By François Gemenne

Contribution to Un Monde de camps (A world of camps) (M.Agier, Ed.), Ed. La Découverte - october 2014

The very notion of a camp often relates to violence, sometimes symbolic: the people in the camp are there because they have had to flee war, persecution, or because they were refused asylum. Curiously, the study of camps has often neglected makeshift encampments, set up to provide shelter for victims of natural disasters. As if these camps were a separate category, and as though their occupants weren’t also forced migrants, suddenly obliged to leave their home, their native or adopted land, their previous life.

Nevertheless, there are a great many of these displaced persons: in 2012, more than 30 million people were displaced owing to natural disasters, more than the number of internally displaced persons, which amounted to 28.8 million that year. Over a period of five years (2008-2012), this figure rose to 242 million (IDMC 2013). These displacements are not simply evacuations lasting several days: many people are displaced for weeks, months, years, an entire lifetime. And many are therefore, logically, accommodated in camps.

Camps have always been associated with natural disasters: in 1755, the Lisboetas displaced by the earthquake that destroyed their city were accommodated in camps, and it was several months before they could return to the city.

In the same way that refugee camps can become permanent or off limits (to use Michel Agier’s expression, 2008) settlements, camps set up in the wake of a natural disaster can also, in some cases, become a new home for the displaced.

The trailer parks that flourished across the whole of Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina are an emblematic example of such camps. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) requisitioned thousands of trailers to house the disaster victims. These trailer parks gradually became a permanent home for all those who didn’t have the means to go elsewhere and who couldn’t go back to New Orleans because they didn’t have any insurance or any resources, or sometimes, for lack of anything better. These parks, a new type of refugee camp, were guarded by the army, forbidden to the public, and faced with numerous problems regarding security, health and trafficking of all sorts. When I visited one of them in 2006, known as Renaissance Village in Baker (Louisiana), I was struck by the fact that the residents had given street names to the alleyways that separated the trailers, a sign that this was their new address.

The presence of trailer parks also highlights a specificity of these camps established in the wake of a disaster: they are not confined to developing countries. In developing countries, these camps are most often comprised of tents and managed by humanitarian organisations; in industrialised countries, they take on more elaborate and more sophisticated forms, and are often managed by the state. In this case, there is often some reluctance to use the term camp, even though that is indeed what they are. As we shall see, the Japanese government doesn’t use the term camp to refer to the prefabricated homes in which the displaced persons of Fukushima are housed, preferring to use the term “shelter”.

One of the underlying ambitions of this text is to place the camps set up following disasters within the context of the sociology and anthropology of camps for refugees and displaced people: to show not only the points in common and the specificities, but also, I hope, to demonstrate the interest of studying these camps to better understand the logic and motivations behind containment following forced displacement. Every year, these camps shelter millions of people, often for periods of several months, and even several years: among them, I have chosen to analyse the logic of containment following what already appears to be one of the major disasters of the 21st century, the Fukushima disaster.

Part 1: Context 

In March 2013, two years after the disaster, more than 313 000 people were still displaced (source: Agency for Reconstruction and Ministry of Health, Employment and Well-Being) These disaster victims are divided into two main categories: those who were displaced by the tsunami, and those who were displaced by the nuclear disaster. Both evacuations took place under very different conditions: while the post-tsunami evacuation was relatively planned and prepared, the one following the nuclear accident was completely improvised, generating injustice, tensions and discrimination.

Those who were able to be evacuated before or after the tsunami were most often rehoused in apartments paid for by the state, or in camps for displaced people, often located within the surrounding towns, and composed of houses approximately 30 m2 made from prefabricated materials. These people can now envisage a return to their home villages and towns, after consultation with the authorities, even if their houses were destroyed in many cases.

