possessions, and their dignity, the triple disaster, compounded by TEPCO's ineptitude and the central government's callous way of sweeping the evacuee problem under the carpet, hope is the last bastion of life being wrenched from the evacuees' hands.

"I've noticed that a lot of the younger people have left the shelters since my last few times volunteering here," said Aaron, an English teacher in his twenties from Australia, now living in Sendai. "I guess they found the energy and resources to get themselves out of a predicament after they realized the government couldn't."

"But for the elderly it's a different story. They can't go back home. They've lost their families and communities and they don't want to die alone in an evacuation shelter. Sadly, the instances of mental illness and suicides have been on the increase," Aaron said.

And for many of the volunteers that comprise SMP, like Aaron - himself a young, affable foreigner with a caring heart - their compassion, positive energy and genuine concern for the evacuees may be a gift far more valuable than food or water.

The bearers themselves have no borders. From a mixed-race toddler handing out sachets of condiments to the evacuees, to a Japanese pensioner counting out quotas of onions, the SMP (and their Second Harvest food bank supporter) seems to be a microcosm of how the world should be.

Ken Chow, a young man in his 20s, doesn't even live in Japan. He's flown in from Hong Kong four times to offer his support to the evacuees here, motivated by a natural sense of altruism and a nagging feeling that Abe's government has already turned its back on its own people.

"I came straight from Narita Airport," Chow said enthusiastically, while explaining the idiosyncratic traits of some of the evacuees and the background of his own experience with one of the groups newbies.

As was the case with all the volunteers, like Catherine Dinh, a twenty-something American with Vietnamese roots, who lives in Fukushima teaching English, Xu Jialing, a student at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and native of China's mainland, was also all too eager to lend a hand, as the central government has seemingly retracted its.

But the day's Herculean efforts that saw six sizable shelters fed and watered were somewhat bitter-sweet for the 60-strong troop of volunteers, as Sunday marks the 75th and final mission by SMP to Minamisoma due to a lack of adequate funding. And while other like-minded organizations will almost certainly pop up to fill in and continue similar work alongside other NGO's and charities, in doing so they are further highlighting the inadequate provisions being made by those who bear the true responsibility. Endi