Chapter Three
Into the Irradiated Zone

ALISON AND I booked to leave Sydney for Tokyo on Wednesday 12 October 2011. Friends in Australia asked, ‘But is it safe?’ I knew, of course, that radiation would probably be widespread around northern Japan. But if the local people had to face that every day, why shouldn’t we? Besides, we were older than most of them, and only if we lived for another 20 years or so would we be at increased risk of getting cancer from exposure. I almost felt it incumbent on me to go as a gesture of support.

We arrived in Tokyo on Thursday evening, 13 October. This is an account of the crowded ten days we spent in Japan, both in Tokyo and around the irradiated zone of Fukushima prefecture.

The vast reception area at Narita Airport is orderly and almost empty. Two prominent signs greet incoming passengers. With no attempt at irony, one warns them to go to the medical clinic before Customs if they feel ill — a reminder of the avian-influenza outbreak that originated in Thailand and was supposed to have swept through Asia in 2009. The other sign invites passengers to experience the autumnal delights of Tōhoku — an attempt to boost the crippled tourist industries of northern Japan.

We take the airport train to Tokyo’s central station, and a taxi to Roppongi. Like other cabs, its rear window is emblazoned with an exhortation for Tokyoites to Gambarō — ‘Stick to it!’ At the end of a working week, the city is uncharacteristically quiet. We check into the Kokusai Bunka Kaikan (International House), which, with a well-staffed library, a carp pond, and a hilly Japanese garden, has been a quiet haven for visiting scholars since the 1960s. In the foyer, I scan The Japan Times. The front page carries a story about a radiation hotspot that has been discovered along a fence line, now cordoned off, of an ordinary house in suburban Setagaya ward. Professor Masahiro Fukushi, a radiation specialist at Tokyo Metropolitan University, tells the Times that the radiation is ‘highly probably’ radium-226, an isotope which is not believed to have been emitted from the crippled reactors at Fukushima. Despite public scepticism, his speculation is later confirmed: under the house are found bottles of radioactive luminous paint containing radium, abandoned there for many years after a sign-writer’s business went bankrupt. Workmen remove the bottles and take away the ropes cordoning off the street from the neighbourhood.

The Setagaya story underlines the edgy atmosphere in Tokyo. Many inhabitants are sceptical of announcements from authorities that radiation levels are low. A map appears daily in the press, prepared by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) in conjunction with the Fukushima prefectural government. With the stricken Fukushima reactors at its centre, the map shows what officials claim are maximum radiation levels in microsieverts per hour, in concentric circles around the whole of eastern Japan, from Aomori prefecture in the north to Yamanashi and Chiba in the south. On the day we arrive, the hottest spot is the abandoned village of Iitate, 39 kilometres north-west of the reactors, where the reading is 2.041 microsieverts per hour.

Suspicion that Tokyo residents are not getting the full picture remains strong. There has been a run on personal Geiger counters and dosimeters from the electronic district of Akihabara. These are supposed to measure the cumulative dose of ionising radiation in the body, and come from a diversity of overseas sources, including Shanghai; Boulder, Colorado; Valley Forge, Pennsylvania; and even from Tallinn in Estonia. Many break down after a few days, or give wildly different readings at the same location. MEXT hands out more-reliable Fuji Electric instruments to kindergartens, elementary schools, and middle schools in the metropolitan area. A Japanese company releases a cheap Geiger counter, a 14 cm × 5 cm probe that can be attached to an iPhone, with the screen displaying radiation readings via a special app, such as the Geiger Bot.

Local and central government officials continue to say there is nothing to fear from radiation, but they do not share the information on which such assertions are based. They also appear reluctant to impose stringent radiation testing of beef, rice, fish, seaweed, and tea. Kaoru Noguchi, head of the health and safety section of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, invites ridicule when she claims that because Tokyo is densely populated, radioactive material was likely to have fallen on concrete, and been washed away. ‘Besides,’ she says, ‘nobody stands in one spot all day, and nobody eats dirt.’ A collection of enraged Tokyo housewives with kindergarten-age toddlers say that their children do.

