Into the Forbidden Zone (2 page)

ON MARCH 11, 2011, a 9.0-magnitude temblor struck the eastern coast of Japan’s main island. A tsunami followed. The day before I departed Tokyo for the disaster zone, the casualties had been totted up as follows: killed, 12,175; missing, 15,489; injured, 2,858.
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In the affected area there happened to be a pair of nuclear power plants owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or, in English-language parlance, Tepco. The six-reactor Fukushima Number One Nuclear Plant emerged from the catastrophe with more cracks and leaks than its counterpart a few kilometers south. By the 26th, water in Plant Number One’s second reactor was emitting at least a sievert per hour of radiation.
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At this rate, a person would receive that five-rem dose in about three minutes.

The situation seemed unpromising, all the more so since I was not the only ignoramus in Japan:

March 27:

Q. Where did this radioactive water come from?

A. Plant officials and government regulators say they don’t know.
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April 3:

How much water has leaked and for how long was not known as of Saturday afternoon.
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Before I had left for Japan, Peter Bradford, formerly a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and now serving on the board of trustees of the Union of Concerned Scientists, had said to me: “I’m getting increasingly concerned about the failure of the Japanese public to get accurate information. In the first week I thought the Japanese government was being cautious for good reason. In the third week, there are more and more symptoms that details are being held back. Just now there’s first of all that one extremely high radiation reading, which was declared to be a mistake, and secondly the discovery of iodine-134, which has a very short half-life and would only be present if there’s some recriticality, and they said that’s also a mistake. That’s two mistakes.”

“What would the worst case be?”

“If one of the cores was able to go critical to produce even a small-scale nuclear explosion.”

“How much of Japan would become uninhabitable?”

“It’s hard to say. It depends a lot on the wind. So far the Japanese have been lucky with the winds blowing west to east, out to sea.”

ALTHOUGH MY LETTER of press accreditation informed those very few Japanese who were interested that my duties involved “interviewing individuals and officials on behalf of our publication,” I did not see it as my duty to obtain figures on casualties, radiation levels, et cetera, which might well be lies and would certainly be superseded. (The stunning capacity of the Japanese official to say absolutely nothing is matched only by the absurd degree of trust that his public places in him; while the cynical suspicion of the American electorate finds its perfect mate in their officials’ complacent and sometimes even blustering dishonesty.)

Nor could I imagine that “experts” had any more to say about the profoundest questions raised by this continuing tragedy than those who suffered by it. Finally, I could see no benefit in seeking out the people in greatest emotional pain. As you read this account, you will see that my interviewees were, for materially devastated individuals, relatively “lucky.” Only a couple of families had lost members—yet. This selection was less the fruit of my deliberate policy than the consequence of the fact that those not grieving the death of a relative felt more inclined to open their hearts to a stranger; hence I was more likely to encounter them.

However conservatively considerate I imagined this approach to be, it scarcely put me in the clear. My interpreter, to whom I had been close for many years, was sluggish and irritable as I had never seen her; she admitted to being depressed, not to mention enraged at Tepco and her government. Her cousin, who had not met me, expected that I would do harm, and therefore admonished me (a) to interview no one without that Japanese standby, a go-between; (b) to begin by inviting my interviewees to refrain from answering any question they didn’t like; and (c) above all, to pay and pay and pay. I always felt that I was doing just that whenever I visited Japan, being well accustomed to slipping crisp ten-thousand-yen notes into “gratitude envelopes.” Once that would have been a trifle over eighty American dollars; now it was 125. I was willing to keep on disbursing this amount, especially to those in need; my interpreter and her cousin, however, informed me that such a small sum would be “unthinkable.” They expected me to pay at least forty or fifty thousand yen. I dug in my heels, inviting the interpreter to open her heart and add whatever she wished to my envelope, as indeed she did, not without quiet resentment; I’m sure she paid out at least as much as I remitted to her. At length we agreed to disagree. With this ugly episode our work began.

That day and every other I watched the dosimeter, perhaps more frequently than I needed to, but I hardly knew how salubrious each hour might be. The display indeed turned over in increments of 0.1 millirems; there was no in-between. In San Francisco, as I’ve said, it registered that same 0.1 millirems about every twenty-four hours, usually changing sometime during the night. The flight to Japan rewarded me with 1.2 millirems, and the return flight, which was shorter, with 0.8; both of these worked out to more or less a millirem per hour. Tokyo was essentially as radioactive as San Francisco, which pleased me for my own sake and everyone else’s.

At six in the morning, the cumulative reading was 1.5. The bus left Tokyo at eight. I was, let’s say, 230 kilometers from the reactor.
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The plum trees were already in flower; the cherry blossoms must already have opened in the south. Shortly before noon we stopped for lunch in Koriyama, 58 kilometers from the danger spot, the mountain-ringed country opening out, with the rice fields still straw-colored (a month to go before planting) and snow shining on the western peaks; just then the display turned over to 1.6. We had come into the Tohoku region, which the interpreter referred to as Japan’s breadbasket, adding, “so I’m very worried about the future.” Many items in the convenience-store restaurant were sold out. Here the Japanese Self-Defense Forces began to be evident, some of them wearing flat caps and the others sporting hard hats. Continuing northward, we drew level with Plant Number One and then passed it, reaching Sendai (208 kilometers from the bad place) in mid-afternoon. From the dosimeter I judged that Koriyama must be at least twice as radioactive as Tokyo, which hypothesis I would test on my return there, once the safer portion of my work had concluded.