As for those who were evacuated after the nuclear accident, the situation is far more complex. Owing to a culture which systematically underestimated the nuclear risk, the Japanese authorities had never really envisaged the possibility of such an accident. Evacuation drills were therefore reduced to a strict minimum.  According to the report adopted after the accident by the Diet (Japan’s parliament), only 10 % of the residents were informed of the first evacuation order issued by the government on the day of the accident. The evacuation was chaotic, and often incoherent. Initially, on the day of the accident, the area within a 3-kilometre radius of the plant was evacuated. The next day, this area was extended to a radius of 10 km, then 20 km. On 15 March 2011, the population living between 20 and 30 km from the plant received the order to stay indoors. More than a month later, on 22 April 2011, these same people received the order to evacuate by their own means, while areas with a level of radioactivity higher than 20 mSv/year were also encouraged to evacuate. All these evacuees - more than 80 000 people - were recognised as such and helped by the government. These areas are indicated on the copy of the evacuation map below.

But, of course, the radioactive cloud didn’t confine itself to the concentric boundaries of the evacuation areas. As a result, very many contaminated areas weren’t taken care of by the authorities, and their inhabitants were left to fend for themselves. These ‘spontaneous’ evacuees, referred to as jishuhinansha (‘self-evacuated’) or kuikigai hinansha (‘evacuated outside the area’), aren’t recognised as official evacuees and therefore only have the right to very limited aid. In other words, if you take the decision to evacuate without having been asked to do so by the government, even if you live in an area sometimes more contaminated than the official evacuation areas, you can’t claim state aid and you are left to fend for yourself. These spontaneous evacuees, stigmatised for their supposed cowardice by those who have stayed, and accused by the government of abandoning their community, have no access to the government shelters. The number of spontaneous evacuees continued to increase in the months following the disaster as awareness rose among the inhabitants, who started measuring the radioactivity levels themselves in their homes. This created a novel situation: more than a year after the disaster, the number of evacuees continued to increase, and not decrease as is generally the case (see table below). Even if there are no official statistics, the number of spontaneous evacuees is estimated at 50 000.

As regards the official evacuees, some live in accommodation whose rent is paid by the government, while others are housed in camps of prefabricated houses set up the authorities.

In March 2013, there were still more than 110 000 people living in these prefabricated camps, i.e. approximately a third of the total displaced persons (source: Agency for Reconstruction and Ministry of Health, Employment and Well-Being). Next to these official camps, even if the authorities prefer to refer to them as ‘villages’, various containment areas have developed, which are also similar to camps in disguise.

2nd part: An endless wait in the camps

It is mainly old people and/or the unemployed who live in the camps of prefabricated houses. Almost three years after the disaster, they are still waiting for another home, compensation from the authorities or the operator of the TEPCO plant, or simply the prospect of returning home.

The camps are comprised of rapidly built prefabricated houses measuring approximately 30 m², often within or just outside towns or villages.  These camps generally also have a community hall, which is home to various forms of group activities: information sessions, nurseries, etc.

These camps were erected in April 2011, a month after the disaster. In May 2012, more than 52 000 houses were built, while the government also paid the rent for 68 000 families. Finally, we have to add to these figures the 19 000 apartments that were requisitioned by the government to accommodate the evacuees (Hasegawa, 2013). Hence, just under 40 % of the displaced persons were lodged in camps, while the majority was placed in apartments that were requisitioned by the government, or had their rent paid by the government.

In the beginning, the type of housing was largely determined by the evacuees’ place of origin. But over time, the sociology of these camps has significantly evolved: in the beginning, there were families from all social classes, but the most affluent families quickly left the camps to move to new lodgings, without waiting for government aid. Gradually, only the aged and the poor have remained in the camps, since they can’t rebuild their lives elsewhere, and won’t be able to return to the contaminated area, while those with a wealthier social situation moved out a long time ago.  The social mix present at the start has been replaced by segregation between those who could move out and those who had no other choice than to remain, those who could find accommodation and/or a job elsewhere, and those who remained dependent on government aid. The evacuation process, which was relatively egalitarian in the beginning, was therefore quickly exacerbated by social inequalities. Today, with the camps occupied above all by the poor and the marginalised, there is no longer any political pressure to release the compensation and envisage an end to the camps: those currently still living there feel abandoned by the authorities, and no longer have any hope of moving out one day.

