Into the Forbidden Zone (4 page)

“Mrs. Hotsuki, here is a question that baffles me. As a citizen of the country that dropped atomic bombs on Japan, I wonder how this could have happened in your country twice. First you were our victims, and then, it seems, you did it again to yourselves.”

“We don’t know much about the nuclear bomb,” explained the older woman. “They’re pretty far from here, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we just heard from our parents that some plane came over and so forth. They didn’t talk about it.”

“Why didn’t they?”

“Unless you go to that area and see that atomic site, then maybe you have no interest in it.” Trying to give me what I appeared to expect, Mrs. Hotsuki gleaned through her memories, then presently grew animated, gesturing and almost grimacing as if she were close to tears, nodding her head as she said: “Once I saw a display in Chiba Prefecture, all about the kamikazes. I was so moved I couldn’t stop crying.”

Less moved by the kamikazes than perhaps I should have been, I resurrected the matter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It turned out that both of the Hotsuki women believed the atomic bomb to have been worse than the reactor accident, because “at least we evacuated.” Minako, the young daughter-in-law, explained that “the prefectural office said that if you just brush it off, it should be okay, and you don’t even have to take the radiation screening. So we felt better.”

As Orwell would say, ignorance is strength. Or was the prefectural office correct? Alpha particles were nearly harmless, if one managed not to ingest them; beta particles once washed or brushed away could do no further harm. While I essayed to formulate why that procedure might be inadequate, a pretty girl wearing a red armband bowed herself in, announcing that the child-minders were here again, today with candy; she also wished to inquire whether anyone might be sick. So perhaps it was all perfect; no matter how politely I pleaded, neither of my two interviewees would accept a ten-thousand-yen note, not even for the children’s sake; wouldn’t you rather believe that they lacked for nothing?

Having scored my interview, I dared to risk an encounter with officialdom, and so met a certain bespectacled, pimpled, and narrow-faced young man named Mr. Maeda, who identified himself as “just an employee of this facility. If you put this in your article, you must contact the city office. That’s what we have been told.” (I most inexcusably neglected to follow his instructions, but, reader, if you wish to do so, the telephone number is 022-214-1148.) He photocopied my letter of press accreditation most alertly; fortunately, my interpreter had always reminded me to keep it neatly folded, in homage to its pretense of importance. “In your opinion,” I inquired, “how dangerous is the radiation?” Mr. Maeda replied: “None of us are particularly concerned.”

ISHINOMAKI, THEY SAID, looked now the way that Sendai had two weeks ago. In Sendai some people stayed for two days on their roofs until the water subsided. In Ishinomaki there were those who were trapped on their roofs for a week.

On the other hand, Ishinomaki was better off than Rikuzentakada. Never mind that; isn’t there always a worse place?

The fifty-kilometer drive in the veterinary science professor’s car would ordinarily have taken an hour. Ever since the quake, there were traffic jams. It took nearly two hours to reach Ishinomaki; and, indeed, in the course of my journey I had almost daily recourse to the four- or six-hundred-dollar creeping taxi ride or half-day stalled bus ride (the region’s railways being broken), on this highway or that expressway, frozen in traffic or not, so many kilometers toward or away from Fukushima, the long windshield wipers sometimes dancing in rain of unknown salubriousness, the radio news on low, the cab creeping and stopping between other cars in a like situation, the driver occasionally misplacing his Japanese patience.

In Ishinomaki the first story of the supermarket was open and newly gleaming. Most goods were present in prequake abundance. Only one yogurt was allowed per customer, several shelves were bare, and others held milk brands from Kyushu and Hokkaido that were not normally sold here. The brand new washing machines were sold out, the tsunami having ruined ever so many; the automobile dealerships were booming for much the same reason.

The professor’s name was Morimoto Motoko. She lived in Sendai. After the tsunami hit, her two teenaged children had stayed overnight in the care of their teachers; now they were living in Osaka with relatives. She was making this drive to bring supplies to one of her students, a young man named Utsumi Takehiro, who now bowed to us; so did his mother, Yoshie. They got into their car and we followed them home, Ishinomaki being less easy to navigate than before. “If you go beyond the number-45 road,” said Takehiro drily, “the scenery changes.”