Mothers with small children quickly coalesce into the National Network of Parents to Protect Children from Radiation, which by the time of our visit comprises 250 groups with an estimated 5000 to 6000 members. With advice from experts, and shared information, the member groups launch drives to get citizens to sign petitions to mayors and the minister for education, Masaharu Nakagawa, demanding that authorities take protective measures to ensure food safety, especially that of school lunches. One of the founding members of the network, Nami Kondo, later tells Mizuho Aoki, a staff writer at The Japan Times, that: ‘We’ve been relying too much on (the safety assurances of) food distributors. I believe we were too complacent about the food we were supplied. It’s really important to raise our voices as consumers. I believe we are going to be faced with radiation for a long time, so we have to demand (that the government) and distributors ensure the safety of food.’

A citizens’ group, the Yokohama-based Radiation Defence Project, finds hotspots of caesium-137 around the metropolitan area, including 138,000 becquerels per square metre under the stands of a suburban baseball park, a higher concentration than in parts of Ukraine after Chernobyl. Robert Alvarez, an American expert on nuclear contamination, wants more comprehensive testing carried out over Tokyo than can be provided by aerial surveys.

In the confusing atmosphere of claim and counterclaim, Alison and I call on some old friends over the weekend, including Greg Clark, a writer, one-time Australian diplomat, and now vice-president of Akita International University. Greg isn’t worried about radiation levels so much as the precipitous fall in value of his property across Tokyo Bay in Chiba, south of Fukushima. He thinks he has no chance of selling any of it under current panicky conditions. Greg blames TEPCO and the government for the Fukushima disaster. The Japanese, he asserts, don’t go for contingency planning. Theirs is a tribal society with an abiding superstition that if you prepare for the worst, the worst will happen. Hence, TEPCO did not want to tempt fate by building a wall high enough to prevent a major tsunami from flooding the reactors. Besides, to do so would have run counter to their propaganda that the reactors were absolutely safe. According to Greg, the only official who adequately prepared for a tsunami was the late Kotaku Wamaru, the mayor of the small town of Fudai, on the Sanriku coast in Iwate prefecture. Although it made him a figure of ridicule at the time, he insisted on constructing a 15.5-metre seawall and floodgate to protect the village, between 1972 and 1984, at a cost of ¥3.56 million (AU$30 million in today’s terms). It saved the entire village from the 2011 tsunami, with their one casualty being a fisherman who insisted on going outside the floodgate to inspect his boat’s moorings before the big wave hit. Throughout the following month, residents visited Wamaru’s grave to thank him for his foresight.

We have lunch in Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market with Kenzo Tomotoshi, our neighbour in Aoyama during the 1960s. For many years, Kenzo ran a successful seafood restaurant in Shinbashi, and is now an elder statesman in the politics of Tokyo’s fish industry. Since March 2011, there has been a sharp rise in the price of fish in Japan, but we queue for an hour, waiting to get counter space at Kenzo’s favourite sushi restaurant. In its smallness, its meticulous preparation, and the excellent taste of its fish, it rivals the restaurant awarded three stars by the Michelin Guide in the film Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Kenzo interprets the queue as a sign that Japanese and foreign tourists are coming back to Tsukiji. He assures us that all fish being marketed at Tsukiji are examined for radiation. None come from waters off the Tōhoku coast, which before Fukushima was the most prolific source of fish for Tokyo markets. Not that, in retrospect, this is very reassuring. On 30 May 2012, The Wall Street Journal published the findings of the US National Academy of Sciences that bluefin tuna spawned off Japan had carried leaked radioactive contamination from Fukushima across the Pacific Ocean to the shores of the United States, almost 10,000 kilometres away — the first time a large migrating fish had been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.

On Monday 17 October, we leave Tokyo for Fukushima — a taxi from Roppongi to Tokyo Station, then onto the cutting-edge Hayabusa E5-series shinkansen train bound for Shin-Shirakawa Station, in Fukushima-ken. Opened in 1991, and operated by the East Japan Railway Company (JR East), the railway runs 674 kilometres north from Tokyo to its terminus in Aomori. The 11 March earthquake played havoc with the line, collapsing station roofs and embankments, and bending power poles. But none of the numerous tunnels fell in and, astonishingly, the line resumed full service on 23 September. Our train glides out of Tokyo on the dot of nine o’clock, stops to pick up more passengers at suburban Ueno, and then smoothly accelerates to its cruising speed of 300 kilometres per hour — to Omiya in Saitama prefecture, then Oyama, Utsunomiya, and Nasushiobara in Tochigi prefecture. The scene flashing past is of unrelenting featureless suburbia punctuated by an occasional rice field, torii gate, or the grey pantile roof of a shrine. I search the crowded landscape in vain for evidence of renewable energy — a wind turbine, solar water heater, or photovoltaic roof panels. We might be moving too fast for me to catch them; but if there are any, they are few and far between.

