Into the Forbidden Zone (6 page)

The first floor of their house had been half submerged. The second floor was fine. Almost all of their electrical appliances would have to be replaced, from the rice cooker to the new television to the heating system, which unfortunately and uncharacteristically had not employed natural gas.

In the dining room, which now needed work, Grandmother Fumiko (born in 1933) said, speaking very slowly, tilting her wide, handsome face: “On that day I was in the garden when the earthquake broke out. When it stopped, I came in; there wasn’t much damage, just some glasses and candlesticks. Then I heard the tsunami alert: someone from the fire department calling on the loudspeaker. I cannot run like others. Then I saw the wave: lots of bubbles, so it was white. It was low. And I saw another big wave coming behind it, and so I tried to run. I ran to a higher place. Had I taken the big road I would have been drowned. I took the narrower, higher road. I looked back; the neighbor’s house was floating. After that, I picked up a bamboo stick and used it as a cane. In this city an elementary school is used as an evacuation center. I still live there. I just came here to welcome you.

“In the beginning we couldn’t communicate with anyone. After five days the parents came and I learned that the three grandchildren had survived. It was so scary that I trembled and couldn’t stop. I couldn’t sleep. Friends offered me clothes, rice balls,
²⁸
and a futon, so I’m doing fine.”

She then said: “For 350 years our family has been living here, and our ancestors’ saying is that in the Meiji era the big tsunami could not come up to here; therefore this house is safe. If I believed the saying of the ancestors, I wouldn’t be alive.”

“Are you concerned about the accident in Fukushima?”

“The radiation, when it rains, they tell us not to get wet. . .”

(Her grandson later told me: “About radiation people on this island don’t know anything.”)

I made my usual remark that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki it seemed particularly sad to me that Japanese were once again suffering from radiation, to which the old lady replied, clasping her hands: “I just want them to be careful.”

“The pines are all fallen and gone,” said the grandmother, stretching out her left hand toward where they used to be, out across the broken trees and sand and over the sea toward the former location of the great rock that the two grandsons used to call their “target” when they swam together. “From here we used to be able to see the sun rising through the pines. We were so proud of that. Now the ocean seems closer. That’s a little scary.”

In the garden she had grown corn, rapeseed, spinach, pumpkins, and white radishes.
²⁹
She said, “I feel so lonely now that I have nothing left to work on.”

The interpreter, Professor Morimoto’s student Takuto, and I went for a walk. Down on the futile breakwater of the wrecked beach we found a dripping Chinese book for boys and girls—the property of his late grandfather. “But we never read it anyway,” he laughed, leaving it for others. I found a field now prettily sown with scallop shells, a bamboo grove hung with garbage.

We met a fisherman in an orange jacket; he thought that a third of the island’s inhabitants had died on March 11. He said: “First they ran, then they returned to fetch something important; they didn’t survive.”

“Radiation?” he cried. “No, that’s Fukushima. We have nothing to do with that.”

Walking past him to the end of the concrete jetty was nearly pleasant, the gulls calling from their low islet, the sea wind smelling so delicious that I could not make myself wear a mask, my dosimeter still at 2.1. The setting sun cast a white trail on the water, and a helicopter, probably from the Self-Defense Forces, hummed out behind a cloud. As the day failed, the sad tokens of the tsunami withdrew into the shadow, until Oshima appeared nearly whole.

Takuto said to me: “I would like to do everything I can for this island. I would like to grow up and be a human being and help.”

Although our clothes were getting quite dirty (we expected to discard them after entering the hot zone), that kind and hospitable family refused to let us use our sleeping bags. Father and son laid out futons for the two women, and a bed for me in the adjacent chamber. That meant that the rest of them slept downstairs in those chilly rooms that stank of muck. Our host’s flashlight wavered slow and white around his belly, Professor Morimoto’s cell phone glowing as she and her student giggled over some stupid display, the interpreter switching on her headlamp, which illuminated her face, and I writing notes with the aid of my American flashlight, which was more yellow than anyone else’s.

Although the Murakamis accepted half a dozen cans of American food, they insisted on cooking us dinner. Ashamed and grateful, we came downstairs to the table, where Mr. Murakami’s stubbled, mustached face gleamed in the light of the Coleman lantern. He was the assistant headmaster of an elementary school. After the earthquake, he had permitted some students to depart in the care of their parents. I could tell that he felt guilty about what could have taken place; as it happened, however, they survived the tidal wave. He pressed on me a satellite-photograph disaster map of Oshima. With his spectacles high on his forehead, he showed me the family home on the map. He said: “Far too optimistic.”

The mother, Mrs. Murakami Kaoru, in her checked apron, stayed nearly always on her feet, her pale arms and cheekbones shining, the other grandmother slowly nodding her heavy head at the two of her three grandsons who were present, while bananas and aluminum foil shone softly in the dark. Mrs. Murakami invariably bowed to the grandmother when offering her food, with a polite
“hai, dozo.”
Given the absence of refrigeration I cannot imagine how she managed so well to make that ad hoc stew, many of its ingredients perishable. Mr. Murakami said: “For the first five days, we got only one rice ball per day, so I became thinner.”

An hour before dinner he had already been promising me treasure: a bottle of sake rescued from the first floor after the ocean departed. The sodden label was nearly invisible in the darkness. Again and again he filled my water glass to the brim, meanwhile offering it around to the other guests. Embarrassed to take so much from him, I finally pleaded tipsiness, at which he happily continued to fill his own glass, not least, he remarked, because it was Saturday night. He kept saying to his wife in English:
“I love you.”
She smiled with pleasure. I am happy to report that on the following drizzly sober morning, he said it again.

