Homecoming Is Sweet Despite Smell of Sulfur

Hidehiko Takahashi finally got to go home last week.

After 4 1/2 years of exile in Tokyo, lonely and unable to find work, Takahashi was one of 61 residents of Japan’s Miyake Island who jumped at the chance to return as soon as authorities declared it safe again.

Safe, if you don’t mind living on a 5-mile-wide Pacific island with an active volcano spewing sulfuric gases.

“I wish I could have returned sooner,” said Takahashi, 44, bundled up against the cold of a February night as he waited for a ferry to take him to Miyake, 115 miles and a seven-hour ride south of Tokyo. “On Miyake, I have my land, my house. I’m the owner of an inn. I can cook.

“That’s my everything,” he said softly.

Just a handful of Miyake’s 3,189 former residents took up the offer to be on the first ferry back to the ash-caked island, which has been off-limits since an intense volcanic eruption in the summer of 2000. Many say they will never go back.

But others insist that the lure of going home is stronger than the fear of nature’s unpredictable powers of destruction.

“As long as you were born on the island or raised on the island, that will be home, the place you are most comfortable,” said Ta- tsunori Hiramo, a 65-year-old fisherman who said he never got accustomed to living in his Tokyo apartment, where he had to worry about disturbing the neighbors.

“I know I will have a hard time at first. But I just couldn’t stop the feeling of wanting to get back.”

Most of Miyake’s residents have been living in government housing in Tokyo since being chased away by the eruption of gas and rocks from Mt. Oyama, the volcano that created Miyake in the first place. No one was killed in the initial storm of gas and ash. But by September of that year, with sulfur dioxide at dangerous levels, the Tokyo metropolitan government, which administers Miyake, ordered residents to leave.

Many did so reluctantly. Some expected to be gone just a few days.

They were barred for 53 months, waiting for the sulfur dioxide still seeping from the volcano to drop to safe levels. Except for scientific visits and the occasional short stay for residents to look in on their homes, no one was allowed to set foot on Miyake. Two hundred Miyake residents have died waiting for the chance to do so again.

Scientists gave a cautious go-ahead only last summer. State-of-the-art sensors to detect gas levels were put in place, and shelters with air filtration systems were built to protect people should the air suddenly get toxic.

Tokyo authorities then set Feb. 1 as the homecoming.

“I don’t see any sign of another eruption,” said professor Setsuya Nakada of the Volcano Research Center at Tokyo University, reflecting the scientific consensus on the risk of another eruption. “We only worry about the volcanic gas. And Miyake now has the best volcano observation system in Japan.”

In recent weeks, workers have been fixing electricity lines and getting public facilities in order, as well as putting up the large signs warning residents away from the half of the island with dangerously high sulfur levels.

With taiko drums thundering out a traditional Miyake Island beat and posses of Japanese media in pursuit, the first returnees boarded the ferry for Miyake last week, lugging all the belongings they could carry and clutching compulsory gas masks and helmets.

“Of course I have anxiety about living on Miyake -- we’ll have to carry gas masks all the time!” said a smiling Taro Asanuma, who runs a gas station on the island. “But I was born and raised on Miyake, so I know how to read the winds. I know how to cope with volcanic gas. I know nature.”

Not everyone wants to go back. The enforced time away was enough for many to start building new lives, and some, especially the younger ones, found they preferred the seductions of Tokyo to life on a pungent outcrop in the Pacific.

A questionnaire sent out by local government officials revealed that just 930 of the 1,630 households on the island said they would return. And more than half of them are over 60 -- one reason the Tokyo government plans to increase the number of doctors on Miyake from one to three.

Meanwhile, just 35 students have registered for the first term of elementary school in April, one-quarter the number enrolled before the eruption. The junior high school’s numbers are down by two-thirds.

Many residents say they will wait to see if an economy dependent on fishing and about 80,000 tourist visits a year to take in coral reefs and bird life can be resurrected.

But for some residents, the return is a pilgrimage. Yoshitaka Tsuchiya, 69, went back to Miyake carrying his late wife’s cremated remains. Mihoko Tsuchiya died of a cerebral hemorrhage in July 2003.

“When we left, we thought we’d be back in a week, or maybe a month,” he told Asahi Shimbun, a newspaper, describing how his wife had not become ill until the despair of exile in Tokyo set in. Last week, he placed her ashes in the family altar of the wooden house they had shared on the island.

“We’re home,” he told her.

Rie Sasaki of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.