After an hour and a half, we alight at Shin-Shirakawa, at the southern end of Fukushima’s agricultural heartland, hire a small Honda rent-a-car from obliging staff at the station, and take a busy narrow road to our first destination, the unprepossessing town of Yabuki, in Nishishirakawa district. With around 18,000 residents, Yabuki has a town hall, a post office, a hospital, and an echoingly empty hotel, the Nikkatsu. Here we spend a restless night in one of their tatami-matted Japanese suites, its walls and flooring impregnated with the metallic smell of stale cigarette smoke. Surprisingly for such a small town, there are also four elementary schools, a junior high school, and a senior high school. The latter, Kohnan, is our destination for the next day. There, Darren Gubbins, who described his experiences of the great earthquake in Chapter Two, taught English.

We stroll around the quiet town at twilight. With its country smells and open fields, it should be a relief from Tokyo, but we sense the ghost of radiation surrounding us, and we do not relax. At first sight, the buildings look undamaged, but a closer inspection reveals cracked walls, vertical surfaces off kilter, buckled footpaths, and occasional evidence of more dramatic damage — such as a heavy concrete balcony that has crashed down and blocked an entrance. Some roads and buildings have already been repaired; others may never be. Yabuki is too far from the coast to have been touched by the tsunami, and yet it loses its illumination as darkness falls. Nothing moves, and there is silence. The narrow roads radiating out from the township should be lit up by the automatic vending machines that dot rural roads everywhere in Japan, but they have broken down. Blackness remains.

The following morning, we drive to Kohnan Senior High School, set on rising ground above Yabuki, with a steep decline facing away to the east. We are met by our host, Ikuo Nemoto, a senior teacher and friend of Darren Gubbins. He ushers us into the principal’s office, where we meet senior staff and talk about the present situation. No one knows how much radiation is coming from the Fukushima reactors, 65 kilometres to the north-east, but there is unmistakable concern. Despite Japanese government claims to the contrary, neither the central nor prefectural government has conducted a radiation survey of the school, its 600 regular students, or their guests — 29 student refugees and their teachers from Tomioka Senior High School, on the Fukushima coast, east of Yabuki. Tomioka, famed for having the longest cherry-blossom corridors in Japan, was wiped out along with its orchards by the tsunami. There are no dosimeters, but none of the students may play outside unless they have special permission from their parents. The main worry is about gamma rays, and possibly X-rays, radiating upward from the soil. Consequently, the gym and computer rooms are crowded, and the baseball field almost entirely deserted. The earthquake destroyed Kohnan’s computers, which are essential for the school’s electronic orchestra, but Apple replaced them all free of charge. ‘Thank you, Steve Jobs,’ says Mr Nemoto.

In a social-studies classroom lined with maps of the world, we meet the Tomioka students, all of whom want to go home, but realise they can’t because the radiation is too heavy. (Unlike Naoto Matsumura, who stubbornly remains behind, as recounted in Chapter Two.)

Separately, we have a meeting with a group of lively senior students from the host school in a high-tech computer lab — there are six girls, Sakura, Ai, Miho, Aya, Asuka, and Saki, and one boy, Taheru. A visiting teacher, Dora Lopez from the United States, joins us. Mr Nemoto presides. We ask each of the students to tell us what they were doing when the earthquake struck. One young woman was with friends at an all-you-can-eat restaurant, another working in a pharmacy, a third studying in the school library. With roads destroyed and no transport available, most were dirty and cold, and faced long walks home in the dark. All try to be cheerful and philosophical, but the worry shows through. One girl expresses the anxiety of many others — she wants eventually to have babies, but is concerned about the possible mutagenic effects of radiation. Besides, would any man outside Fukushima be prepared to marry her? Discrimination against them by others, particularly Tokyoites, is a recurring theme. We conclude our discussion with a DVD performance of the Kohnan Techno-Art Synthesiser Club Orchestra, played in our honour. The folk songs ‘Sakura’ and ‘Suzaku’, and the school song ‘Be the Wind’, are poignant and quite beautiful.

