A year on, only brief home visits for Japan nuclear evacuees

OKUMA, Japan (Reuters) - Back home for just three hours, a tearful Miyoko Takeda sorted through her belongings. She left behind the kimonos she once wore as a traditional dancer, fearful they might be contaminated by radiation.

Nearly a year has passed since a massive 9.0 magnitude earthquakehit Japan, Okuma town, but the site of the reactors at the centre of the Fukushima nuclear crisis remains off limits for residents, save for short trips to hastily abandoned homes.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant, on the coast 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo, was wrecked by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, triggering reactor meltdowns and radiation leaks that caused mass evacuations and widespread contamination.

For the about 11,000 residents of Okuma, and the nearly 80,000 people across the prefecture who have been unable to return to their homes due to high radiation, the mental scars run deep even though many of their homes are physically intact.

Many do not know when, if ever, they can return to land that has been in their families for generations.

The 74-year-old Takeda, who visited her home with her husband at the weekend to remove cabinets, said that she has been unable to properly function ever since the evacuation last March.

"I can't sleep, I can't eat, I lost 8 kilogrammes and when I went to the doctor I threw up everything I took," she said, walking through her house, less than 10 km from the plant, in a white protective suit.

On her third trip back, Takeda fought back tears as she tried on her kimonos one last time before the three-hour window to return ended and they were once again forced out of the 20-km exclusion zone in which their home lies.

Okuma is the location of four reactors at the centre of the nuclear crisis, out of the crippled plant's total six reactors.

Over a thousand people from three towns, all within the exclusion zone, went back on Sunday to an area where weeds have taken over kindergarten schoolyards and manure from roaming cattle covers the roads.

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VOCABULARY 

[contaminate:V] ~sth (with sth) to make substance or place dirty or no longer pure by adding a substance that is dangerous or carries diseese.

 *The drinking water has became contaminated with lead.

[hasty:abj] said , made or done very quickly, especially when this had bad results.

*Let's not make any hasty decisions.

 [wreck:n&v ]

1、a ship that has sunk or that has been very badly damaged.

2、a car, plane ,etc. that has been very badly damaged.

* Two passengers  still strapped in the wreck.

[Kimono: n] Japanese traditional clothing.

[intact: n] complete and not damaged.

[cripple:v&n] SYN.disable; ~ sb, to damage sb's body so that they are no longer able to walk or move normally.

[weed:n] a wild plant growing where it is not wanted.

*The yard was overgrown with weeds.

[cattle:n] plural .cows and bulls that are kept as farm animal for their milk or meat.

[manure:n&v] the wast matter form animals that is spread over or mixed with soil to help plants or crops grow.