Sakae Kato, the Man Who Stayed in Fukushima to Care for Cats

Facebook ↗WhatsApp ↗
0 0 Edit this post
Sakae Kato’s Decade Caring for Cats After Fukushima

Sakae Kato is a former builder from Namie, a town inside the evacuation zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, who chose to stay behind after the 2011 disaster to look after cats abandoned by fleeing neighbours. When Reuters profiled him in March 2021, a decade on, he was 57, caring for 41 cats, and spending about $7,000 a month on food and shelter for them and other animals. This is his story, and the background that explains why so many pets were left behind.

Who Sakae Kato is

Before March 2011 Kato ran a small construction business in Namie, on the Pacific coast of Fukushima Prefecture. His family has held its land there for three generations. When the earthquake and tsunami knocked out the cooling systems at the nearby nuclear plant, about 160,000 people left the area, many expecting to be gone only a few days. Large numbers of cats, dogs and farm animals were left behind.

Kato said his decision to stay was shaped by what he found in the following months. Helping to demolish abandoned houses, he came across pets that had died inside. He resolved to care for the survivors himself.

A day in the restricted zone

Ten years later the routine was still demanding. His two-storey wooden house had been badly shaken by an earthquake, and because the area remained restricted he was allowed to visit but not officially to sleep there. There was no running water. Each day he filled bottles from a mountain spring and drove to public toilets.

Around him lived 41 cats, sheltered in his home and in an empty building on his property. Feral cats that would not come inside were fed in a storage shed he kept warm in winter with a paraffin stove, which mattered in a region where nights drop below freezing. He had also taken in a dog named Pochi.

Not every animal survived. Kato told Reuters he had buried 23 cats in his garden, and wild boars sometimes dug at the graves. Some of the cats he looked after had been born well after the evacuation and had never had human owners.

The monthly bill of around $7,000 covered more than cat food. He also put out dog food for wild boars that gathered near the house at dusk, and that habit would land him in trouble.

The wild boar arrest

With people gone, wild boars spread through the empty towns of the evacuation zone, raiding gardens and homes. The government set traps to control them. On 25 February 2021, Kato was arrested on suspicion of freeing boars caught in traps laid the previous November, and he was still being questioned when the Reuters profile appeared. Reports at the time did not describe the outcome of the case.

His defenders saw a man unable to watch any animal suffer. Officials saw interference with a programme meant to make the area safer for residents who want to return. Both points can be true at once.

What happened at Fukushima in 2011

On 11 March 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off north-eastern Japan. It triggered a tsunami whose largest waves reached 13 to 14 metres at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, swamping the seawall and knocking out most of the backup power. Without cooling, fuel in three reactors melted, hydrogen explosions damaged buildings, and radioactive material was released into the air and sea.

The accident was rated Level 7, the highest on the international scale, the only other being Chernobyl in 1986. At its peak, at least 164,000 people were displaced. A decade later around 41,000 were still evacuees.

It helps to be precise about the risk. The United Nations scientific committee on radiation (UNSCEAR) has reported no documented health effects among residents directly attributable to radiation from the accident. The evacuation itself, however, caused deaths and great hardship, especially among elderly patients moved from hospitals and care homes.

The zone has also changed. Evacuation orders have been lifted step by step across much of the area since the mid-2010s, including parts of Namie, while areas closest to the plant remain restricted. In August 2023 Japan began releasing treated, diluted water from the site into the Pacific under international monitoring, a plan expected to take about 30 years and one that drew protests and import bans from China. Talk of an entire region being permanently uninhabitable is out of date.

Animals left behind after disasters

Kato is not the only person who refused to abandon animals in the zone. Masami Yoshizawa, for example, kept a herd of more than 200 cattle alive on his Ranch of Hope after defying an order to cull them.

Fukushima taught a hard lesson that disaster planners now repeat: people are less likely to evacuate quickly if they cannot take their pets, and animals left behind suffer. If you have pets, a few simple steps help:

  • Keep a carrier, lead and a few days of food and water ready to grab.
  • Make sure pets are microchipped or tagged with up-to-date contact details.
  • Know which local shelters or evacuation centres accept animals.
  • Arrange with a neighbour to take your animals if you are away when an alert comes.

Staying for the last one

Asked how long he planned to continue, Kato gave Reuters a simple answer: "I want to make sure I am here to take care of the last one." His story is less about radiation than about responsibility, the long, unglamorous work that continues after cameras leave a disaster zone.

The details in this profile reflect his situation as reported in March 2021. What stays constant is the picture of one man, a shed, a paraffin stove and a few dozen cats who would otherwise have had no one.

Sources: Reuters via Nippon.com: The man who saves forgotten cats in Fukushima's nuclear zone (4 March 2021), by Tim Kelly, photos by Kim Kyung-Hoon; My Modern Met: Cat rescue in Fukushima; Wikipedia: Fukushima nuclear accident.

Labels:

Facebook ↗WhatsApp ↗

COMMENTS

BLOGGER