That afternoon, we drive 80 kilometres north to Fukushima city, the capital of the prefecture, and check into the multistorey Sunroute Plaza hotel, an improvement on the Nikkatsu in Yabuki. A major producer of silk during the Edo period, Fukushima was named capital of the prefecture in 1907. With a population of 290,000, it is set in a pretty valley between high mountains to the west and north, and is too far inland for the tsunami to have reached. The earthquake of 11 March nevertheless damaged many buildings and ruptured mains from the Surikamigawa Dam, the only water supply. The city is 63 kilometres north-west of the reactors, and a heavily radioactive plume spread overhead for days after the tsunami. People were initially advised to stay indoors, but many are now cautiously venturing out.

In the early morning of our third day in the north, we are met in our hotel lobby by Billy McMichael, a young Japanese-Canadian who is assistant director of the Student Services Department at Fukushima University. Billy has machine-gun fluency in colloquial Japanese. We take off, heading down the winding road to the towns of Soma and Minamisōma, to meet local officials. Both towns are on the coast, 50 and 30 kilometres respectively north of the reactors. On our way, we pass between beautiful, heavily forested mountains and through cleared valleys, where the paddies are beginning to show their stubbly winter greyness. Billy tells us that most of the hills are off limits because they were heavily irradiated when the initial plume of escaping gases from the reactors passed over them, and rainstorms precipitated large amounts of strontium-90, iodine-131, and caesium-137.

Along the road are small farms, outhouses, tractors, and cars, but no signs of life. Most properties are abandoned, their owners relocated to refugee camps or living with relatives. Contrary to popular belief about the law-abiding Japanese, some houses have been looted by marauding gangs. Cattle graze in the meadows, but they look weak and thin. Billy explains that their owners are allowed to return weekly to feed them, but only until they are euthanased under a comprehensive government program to destroy all irradiated stock.

At the Minamisōma town hall, we meet Kazuo Monma, Shinji Morimoto, and Koichi Fujita, three local industry and agriculture officials. They say the earthquake caused no significant damage, but the tsunami did, with massive loss of life, and the wholesale destruction of residential areas. Before the earthquake and tsunami, the population of the district was 70,000. Sixty thousand left, but many have trickled back. Thirty thousand are still away — mainly women, children, and young men, including skilled workers and hospital staff. The officials tell us that the 30-kilometre exclusion zone around the reactors will remain empty for the foreseeable future, maybe for a very long time. The area’s beef, fruit, rice, sake, and fishing industries have been pretty well destroyed. Stored fruit is going rotten. Nashi pears and peaches used to fetch ¥2000 a tray on Tokyo markets, but they must carry labels of origin. Now, even when they can be proven to be radiation-free, they fetch ¥200. Many boats in the fishing fleet were sunk at their moorings by the tsunami, or were washed inland and left stranded and rusting in the paddies. It is uneconomical to drag them back to the coast where ports are in ruins, and they will be broken up. None of our interlocutors believe that any of the six reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi will be restored, nor those at Fukushima Dai-ni, further along the Fukushima coast. They think that Japan will gradually ease away from nuclear power altogether. The consequences of things going wrong again are too grave.

In Soma, a large electronic board stands near the entrance to the town hall, displaying radiation levels. Inside, former residents are seeking advice from patient officials about their concerns — their homes, land, jobs, compensation, and their future. Compensation for property damage and crop loss is a particularly vexatious matter. The Nuclear Damage Compensation Act of Japan makes utilities, not the government, responsible for damages. Guidelines provided by TEPCO run to 60 pages, requiring individual responses to 2000 questions, and requiring supporting documents such as receipts for seed grain, machinery, labour hire, and fertilisers. Anger, at what is seen as an obvious attempt by TEPCO to avoid giving compensation, is palpable.

We meet Mr Yoshino, the director of local industry and commerce. He shows us ‘before and after’ satellite pictures of Soma. The devastation is huge. Oyster and seaweed beds are wrecked, housing complexes along the coastline are destroyed, and pine forests gone. But Mr Yoshino is optimistic. IHI and Nissan both had parts plants in the neighbourhood. One is operating again; the other will be soon. A pickle factory continues production. Two large coal-fired power plants were knocked out by the tsunami, but one is back online, and the other will be shortly. He shows us a plan for future reconstruction. Residents will be located in new suburbs on high ground around the town. The fishing port will be rehabilitated alongside a new industrial zone, all behind a new 7.2-metre storm wall. (Mr Yoshino says that the March tsunami measured 14 metres, but planners are assuming that it was a once-in-a-thousand-year event.) A major solar-energy plant will be built.