In Tokyo the stresses of the disaster had approached the inconspicuous: a blackout here and there, a shortage of diapers and sanitary wipes, which people were sending to their relatives in the stricken zone. As for Sendai, it was recovering; although the airport was not open, heating gas remained unavailable, and milk, yogurt, eggs, and cigarettes were in short supply, at least the two-hour waits in petrol stations had come to an end and the electricity was back on. Indeed, downtown appeared untouched, if one did not wander about to discover the warning signs posted on this or that building.

I hired a taxi to take me down into the Wakabayashi district of Sendai, which had been harder hit.

“I was on duty in the car,” said the driver, whose name was Sato Masayoshi.
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“There were no passengers. I heard the earthquake alert on the radio. I looked for a wide open place to park, since the buildings were shaking. You couldn’t stand! I was sitting on the median strip. It lasted a good two minutes, moving between east and south, laterally.
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When the tremors stopped, I got out of the cab, tried my cell phone, which did not connect, and used a public phone to call my family. It rang and rang but nobody answered. So I drove to the office, received permission to stop working, and hurried home. The traffic jam was terrible, but everybody was okay. We had no electricity for three days. My grandchildren enjoyed it.”

He pointed. “Over there, there’s the restaurant that shook so much. And you see this gas station! The ceiling dropped. . .”

“Did the tsunami come here?”

“No, this is all earthquake.”

“What was your opinion when you first heard about the reactor accident?”

“Sendai is eighty or ninety kilos from the power plant,
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so I’m not really worried about it. The wind in this season blows from the land to the sea. If it blows from the south, that will be a problem. The highly contaminated water needs to be released, they say. . .”

That was the word I so often heard:
contaminated.
It sounded less frightening than
radioactive.

“How contaminated is the sea around Sendai?”

“I don’t think they’ve measured it yet.”

Gazing down at the dosimeter in my shirt pocket, I was pleased to see it still at 1.6. We came to a shed that had been uprooted. I photographed it, and then the driver remarked, a trifle indignantly: “Today a fishing boat in Chosi Port,
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even without inspection their catch was refused!”

I wondered aloud if fish and eels and other such foods might be getting dangerous. Not caring to pursue those implications, or perhaps simply wishing to return to business, the driver announced like a tour guide: “And now we’re making a right turn to the place where the houses are gone. Here to the left there’s a highway. In some places the highway blocked the water. Some of the people who ran up on top of it survived.”

“Are you worried about the next earthquake?”

“Since the Miyagi Coast earthquake in 1978, it’s been a long time. This latest one was not the one the experts were discussing. People are talking about the next one; yes, there may be another. . . Here the water came,” he continued, gesturing at some mud fields decorated with fallen trees and stumps. “On account of the salt water, you won’t be able to grow anything here for five or six years. They were growing soybeans.”

A fallen pine, cables, heaps of mud, bent pipes, metal grilles, fallen poles as thick as my shoulder, these sad and ugly objects varied themselves monotonously all the way to the mud horizon. On one side of the road the former fields were flooded with seawater. On the other, on the edge of streaming tidal flats which used to be rice fields, a two-story concrete house, windowless but seemingly intact, supported a second home that had been smashed up against it, the roof twisted like sections of ruined armor, both structures choked with rubbish. A detachment of goggled, web-belted, booted, camouflage-uniformed Self-Defense Forces from Hokkaido were dissecting the two houses in search of bodies. The slogan one often saw on their helmets was: “Let’s cheer up, Sendai!”

A cool breeze blew from the sea; I wondered if it was poisonous with beta particles. In any event, the dosimeter remained at 1.6. On and on in the house lots, sad heaps of trash that used to be houses hid their secrets. In this prefecture alone, more than 7,800 people had died, according to the current figure. Here came a civilian cyclist, stern and skinny, riding up the dirt road and passing us, continuing down among the house-stumps; I suppose that he was looking for his home. Slowly, while the soldiers stood around, the crane-claw opened and closed, pulling up a heap of crackling tree stumps. A young soldier informed me that they had found no corpses yet. When I photographed him, he pulled himself up tall and straight. He said that he was not worried about radiation; the likelihood of its coming here was low.

It is hard to describe to you the littered flatness, everything pulverized into irrelevance, some foundations still visible. One of the driver’s colleagues had lived here. Now he was staying at his son’s. The neighborhoods of Okada, Gamo, Shiratori, and Arahama were gone. The former geriatric home was full of rubble and trees. By now the trees had already started to decompose, so that when they edged up the sides of houses, they infiltrated them like subtly woven rattan, perfectly fitted by the weaver-upholsterer called death. Occasionally the empty doors and windows of better-off buildings had been protected by blue tarps taped into place. We drove slowly south through the smell of tidal flats, toward the Natori River, passing blue and gray stretches of rippling water, and a sign: Seaside Park Adventure Field.

“I have no words,” the driver said.

Here came mud and muck and shining water, a car in water up to the snout, a policeman in a hard hat, more fallen trees, a red sports car turned onto its side, the light now pretty on the rice fields. In one place, the road had been licked away underneath, the asphalt looking silly as it stretched through the air.

“Were most people drowned or crushed?”

“I think they drowned. Some of the cars were in a traffic jam. I know of one person who climbed up a pine tree to survive. His decision to give up the car was good.”

The cool air was dust-prickly in my throat. The driver and the interpreter both wore masks. I wondered some more about beta particles but decided to rely on the inverse-square law, which in general terms states that as radiation spreads from its source over a greater area, its intensity declines. The Natori bridge had been closed off with a checkerboarded barrel. A man with a light-stick baton and hard hat stood demoralized beside a flashing police car. Behind him, a boat had been pounded sideways into the muck.