“A man entered the blanket” shock testimony of a woman at the Great East Japan Earthquake Shelter

Ten years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake that caused the Fukushima nuclear power plant explosion in Japan, and testimonies from women who were sexually assaulted at refugee shelters at the time of the accident are shocking.

On the 11th, Japan’s NHK aired a documentary titled’Buried voices’ in the 10th anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake. In this documentary, the victims of sexual assault by women who lived in three prefectures, including Fukushima, Iwate, and Miyagi, were severely affected by the earthquake.

On the afternoon of March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred off the Pacific Ocean in Japan. Gangjin, accompanied by a tsunami, struck East Japan, and residents living there took refuge in shelters. There were no partitions in the shelter at the time, and blankets were everything.

Another terrible thing happened in the shelter in a nightmare-like chaos.

According to the NHK, a woman who lost her husband in the earthquake said, “The shelter manager blatantly forced her to have sex, saying,’It’s a big deal because I don’t have a husband. I’ll give you a towel or food, so come at night.'”

Another woman, who was in her twenties at the time, said on the broadcast, “At night, a man came into the blanket on which the woman was lying,” and “Caught the woman and took it to a dark place and took off her clothes.” He said, “The men have become weird.”

Testimony of abuse also came out. One woman confessed, “I was abused by several men, but I was afraid that I would be killed.”

According to an analysis of 360,000 consultations received between 2013 and 2018 in February 2013, the “Companion Hotline,” a counseling line for women only, revealed that more than half of the consultations in the three prefectures affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake were related to sexual violence.

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