--- title: Suicide in Fukushima: The Unspoken Legacy of A Disaster | TIME description: TIME had exclusive access inside Fukushima's reactor canonical: https://time.com/video/5vARmSEK/ og:title: Suicide in Fukushima: The Unspoken Legacy of A Disaster og:description: TIME had exclusive access inside Fukushima's reactor og:url: https://time.com/video/5vARmSEK/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/5vARmSEK/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Suicide in Fukushima: The Unspoken Legacy of A Disaster twitter:description: TIME had exclusive access inside Fukushima's reactor twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/5vARmSEK/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Suicide in Fukushima: The Unspoken Legacy of A Disaster > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Suicide in Fukushima: The Unspoken Legacy of A Disaster [Watch (HLS stream): Suicide in Fukushima: The Unspoken Legacy of A Disaster](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/5vARmSEK.m3u8) (3:45)  _Published 2014-08-20. TIME had exclusive access inside Fukushima's reactor_ --- Jul 27, 2023 5:09 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The Removal of Fuel From Fukushima Reactors Begins, Eight Years After the Disaster](/video/jSYJ6FNx/) ### The Removal of Fuel From Fukushima Reactors Begins, Eight Years After the Disaster [Fukushima's Safety in Question](/video/Tjfl52kz/) ### Fukushima's Safety in Question [How Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant Disaster Happened](/video/OCaxIAFI/) ### How Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant Disaster Happened --- ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] In Japanese, Fukushima's made up of, of two words, fuku which means lucky, or fortune, or fortunate and shima which means island. So Fukushima is literally the island of fortune. [ MUSIC ] Suicide is a sensitive topic in, in any country, particularly Japan but the Fukushima nuclear crisis has made this subject I think even more fraught. [ MUSIC ] Since the accident, the number of officially recorded suicides in Fukushima has increased. But even those government figures are almost certainly far too low. I talked to person after person in Fukushima who knew someone who had ended their life because they lost their home or their land or their lively hood. To the radiation emitted by the nuclear accident. These were people in, in this region, who are so proud of having been part of Japan's modern miracle economy. They were contributing to the effort to. To literally power Japan for nuclear energy. But, but now there's such a stigma attached just to the word Fukushima. In many cases, because of the double stigma of suicide and of Fukushima itself, their families weren't willing to report the deaths as self inflicted. There was one dairy farmer from an area called. People didn't want to buy his milk because it was from Fukshima and they were scared of radiation. But the farmers farm actually bordered another prefixture. You know, a couple miles difference and he wouldn't have been tainted by the Fukishima curse. The farmer began writing what later amounted to a suicide. Note on his barn walls, he wrote to the other remaining farmers saying that they shouldn't let themselves be defeated by nuclear power. He apologized to his wife and sons writing that he'd lost the will to try. One of the sentence fragments he scribbled was, If only there was no. Nuclear plant. Then he hanged himself from a barn rafter. Initially his death, wasn't even classified as a suicide. [ NOISE ]. When you think about the legacy of Fukushima, it's easy to focus just on the radiation, itself. You know? How bad is it? What's the half life of these radioactive ions? Is a peach grown in Fukushima, safe to eat? And these are questions that will presumably be answered in the future. But I think the mental, and. And psychological fallout of the accident will also take generations to resolve. And I think that's so much the tragedy for the people who were there, who were so proud of what they were doing for modern Japan, and now that dream has evaporated. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Suicide in Fukushima: The Unspoken Legacy of A Disaster","description":"TIME had exclusive access inside Fukushima's reactor","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/5vARmSEK/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-08-20T22:55:40.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/5vARmSEK.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/5vARmSEK/","duration":"PT3M45S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/5vARmSEK/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```