Passing the vegetable market, which was now a temporary morgue, we rounded a corner, and I saw many grooves cut deep in the smooth tan earth, with a line of cars and people perpendicular to them on the far side, and white coffins down in the farthest of those open trenches. Takehiro’s grandmother was buried here. The tsunami had caught her. From the way that he spoke about her, I came to believe that he had loved her very much.

“I didn’t see the body, actually,” he said. “My parents saw a hundred bodies every day. They finally found her. Now it takes a year or two before they’re cremated. First, we temporarily bury them. Then they’re disinterred. There are only a few crematoria, so we have to take turns.”
²¹

“I’m sorry,” I said.

 “Our dog was also killed, because he was chained. We took his body to Niigata, where my father was working, and cremated him. But you need a special vehicle to transport a human body, and those are in shortage.”

Now came heaps of mud, canted trailers, gouged walls, crumpled cars, the crazy skeleton of a shed barely supporting its intact roof, many relief workers and blue-clawed cranes, half-smashed houses on a muddy ugly plain with wet trenches tunneled through it, man-high mounds of debris on the roadside; and so we came into the Tsukiyama district (the clouds like sheets of white slate, the sun in the pine tops, and the dust in my throat). Several large oil tanks had exploded, setting off numerous fires. We rolled past the wreckage of the paper mill, whose round bales of product lay oozing and dripping everywhere. Paper was now in short supply, remarked Mrs. Utsumi.

“My uncle was rescued by helicopter, and he appeared on TV,” said Takehiro proudly.

An American battleship lay on the horizon of the pale blue sea. Here came a long mild wave, its crest so clean. One of its predecessors, the tsunami, had dragged a giant fuel tank onto what remained of the dike. More heaps of mud framed our scenic drive, accompanied by fuel tanks thrust against and through roofs, cars leaning against trees, block after block of ugliness; and presently we turned down a street of newly made junk lots and Takehiro said, “This is my house.”

His next-door neighbor Kawanami Shugoro made us black coffee on a butane-powered hot plate on the dust-choked rickety table inside his blighted house, which appeared intact on the outside. He wore a cap, presumably for warmth. Fat hunks of ceiling dangled down from the rafters, the Sheetrock torn like cardboard. Everything in the living room cabinet was in place, but the cabinet itself tilted at about thirty degrees.

Mr. Kawanami said: “When the earthquake came I was at home. My office had some meeting, so I was trying to change into a suit. At that time there was not much damage, so I changed back into my work clothes and drove the clerical worker to her home near the supermarket. Then I headed toward the office. Then there was a traffic jam, and they said that the tsunami was coming, so I made a U-turn, meaning to come home again. I saw water coming out of the canal by the senior high school and vehicles were floating; so, since that direction was no good, I made another U-turn and took a higher direction. At the river’s edge, the fire department personnel told me not to go that way, but it didn’t look bad. All the same, the water level seemed a bit higher, and then I saw it come over the dike. So I fled. I had to sleep on the ground for four days. I went to Yamato to confirm that my grandchildren were all right. Then there was a gas shortage, and it was so cold. I found a garbage bag to keep me warm—so cold, so cold! It was snowing. I tried to find someplace warm; I took more and more garbage bags for a shirt. . .”

“What color was the tsunami?”

He laughed. “I don’t remember. It was black, they said, with oil.”

He was a cheery, rugged, white-bearded old man—sixty-six years old, with the face of a workingman. At the shipyard he was in charge of safety and hygiene. The neighbors stood around us. Cans of juice were on the filthy table. His wife had led some panicked Chinese girls up onto the second story of a parking lot, and they all survived. “Everyone went to the roofs,” he said. The second or third tsunami wave had been in his opinion the bad one, people floating in their cars and calling out for help until they sank. Mr. Kawanami said, “These images were in my brain yesterday, and I got depressed and confused. . .”

A couple of his acquaintance had fled. The wife had returned home for their valuables, because she was a strong swimmer. Fortunately, they recovered her corpse, which still gripped a bag of precious things.

“When you think of all you’ve suffered,” I asked him, “do you think the reactor accident might be better or worse than that?”