Therefore, everything is done in the camps to give an appearance of normality, and it is almost possible to forget that the houses are prefabricated and hastily built. The camps are now an integral part of the towns and villages in which they were set up, and the evacuees have mixed with the population, while continuing to wear the badge of a Fukushima evacuee like a stigma. Apparently, the camp itself isn’t called a camp: it is a shelter, as though it was a matter of erasing the reality of containment and substituting it with the necessity of protection.

Among the camps’ inhabitants, there is an added inequality between those who can envisage the prospect of returning, and those who can’t, or for whom it would be difficult. The first category was displaced by the tsunami and can envisage returning home at some point, once the aid has been released and the reconstruction plans put forward. As for the second category of persons, they were displaced by the nuclear accident: despite the decontamination plans, their prospects of returning home are more uncertain.

However, the camp has taken on a permanent aspect for both sides. These camps of prefabricated houses are now in-between places, not quite temporary shelters and not quite permanent homes either. Just like the Katrina trailer-park residents, the inhabitants are left to fend for themselves, while waiting for the authorities to intervene, a wait that has no end in view.

3rd part: The area of contamination, a camp in disguise

The situation of those who weren’t evacuated, however, is equally unenviable.  The evacuation took place in three successive phases: after having focused on concentric areas, it was the level of radioactivity that then determined the evacuation process. On 22 April 2011, the government began to identify the areas with a high degree of radioactivity (more than 20 mSv a year), and recommended their evacuation within a month. Of course, the radioactive cloud hadn’t progressed in concentric circles, and a significant discrepancy was observed between the evacuated areas and the contaminated zones, as can be seen in the map below.

On 16 June 2011, more than three months after the disaster, the government took this process even further and took direct readings of radioactivity in homes: evacuation was recommended for those living in houses with a level of radioactivity higher than 20 mSv a year. Radioactive particles attach themselves in particular to certain textures (especially vegetation), meaning that two places in very close proximity can have very different levels of radioactivity.at two veryg that two veryon was reco on the map below.that seems to go on forever. Hence, within the same village, or even the same street, some homes showed very high levels of radioactivity, while others had normal levels. This difference led to very different evacuation conditions: while it was recommended that those living in ‘contaminated’ houses should evacuate, others were told to stay at home: hence, whole villages left, except for a handful of inhabitants whose houses had not been affected by radioactivity. For these people, now the inhabitants of deserted villages, no evacuation procedure was provided, often to their great bewilderment.

The logic that had prevailed among the authorities during the evacuations was that of minimum evacuation: the procedures were largely improvised, in successive waves. The more evacuations, the higher the costs, since every evacuated home was eligible for aid from the state and TEPCO, the nuclear plant’s operator. Above all, besides the financial costs, every evacuated area now represented lost land, abandoned to radioactivity, whose recovery would be difficult.

With no universal threshold for radioactivity’s level of dangerousness (every country has different standards), and faced with the government’s will to minimise the dangers linked to nuclear contamination as much as possible, many inhabitants took charge of their own fate and raided the shops for Geiger counters. Many also turned to the internet to assess the level of danger of the area where they were living. Faced with official information which they no longer believed, many of those among these populations left to their own devices, decided to use their own means to evacuate. The feeling that the nuclear accident still wasn’t under control and the increase in the number of incidents on the site of the power plant clearly strengthened this feeling of danger.

Spontaneous evacuations therefore increased owing to the total lack of support from the authorities. But these “voluntary evacuees” (jishu binansha) were very rapidly stigmatised, by their communities, the authorities and the rest of Japan. Their communities of origin virulently reproach them for having ‘abandoned’ them, while their decision to evacuate is considered as difficult to justify by the authorities and the rest of the population. The majority of these evacuees are women, who have sometimes left their husbands to take their children to safety, while the husbands have refused to leave, through fear of social stigmatisation or losing their job. While their communities of origin feel abandoned and betrayed by the voluntary evacuees, the latter also feel the same. They sometimes refer to themselves as kimin, the abandoned people, “in reference to the civilian population left to their fate by the Japanese government and its army in Manchuria towards the end of the Second World War” (Augendre and Sugita 2014:19).