In the midst of dinner the electricity came back on, and they happily shouted,
“Surprise!”,
the grandsons grinningly illuminated. I assured our two hostesses that they were even more beautiful by electric light, and the grandmother clapped her hand over her laughing mouth.

Whenever I mentioned Hiroshima the whole family grew sad and silent, so I hated to bring up the matter, but it seemed my duty to raise it once more with the patriarch, which I did while we were still eating in the dark. The whites of his eyes seemed to flare. “Because Fukushima is prosperous on account of their fishery,” he said, “I fear their decline.” To me this seemed so Japanese, to worry about others first! He went on: “Atomic power is very dangerous. To me, it’s so dangerous. To me, it’s like war.”

That afternoon I had asked Takuto how he imagined the worst might be, and he replied, not quite a week before the Japanese government admitted that the reactor accident was a Level Seven like Chernobyl’s: “Like Chernobyl. Oshima could be contaminated. In the summer the wind comes from the south.”

Soldiers in Ishinomaki. Photo by William T. Vollmann

I WON’T DENY MY SELFISH RELIEF at leaving the stinking ugliness of Kesennuma and Oshima, not to mention my anticipation of getting safely home where such things never happen (Sacramento, my home city, is second only to New Orleans for flood risk in America). As well as I could determine from my dosimeter, the radiation in Kesennuma and Oshima seemed to be double that of Tokyo: a millirem every twelve hours. Now it had come time to return to Koriyama, and from there to make a foray or two into the evacuation zone.

At five-thirty in the morning in Oshima, the meter read 2.2 millirems, having turned over once since dusk. At nine-thirty on the Tohoku Expressway, after two hours of moderate rain and just north of the Ohira exit, it reached 2.3. Shortly before one in the afternoon, just as we came into Koriyama, it showed 2.4. By eight that night, thanks no doubt to a certain pleasure drive which I will shortly recount, it was at 2.5, and before six the following morning it had achieved a glorious 2.6 millirems: four times the Tokyo baseline, in short. According to the newspaper, the actual level was closer to forty-four times Tokyo’s,
³⁰
but, optimist that I am, I’ll keep faith with the toy Bob sold me. Here is an appropriate place to say that my dosimeter’s figure for Koriyama, the highest reading of any twenty-four-hour interval excepting the days of my two international flights, is not bad at all: it works out to 146 millirems per year. One American dosimetrist opined that as much as half of this might be predisaster “natural” background radiation.
³¹
To reach my danger threshold of 5 rems, I would have had to hang around Koriyama for more than thirty-four years. All the same, if I were young, I might not want to marry and raise children in Koriyama.
³²

REGARDING THAT DAY’S PLEASURE DRIVE, I will tell you that shortly after five in the evening, once the nasty and potentially hazardous rain had ceased, the interpreter and I hired a taxi to convey us to the Komatsu Shrine, of which none of us, including the driver, had ever heard; the interpreter and I had chosen it after a glance at her map. The driver was a bald old man who insisted on his financial rights. His stubbornness had nothing to do with the danger; the question was whether to pay by the hour, the meter, or the job. Finally we compromised on all three. The driver then said that this journey might not even be allowed, because it seemed as if Komatsu Shrine might lie—what a coincidence!—within the forced evacuation ring. He radioed his boss, who gave us his blessing, and off we went. Needless to say, I watched the dosimeter, expecting radiation to rise in proportion to the inverse-square law, but anyhow I have already spoiled the suspense of that business.

The driver had picked up only two fares that day, both of them insurance company operatives who were verifying earthquake damage. Now the highway was open, he continued, so that made it smooth. He was a good talker, and I had already begun to like him. The dosimeter remained at 2.4 and the evening was clear, the bare trees on the verge of appearing springlike. Here came more lovely silver-white plum blossoms in the dusk. The driver said that he used to party in Kesennuma; he was an angler; the fish were so good there. I did not have the heart to tell him what the fisherman in the orange windbreaker had told me in Oshima—that all the fishing was ruined there for years to come.
³³

He said that Koriyama was very quiet at night now.

Rolling up the ever emptier road into the grassier hills, we saw here and there a long straight line of cabbages in the grass, or jade-colored onions growing high. We were all wearing masks for the dust. The taxi was hot; my mask made me a trifle nauseous; but I thought it best not to roll down the window. Did the driver worry about the contamination? (
Contamination
was once again the word they all used; oh, it sounded so much better than
radioactivity
!) Not at all, he chuckled. “My wife,” he laughed, “she told me since it was raining not to go out, but I don’t care at all! The government always says: no
immediate
effect on your health! Ha, ha, ha! Every day they announce the level of radiation within the prefecture. Compared with an X-ray check, which is 600 sieverts,
³⁴
that doesn’t sound scary at all!”

“Was that sieverts or millisieverts?” I inquired.

“I thought it was six hundred,” he said vaguely, “but however strong the contamination is, it’s not comparable. We have never thought about these things.”

The driver’s bald head was as pale yellow as the bamboo leaves at sunset, and he seemed rather happy, the local road winding us under bluish-purple clouds, ostensibly toward Funehiki, and then as the driver mentioned a fine cherry-blossom-viewing spot (although the season was still too early), we turned onto National Highway 288.