“What shall I say? I can’t even imagine. This area is where elderly people are residing. It requires money to rebuild a house, and many people are scared. My wife says that if everybody leaves, then only we will stay. We think that since we are old, we can stay until we die, since
this”
—he must have meant the tsunami—“happens only on a thousand-year scale. I planned to retire this year and live a nice relaxed life. But the money for my future will have to be spent on repairs. Moreover, the people at the nuclear plant, they are talking about some nuclear explosion. Our governor is so proud of our nuclear plant, compared with Fukushima.”

In the filth, muddy dishes were neatly stacked. Freshwater was still too rare for washing just yet.

At my request, Mr. Kawanami took me upstairs to admire the sand and silt. He said: “When the wave came, each tatami mat struggled like
this!”
and his arms writhed.

Thanking him and departing with my best bow, I was next introduced to Mrs. Ito Yukiko, age sixty-six, who received me narrow-eyed, with her shoulders drawn in and her fists on her lap as she sat on the edge of her chipped, cracked concrete porch, wearing orange wind pants, a dingy sweater, and a white-striped wool cap pulled down over her eyebrows. The toes of her slippers touched the mucky, rubbly ground, which happened to be decorated with broken dishes. Here as everywhere else in that neighborhood the smell of diesel was nauseating. Her two young granddaughters, wearing galoshes, played at sweeping the doorway, then settled down to read what might have been comic books. They were very shy; I left them alone. I did not ask, since no one mentioned them, where their parents might be.

“I was born in the beach area,” Mrs. Ito said. “I have experienced the Chilean tsunami, and also another one in this prefecture. So I knew well that when an earthquake comes, you have to take care in case of a tsunami. But
this
one,” she said, grimacing (and stopping to pick up a spoon that one of the little girls had dropped),
“this
one was different.”

Well aware that quake-deformed doors might trap people behind them, she had carefully opened the house door in advance, then rode out the temblor just within, for fear of getting brained by her roof tiles. Unlocking the safe, she removed “the memory of the ancestors,” evidently their Buddhist memorial tablets, and then, believing she still had time, searched for a cotton
furoshiki
cloth in which to wrap them. One of the granddaughters then suggested that she might wish to take the cell phone. And so they fled in the car. Sending the two girls ahead, she returned to the vehicle to retrieve their dog and her wallet. Here her hands began twisting tighter and tighter together in her lap, and when she said, “I took a narrow way, and then I saw the tsunami in the middle of the road,” I found the horror in her round reddish face nearly unendurable.

“The first wave took all the belongings away from me, so then I ran to where the wave was lower. I know that a human cannot escape the tsunami once she is caught in it, so I removed my shoes and climbed a wall, and first it was unstable, but I found a stable place, clinging with my toes. The water was up to my waist, and then it was up to my chest; I was holding onto the roof so that I couldn’t be carried away; I was screaming
help, help, help!
to the spirit of my late husband. . . Then it came.”

The grandchildren went on reading books in their galoshes in the fishy, diesely wind (and since it might for all I knew be blowing from the reactor, I inspected my dosimeter, which at six in the morning had been reading 1.9 accrued millirems and now after three hours in Ishinomaki turned over to 2.0, which signified that the radioactivity here was at least twice that of Tokyo’s—not bad; never mind those hypothetical beta particles riding on the wind); and a crow cawed; there was a heap of tires; from a glassless window, sodden futons hung out to dry.

“I was on the rooftop, so I was rescued at the end, before it got dark. I didn’t see my granddaughters for two days, but their teacher told me they were all right. . .”

Behind a leaning grate, her old neighbor was picking up clinking things from the mud of his former yard.

“How relevant is the nuclear accident to you?” I asked her.

“The power plant may be necessary, but they ought to publish the facts. It seems to be stopped all right, but is it really? They’ve said that in some fishery products the concentration is low, but accumulation will be bad. . .”

Gazing down at the sand by her feet, I saw a small fish-mummy, convulsed.

In a narrow zone of sand between two ruined houses, an old man was planting seeds. Streams of plastic twitched in the tsunami-pollarded trees. A twisted cypress, still green, rested against the patio wall of a house that had been smashed open on its eave-end. I bowed goodbye to Mrs. Ito, who slowly crept into her house.