FUKUSHIMA -- The Fukushima District Court ordered Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. on Tuesday to pay 15.2 million yen in compensation to bereaved family members of a 102-year-old man who killed himself shortly after the March 2011 disaster at TEPCO's Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
This marks the third court ruling in a suicide case related to the nuclear accident. All of the three rulings have recognized a causal link between the accident and the different suicides.
Fumio Okubo -- at the time the oldest person in Iitate, Fukushima Prefecture -- committed suicide in April 2011 after learning that an evacuation order would be issued for the village following the nuclear accident.
Mieko Okubo -- his second-eldest son's wife, currently 65 years old -- and two other family members sued the electric power company for about 60 million yen in damages, arguing that Fumio killed himself because the nuclear disaster had plunged him into mental agony.
Fumio was born as the eldest son of a farming family in Iitate and made a living by cultivating leaf tobacco and silkworms, according to their petition and other sources. He had eight children and lived together with Mieko and other family members.
On April 11, 2011, after hearing a media report about an evacuation order, he said to Mieko, "I think I've lived a bit too long." He did not eat his favorite stewed nimono food, and returned to his room more than one hour earlier than usual.
The following morning, Mieko found Fumio had hanged himself in his bedroom with a plastic shopping bag that had been turned into a rope. She shook his body and asked him to respond, but the hands she held remained cold.
Asked prior to his death about whether to evacuate from the village, Fumio looked despondent. He said: "I'm not going. I won't leave here."
"Had the [nuclear] accident not occurred, he would've been able to enjoy himself until the end of his life, surrounded by his family in the village he loved," a family member said.
Causation at issue
The point at issue in the lawsuit was a causal link between the suicide and the nuclear accident. The plaintiff claimed that Fumio committed suicide due to his despair over the future, having lost everything he had built in his life as a result of the nuclear disaster.
The TEPCO side argued against this claim, saying, "Even if the causal link is recognized, the accident had an insignificant effect on the suicide."
Regarding lawsuits over the nuclear accident and suicides, there have been rulings in August 2014 regarding a 58-year-old woman in Kawamata, Fukushima Prefecture, who set herself on fire, and in June 2015 regarding a 67-year-old man of Namie of the same prefecture who threw himself from a high place. In both cases, a causal link between the suicide and the accident was recognized by the court.
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