Into the Forbidden Zone (7 page)

Since he had been born in 1941, I asked him how he compared the dropping of the two atom bombs with the reactor accident, and he said, “There was a movie I saw as a child, a black-and-white movie, so vividly showing the ruins of Hiroshima and Bikini Island. Now, Koriyama is farther than the thirty-kilometer ring; in fact, it’s sixty; but if there’s a hydrogen explosion, I’m afraid that Koriyama may be in the forced evacuation zone. Having reached the age of seventy, if we’re told to evacuate, I said to my wife, where should we go, Sado or where? When I see the situation of evacuees, I don’t seem to be in a good condition! In Koriyama there are three evacuation centers, mainly from the forced evacuation ring around the reactor. Most people are in a hall called Big Palette, which can accommodate three thousand people. There’s also a baseball stadium which holds three or four hundred, and. . .”

Night globes glowed in a roadside restaurant, and then at a gas station. We rolled across the Inasokamatsi River, then down through a cut tasseled with golden grass, a gray-green volcanic-shaped mountain projecting itself ahead upon the pale cloudy sky. An old man in a russet robe toiled slowly uphill toward his house, swaying from side to side. Presently we entered the municipality of Funehiki. The driver said, “You know Chernobyl? I watched on the news; there was a ninety-year-old woman who grows her own vegetables, lives alone, and gets sick occasionally but is basically fine.” How inspiring, I thought.

Turning away from the route that led to the famous limestone caves, he said, “Where we are going is about forty kilometers from the plant. If you stay on this road, you will go straight there,” at which the back of my neck prickled slightly. “If you pass that point up there, you approach the mountain and then you go down again.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“Once. It was a tour. At that time we never thought this could happen.”

That afternoon while we waited for the rain to stop, the interpreter and I had swallowed our Cold War–era potassium iodide tablets, courtesy of my friend Dave, who had purchased a bottle at some gun show. The bright yellow-green, crumbling pills were to be taken only in the event of fallout, said the label. (My tongue tingled for days and I got a rash; the interpreter remained unaffected.) In retrospect I am ashamed that we did not think to bring one along for our driver. Fortunately, the meter remained at 2.4.

We entered the town of Tokiwa and stopped at the shrine. The mask had fogged up my glasses so badly that I pulled it off, gratefully inhaling the chilly air. The interpreter and I ascended the stone stairs. Above the wooden-slatted offering box, the immense corn-hued tassel, the size and proportions of a girl-child’s skirt, barely swayed in the breeze, ferruled (if that is the word) by a tall hexagon engraved with the name of the person who had dedicated it. Climbing the last wooden steps in stockinged feet as tradition requires, I peered into the windows of the place and, as usual, saw mostly darkness, interrupted by the reflection of that tassel behind me and by indistinct golden gleamings deep within. My heart revolted at slipping the mask back on, but I did, descending toward the pines and clouds and down to the steep edge of this high place, down the decrepit stone steps, which might have been damaged by the earthquake. I could smell the pines.

Informing the driver that the dosimeter still indicated a safe amount of radiation, I asked whether he would be willing to take us farther.

“Sure,” he laughed. “I’ll take you to the point where you can’t go anymore.”

“The radio announces it every day,” he remarked. “For the past few days, this area has had a very low level.”

So we drove up the road toward Futaba, the pallid roofs of houses fading into the low oaks. “This area is close to the plant, but they say it is not just distance but also geography,” he explained. Suddenly we reached a yellow signboard, no more impressive than any sidewalk restaurant’s, whose red letters warned: DANGER: ENTRY IS RESTRICTED 10 KILOMETERS FROM HERE. We had entered the voluntary evacuation zone. From here on, the road was quite empty. The next village was virtually lightless, except for the yellow windows of three sidewalk vending machines from which no one had yet pulled the plugs. Another sign for Futaba and an indication that we were still on Highway 288 separated us from the following village. Now it had become nearly pitch dark, although I could infrequently make out the silhouettes of forest ridges.

I told the driver that this excursion was very interesting. He chuckled: “I am ready to cooperate as much as possible, because anyway I don’t have much longer to live.”

