Into the Forbidden Zone (3 page)

“Driver, do you think that nuclear power is wise or unwise?”

“There are three nuclear plants in this prefecture. They are on higher ground than Tepco’s, so I think that is good.”

“So you approve of nuclear power?”

“Well, due to the greenhouse effect, oil and coal are not clean, so as long as they secure the safety, I think that nuclear power is good.”

An old woman in baggy clothes and a flapping shawl staggered down the road. Here came a small cemetery, the steles all upright but the mud churned up disgustingly between them. In the port, the trade show palace appeared in good health from the outside. A glittering stack of Toyotas which had awaited export had been crushed. It was strange to see new paint jobs on pancaked cars.

“So what will happen in the other season when the wind blows in from the south?”

“Well, we don’t have it like that so often.”

“It might only take one time,” I said.

“I agree!” he said with a laugh.

DUE TO HORDES of soldiers and volunteers in Sendai (the Metropolitan Hotel had been entirely turned over to relief workers), I found accommodations at a hot spring more than an hour’s bus ride out of town. Here various hard-pressed employees of the Osaka Gas Company were staying, and in the morning one sometimes saw a truckload of Self-Defense Forces outside. It was a half-empty, second-rate place where the sashimi came wrapped in plastic, although one could only admire the fervency of their many rules (“We firmly refuse your request to enter the baths when you are drunk or if you have tattoos on your body”).
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The waitress proudly assured me that the food was local insofar as possible, so while I was eating it I grew angry again at Bob the salesman, who had promised me a local measurement probe that had never arrived, and of course at Tepco; for how could I have any idea how carcinogenic the fish might be, not to mention these slightly less than fresh greens accompanying them, or the crab claw in the soup? I was not unmindful of the fact that I could eat while so many others went hungry; nor was I so concerned on my own account, for a man in his fifties has already won a victory of sorts; but what about the pregnant women, the young children, the people who should have had decades to look forward to? In the words of yesterday’s paper: “Govt. holding radiation data back: IAEA gets information, but public doesn’t.”

In the body of the article, an unnamed Meteorological Agency official explained that the Japanese government made its own forecasts—never mind that they had been released only once, because, an official named Seiji Shioya explained, “we can’t do it since accuracy is low.” The unnamed official then remarked: “If the government releases two different sets of data, it might cause disorder in the society.”
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Was that why the official statistics offered varying units of measurement, so that in Koriyama the drinking water at the bus station was proclaimed safe on account of its radioactivity being less than a hundred becquerels, while the newspaper reported the radioactivity of this or that city in millisieverts per hour? Nobody I met knew what these numbers meant. How convenient! And so I chopsticked another previously frozen tidbit of horse mackerel into my mouth, wondering how safe it was.

IN CASE YOU HAVE NOT NOTICED, I considered this matter of the reactor to be the real story. Sad as the earthquake and the tsunami had been, the damage had been done, the people killed and property ruined; and now recovery could continue until the next quake. But this other horror wrapped up in becquerels, sieverts, and millirems, it was just beginning, and nobody knew how bad it might be.

(I had asked Peter Bradford: “Could it happen here in the States? I understand we have some reactors of the Japanese type.”

“I don’t think the likelihood is driven so much by reactors of that kind as by the fact that we’re just about as vulnerable as the Japanese to complacency about what used to be called a Class Nine accident. I don’t think we’re any less vulnerable than the Japanese.”)

About the earthquake-tsunami and the concomitant reactor disaster it may be apposite to cite the words of Buddha: “Nothing in the world is permanent or lasting; everything is changing and momentary and unpredictable. But people are ignorant and selfish, and concerned only with the desires and sufferings of the present moment. They do not listen to the good teachings; nor do they try to understand them; and simply give themselves up to the present interest, to wealth and lust”
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—to, for instance, the tax credits awarded those who dwell near a nuclear reactor, not to mention what the reactor enables and impels.

From Buddha’s point of view, it scarcely matters whether all our ease in life derives from uranium pellets, solar cells, or perpetual motion; in any case, our complacency alone protects the lovely roofs and trees of this present instant from becoming the rubble into which the very next moment might in fact cast them. But how many of us (excepting monks) can live and hope—in other words, chase our present interests—without disregarding our inevitable ends? I say we are “better off” pretending that the bullet train we're riding won’t derail. The peril is remote; probably we will die from something else. When the peril is nearer, present interest advises against disregard. The more present the interest, the less present or apparently present the danger, the more irresistible the disregard.

Hence the following parable, courtesy of the paterfamilias of the family who would soon host me on Oshima Island. Refilling my sake glass as we sat in his dark and chilly mud-stained dining room, he remarked that following an infamous tsunami back in the Meiji era,
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many oceanfront plots here and elsewhere were banned from resettlement, but “somehow,” he jocularly continued, people forgot or set the edict aside. Of course, even had they complied, this latest terror would have carried off ever so many, since it rolled in higher than any wave seen by the people of the Meiji period. Who can blame the inhabitants of Oshima for not predicting that?

However, the corporate engineers and presidents, the prefectural governors, the authorities whose task it ought to be to maximize public safety, these super-actors on the civic stage, they must be held accountable should they abandon themselves to their own present interests. The reason that I unalterably oppose nuclear power is so obvious to me that I remain astounded that everybody on earth is not likewise against it: Dangerously radioactive nuclear wastes must be stored and guarded for periods insanely in excess of any civilization’s frame of reference. Were it possible to render those spent fuel rods harmless in, say, five years, even then I’d worry about carelessness and greed, but at least I would be willing to suppose that nuclear power might be useful. Having reached that point, I would, of course, remain among the complacent ignoramuses against whom Buddha’s warning was directed.