The decision to evacuate spontaneously, especially if the evacuee is a man, is perceived as deeply unpatriotic and as abandoning the country. These evacuees have to face a great deal of discrimination and harassment: field research carried out within the framework of the DEVAST (2011-2012) research project, as well as DILEM (2013-2014), showed how extensively these voluntary evacuees were the victims of stigmatisation. Those who left and those who stayed are now the prisoners of two camps who no longer speak to each other.

The contaminated areas are therefore largely deserted, and are only inhabited today by less fortunate populations, often older and unable to find work elsewhere in the country. For these populations too, the area has become a sort of camp, whose border is defined by the acceptable thresholds of radiation. They are readily considered cursed, but exemplary at the same time for not having evacuated. The Japanese government has undertaken decontamination works in the area, whose cost is exorbitant and whose efficiency is questionable. The government’s plan is clear and almost military: it is question of forcing the populations to return and reconquer the lost land.

In total, it is the entire Fukushima prefecture, whose name continues to be associated with the nuclear accident, which is stigmatised. The contaminated area has become a gigantic off limits zone, where the rare inhabitants who have remained now live a half-life, to quote Mickaël Ferrier (2011). The decontamination and reconstruction projects can be compared to a determined effort to reconquer this off limits zone, left to radioactivity and stigmatisation, whose future is anything but certain.

Conclusion

Besides the actual camps of displaced persons, with their prefabricated houses, the Fukushima disaster has also resulted in the division of the region into different zones. This fluctuating zoning, randomly defined by the authorities according to the evolution in radioactivity levels, has caused deep social rifts, also defining differentiated structures of containment, evacuation, compensation and, finally, identification and representations of the displaced persons. This technical and administrative zoning has also led to social zoning, a stratification of the displaced persons, in the words of Augendre and Sugita (2014).

In reality, the Fukushima camps extend well beyond the villages of prefabricated houses: the different levels of radiation mark out the borders of many more camps, with fluctuating borders, which are nevertheless characterised by their permanence. Currently, it is highly unlikely that the decontamination procedures will allow these camps’ barriers to come down in the near future. On the contrary, the exceptionally long lifetime of radioactive particles implies that this zoning will be relatively permanent. The camps are therefore defined by invisible borders, which have however led to the extensive social stratification of their residents. First of all, there are those who have stayed, and who currently live in a deserted and contained area. Then there are those who were evacuated by the authorities, and forced to wait endlessly for a hypothetical return. And, lastly, there are those who decided on spontaneous evacuation, and who are confined to marginalisation and disgrace. Everyone now lives a contained life, while waiting for hypothetical decontamination. A life whose outline is determined by measurements of radioactivity levels. A prefabricated life.

References
Agier, M. 2008. « Quel temps aujourd’hui en ces lieux incertains ? », L’Homme 1 (185-186) : 105-120.
Augendre, M. et Sugita, K. 2014. DILEM : Déplacés et Indécis laissés à eux-mêmes après l’accident nucléaire. Rapport d’étape 2013. Lyon : NEEDS/CNRS.
Disaster Evacuation and Risk Perceptions in Democracies (DEVAST), projet de recherche. http://www.devast.org, consulté le 4 février 2014.
Ferrier, M. 2011. Fukushiam, récit d’un désastre. Paris : Gallimard.
Hasegawa, R. 2013. Disaster Evacuation from Japan’s 2011 Tsunami Disaster and the Fukushima Nuclear Accident. Paris : IDDRI.
IDMC. 2013. Global Estimates 2012. People displaced by natural hazard-induced disasters. Geneva: IDMC.