There came another winding stretch. Soon we would arrive at Miyako Oji  (twenty kilometers from the reactor), beyond which rose a mountain that would, I hoped, protect us from beta particles and gamma rays. I inquired whether there might be any legend relative to Miyako Oji; the driver replied that there was not. “What’s popular in this vicinity is beetles for the kids. They produce them here.” As a matter of fact, the interpreter had once purchased a pet beetle for her sons (although whether or not it came from Miyako Oji she did not know); it failed to thrive, I am sorry to say. When we turned right at the junction for Inaki, it was quite dark. “Most of them are gone, I guess,” said the driver.

And so we came to the inner ring, where tall signs with black and red letters interrupted the road, the prefecture proclaiming that further travel was forbidden while the police merely announced that it was restricted. In the darkness beyond lurked a police riot bus, empty or not. Since there was nothing to see and the hazards (including perhaps arrest) were unknown, I could not in good conscience ask the driver and the interpreter to go any farther that night, brave though they were. We did take a spin through Miyako Oji, whose houses seemed intact but dark. A lonely white dog trotted up to the taxi, looking up at us hopefully; as we continued on our way it darted crazily back and forth. The driver remarked that the evacuation centers such as Big Palette did not allow any pets, which therefore had to be left behind. Should I have tried to take it to some animal shelter in Koriyama, if there were such a place? Who knew how contaminated the creature was?

“It’s the first time that I’ve seen this here,” said the driver. “It’s like a ghost town. About twenty years ago in Koriyama, on Christmas Eve a cable fell, and there was a blackout, so black! And this is the first time since then.”

As we began to drive away from the reactor I pulled my mask off and instantly tasted dust in my throat, which made me anxious, because what if the dosimeter were lying? It was all I had to go on, really.

The old driver said, “What’s the most scary around here is the wind that comes from the sea. That’s when the radiation comes. In summer, that’s when it comes.”

A quarter-hour later, at eight o’clock, the dosimeter clocked 2.5 millirems.

ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, a Sunday, which began chilly and breezy while the dosimeter displayed its predicted 2.6 millirems and the hotel television explained that the overflow trench for the contaminated reactor would soon itself overflow, we set out for the danger zone once more. As before, I wore my ball cap (a convenient resting place for airborne beta particles), my house-paint-spotted old raincoat (quite inappropriate for appearance-conscious Japan) whose virtues were its hood and its expendability—this magnificent accessory was intended to go over a disposable poncho whose sleeveless armholes I would seal with masking tape around the raincoat’s sleeves; beneath this was an optional sweater of polyester fleece, for the tsunami zone had been chilly; then came my fifteen-year-old long-sleeved shirt (just broken in; a shame to lose it, but anyhow I had worn it before for chemical experiments), and in the breast pocket of this lived my dosimeter; beneath this shirt I wore another lighter one. The idea was to pull on my yellow kitchen gloves at the last moment, taping them around the cuffs with masking tape; then came my old blue jeans and underpants, my grubby socks still soggy with tsunami scum, my late father’s old shoes, disposable shoe covers at the ready—and, of course, my respirator, guaranteed to filter out 99.97 percent of all particulate matter, although, since I had bought it at an American hardware store, the label advised me that misuse might cause injury or death.

I had brought a second set of all the exotic items for the interpreter (who in due course would inherit the dosimeter). Needless to say, the poncho, gloves, masking tape, and shoe covers had not graced my person so far on this adventure; all the other clothes I had been wearing unstintingly, day after day, since I had to suppose that everything I did not store in Tokyo might become contaminated, so why throw away more than I had to? Although I succeeded in showering every day except in Oshima, I doubt that I made a very professional show. The notebook I carried, a scarlet-spined yellow affair emblazoned with a pink-tutued ballerina who curtseyed from beneath a cloud of multicolored butterflies, might have been what tipped the scales, causing policemen to snicker softly the instant my back was turned. Never mind; even in former years, when I had been younger and slimmer and needed to dress up for interviews in my one and only business suit, my best achievement was a look of mild surprise on the interpreter’s face, accompanied by this encomium: “You look almost handsome!”