Tepco’s complaint-apology—how could we have been expected to foresee so high a tsunami?—is nearly legitimate, but may fall short. “The cooling facilities survived the earthquake, at least partially,” remarked my interpreter. “The disaster occurred because the cooling facility was totally destroyed by the tsunami.
The cooling facility was located lower than the reactor itself.
Their assumption was a five-point-seven-meters tsunami while the tsunami was actually fourteen.” Well, should Tepco have been expected to prepare for a fourteen-meter tsunami?

Whatever your answer may be, please consider Buddha’s admonition an instant longer. “They do not listen to the good teachings; nor do they try to understand them; and simply give themselves up to the present interest, to wealth and lust.” If the present interest requires us to consume more and ever more energy, then dangerous forms of energy generation may become accepted as necessary. Practically speaking, any individual Japanese (or American) is powerless to prevent the construction of nuclear plants. But while you read this story, please consider how many more times you desire the Fukushima reactor disaster to occur. Should you come down on my side, consider relocating upwind.

THREE BLOCKS AWAY from the pedestrian mall where on this sunny, breezy afternoon members of the group called Atiatom proffered petitions against nuclear weapons and reactors, in an almost undamaged quarter stood the Sendai City War Reconstruction Memorial Hall, which presently served as a temporary evacuation center for thirty-one voluntary evacuees from Fukushima. One entered through the back door, the earthquake having rendered the lobby’s ceiling ducts liable to collapse. In Japan, neighborhood attachments run deep enough that communities often relocate as coherent entities. Hence the Memorial Hall housed people from a specific place: the northern sector of the radiation-poisoned zone.

Rather than seek out some bureaucrat who might have denied me entry privileges (I had already been refused permission to sleep in several evacuation shelters), I waylaid the first nonuniformed individual who seemed in no hurry—in this case, a bespectacled woman about twenty-five years old who had fled the Haramachi-ku ward of Minami Soma City. Officialdom had drawn two rings around Plant Number One. The inner one, twenty kilometers in diameter, constituted an area of involuntary evacuation. Residents of the outer ring were merely advised to leave, at their own expense; if they wished, they could remain home, keeping indoors as much as practicable. The woman, whose name was Hotsuki Minako, had lived in the outer ring.

She said: “On Friday there was an earthquake. On Sunday or Monday, on the news they said to stay inside. We tried to wait and see, but since we have kids, just my two kids and I came to Sendai with my husband. In a couple of days, my husband’s parents also came here.”

“So now your home is empty?”

“Yes.”

“Could you please tell me more about how you left Minami Soma?”

“After we saw the video of the reactor explosion, we immediately moved. Even after the explosion we thought we could come back. . .”

“Did you feel or hear the explosion?”

“No. We only saw the television image. There were three explosions, I think”—she held her fist to her mouth in thought. “And because we had kids, we were concerned. Otherwise we would have simply stayed inside.”

“If somebody cared for your children where it was safe, would you ever go back?”

“Life here is just fine, so we are not too concerned to go back.”

She had a very oval, girlish face; her bangs spilled over her thick eyebrows. Her hooded blue sweatshirt seemed too large for her.

Soon, she believed, her family and neighbors would be moved again, to a hotel, “so that the community itself will continue.” They had already stayed first at a relative’s, then at an elementary school. She supposed that after the hotel they would be moved still again.

“Do you think you’ll be returning home anytime soon?”

“I have a feeling it will take a year or more.”

“When you think about radiation, what comes into your mind?”

“I worked as a clerk for a Tepco subsidiary. So I’ve heard about the danger of radiation and about controlling it, but I hear it’s not
that
scary. But now, when I hear on television that it can affect your blood and so forth, well, I didn’t know that.”

“Was Tepco a good employer?”

“Those who worked at the nuclear site seemed to enjoy their job, but I only saw them once a month. I was in a clerical department.”

“How are you managing for expenses nowadays?”

“We are using our savings. I heard the city would pay some fifty thousand
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per household, but I was unable to attend the registration for that. The city office is not really functioning. I’ve lost my job, but I don’t know whether I can register for unemployment in this prefecture.”

“Should we ask for you at the prefectural office?”

“My company has not finished the clerical procedures related to our termination, so I cannot.”

She had two children, ages seven and five. Just now they were at the park with her husband. I asked how they were managing, and she replied: “They’ve regressed to a younger state. At home they do everything themselves. Here, I don’t know whether it’s from staying so long and living like this, they say, ‘I can’t do this. . .’”

I requested to see how her family lived. She hesitated. “My husband’s mother is a bit depressed, so. . .” At length I prevailed on her to at least ask the older woman, who kindly allowed the interpreter and me inside the long, almost empty room, over whose floor stretched many long, narrow tatami mats, very bright and clean, a few bags of belongings in a neat row against the wall. Sheets and blankets had been folded into neat squares and stacked.

Hotsuki Keiko, the mother-in-law, was lying down. She sat up when we came in, smiling politely, lowering her eyes, discreetly half-stretching; perhaps she had been sleeping. She appeared to be not much older than her daughter-in-law. Bowing as respectfully as I could, I inquired how the quake had expressed itself to her.

“At that time I was at home. I rushed out of the house, where there was a big plum tree. I held it for a long time.”

Since Minami Soma lies some distance from the ocean, the tsunami caused her no personal fear. But her aunt and uncle had drowned in their car. Fortunately, she said, the family could recover their bodies. Unfortunately, the cemetery had washed away.

“We were allowed within thirty kilometers. The recommendation was to stay inside. The city mayor told us to evacuate ‘on your responsibility,’ so some are still living there.”

“What is your opinion of the reactor accident?”

“Everyone has always said that nuclear power is safe. . .”