On last night’s drive to Miyako Oji we had brought with us our yellow kitchen gloves, respirators, et cetera, but the dosimeter persuaded us not to use them. Moreover, we both would have felt ashamed to protect ourselves so ostentatiously without doing likewise for the driver. In my American imaginings of this final visit to the hot zone I had envisioned a walk of some sort, probably on my own; any taxi driver would have stayed inside the vehicle, with the windows cranked up against beta particles. Just in case someone accompanied me, I brought double everything.

Now of course this does not excuse me from having forgotten the safety of any hypothetical third party; never mind the fact that a sane person might well decline to drive anywhere that such accoutrements were advisable; in short, last-minute logic (and decency) prohibited the interpreter and me from setting forth in any such dress, although we did bring them with us just in case.

And so we each wore a medium-quality surgical mask, purchased at a nursing supply store in San Francisco; we offered our new driver, whom I will introduce in a moment, a fresh mask of his own, but he was satisfied with the one he had. I wore my hat, raincoat (unzipped as long as we were in the car), heavy shirt, light shirt, underwear, jeans, socks, and shoes. Upon our return to Koriyama the yellow gloves would go on, the shoes would get wiped down with a damp cloth before permanent removal to a plastic bag, and then pretty much the rest of that day’s clothing, as well as the gloves, also got disposed of in a suitable place—contaminated presents for a contaminated town. The fancy respirators, the backpacks, and all the other usable items we gave away to an evacuee at Big Palette that night, before proceeding to the gymnasium for our radiation screening.

As it turned out, this day’s accrued dose would be no higher than the previous two Koriyama days: 0.4 millirems in twenty-four hours.
³⁵
I flatter myself that prudence played a part in this result; I paid attention to wind direction as well as distance, and consulted the dosimeter every few minutes; still, we seem to have had two very lucky days (a statement I intend to retract should I come down with some cesium-characteristic cancer within the next few years). The interpreter later informed me that in the newspapers she had read that the maximum recorded radioactivity suffered by any inhabited place fell forty-odd kilometers north of the reactor: 16,020 microsieverts over twenty-one days, which worked out to seven millirems a day; at that rate it would have taken only sixty-six days to achieve my ceiling of five rems.
³⁶

First we went to Big Palette. I hoped to find an evacuee who knew how to enter the inner ring without police interference. En route, the driver explained that Koriyama was “the Oriental Vienna,” an appellation I never would have imagined. My tongue was still tingling and stinging from the potassium iodide. The driver said, “Well, we have no direct impact from the reactor, but I don’t like the rumors.”

As soon as we stepped out of the taxi we spied people passing in and out of Big Palette. I stopped a youngish-looking woman who was carrying her granddaughter against her chest. The child and her mother were from Ohkuma, five kilometers from the reactor; the grandmother hailed from Kawauchi Village, right on the edge of the twenty-kilometer inner ring. It was to Kawauchi that we would go today.

The grandmother said, “We had been helping the victims since the twelfth,” the day after the earthquake and tsunami. “On the sixteenth, we ourselves were made to evacuate. It’s like I’m seeing a dream. The life is hard. My daughters are all living very close to the reactor, so they lost everything.”

She did not want to visit Kawauchi just then, and a man who was going there today preferred to organize his things first, so we hired the driver at the head of the long line of taxis that waited there; the driver said we must visit his company’s office first. I spoke against this, expecting as usual to be quashed by some higher-up, but there was nothing to it; his boss came out and inspected us, after which he and the driver worked out a price. I said that the journey might possibly take longer than our agreement arranged for, in which case I could pay more. The driver, unassuming to the point of shyness, appeared uninterested in these details.

We were still in central Koriyama when the meter went to 2.7.
“Ehh!”
cried the interpreter anxiously. Feeling a trifle nervous myself, I put on my second-best mask, the surgical one I had worn last night; so that now in that department I approximately resembled my two companions as we took Highway 95 toward Ono.