Before returning to Fukushima city, we tour the devastated parts of Soma along the coast. The terrain is flat and desolate, and now bulldozed bare. The land is dotted with huge square piles of debris — some of splintered wooden beams and flooring, others of steel scrap, with the twisted wrecks of cars poking through the rust. We pass a small pile of children’s toys and comics, left in the hope that their owners might still be alive and will come back to reclaim them. A cemetery has been restored, its gravestones standing again at attention in the middle of nowhere. A huge fossil-fuelled power station squats silent and deserted on the coast, like a killing machine from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds after its Martian crew succumbed to terrestrial germs. Twisted ganglia of high-tension powerlines hang from immense pylons, like communication masts on the battleship Yamato. Workmen are operating a drone helicopter, spraying a white substance — we do not know whether it is a weedkiller, fertiliser, disinfectant, or radiation dispersant — over the countryside through the misty autumnal chill.

The next day, Thursday 20 October, Billy picks us up early from the Fukushima city hotel to call on university staff. First is Shuji Shimizu, vice-president of Fukushima University, an expert in nuclear economics. In Japan, Dr Shimizu says, nuclear reactors have been a cash machine to lure investors. They brought tax benefits to the regions where they were located. But the Fukushima accident has demonstrated that the cost of things going wrong is unacceptably high. The accident has cost TEPCO ¥300 billion and counting, plus at least ¥450 billion in compensation payouts. Banks are no longer willing to lend to the industry. Of Japan’s 54 power reactors, 43 have now been shut down. The country will go back to operating at 1985 production levels until alternatives are found. LNG is a feasible interim fuel.

As for renewable energy, the country is way behind Europe, where 27 per cent of Denmark’s electricity and 17 per cent of Germany’s is already generated by solar, wind, and geothermal technology. Dr Shimizu avoids speculating on the attitude of nuclear bureaucrats and ministers in Tokyo towards the rehabilitation of nuclear power, but observes that prefectural and local officials will have much more say in future. He is about to embark on a trip to Belarus with 15 local officials, to see how radiation leaks from Chernobyl have been stopped (indeed, if they have been stopped). He believes that Fukushima has suffered far less from radiation than Ukraine, but predicts the nuclear future in Japan will be short. He thinks the technology of breeder reactors is dangerous, politically impossible to implement in today’s post-Fukushima climate.

Professor Hisashi Sato is a confident young clinician who runs the Department of Radiology at Fukushima Medical University. He greets us warmly and shows us around his domain. It includes a spacious, light-filled examination ward with beds, dosimeters, a stainless steel bath for washing radiation off patients, a gurney with a dummy to demonstrate various treatments for radiation, an operating table, and, rather surprisingly, several wall charts showing radiation levels from naturally occurring phenomena.

Professor Sato gives us an optimistic view about the radiation effects of the stricken Fukushima reactors. Since 11 March, he claims, radiation in the prefecture has gradually fallen to low levels. Referring to his charts, he compares it to doses from clinical and natural causes, including granite formations, CAT scans, chest X-rays, and radiopharmaceuticals. He says that astronauts in space receive many more millisieverts of radiation per day than people in Fukushima. After the reactors blew, a substantial radioactive cloud drifted north-west, over Fukushima city and the surrounding mountains, but the iodine-131 and strontium-90 quickly dissipated. Caesium-137, he admits, remains a problem, particularly in the hills. Plutonium levels, however, are no more than those which irradiated parts of Japan from the 1954 American hydrogen-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. He disputes my suggestion that there are no safe levels of radiation, or that it builds up in the human body. He asserts that all children in the prefecture up to the age of 18 have already been tested, that all school children have been issued with personal dosimeters with inbuilt alarms that sound off if background radiation exceeds 10 millisieverts per hour, and that all Fukushima residents will get free annual radiation tests.

Professor Sato claims that there have been no fatalities from radiation as the result of the Fukushima meltdowns. The three deaths of TEPCO workers were respectively caused by a fall, a heart attack, and septic shock. Three thousand workers are at present trying to rehabilitate the plant. Wearing heavy clothing without air conditioning, their physical condition has deteriorated, but not from radiation. We ask why he has no radiation patients in his clinic. He says he has had eight since 11 March, but no more because the reactors are 30 minutes away by helicopter, and patients were sent to hospitals closer to the reactors. As for himself, Professor Sato has a young family, but he fully intends keeping them with him in Fukushima. He asserts that the only food which remains dangerous is mushrooms. He says that he is fighting an information war, and his challenge is to improve communications with the wider Japanese public about the true situation.

After bidding Professor Sato farewell, we reflect on his assertions. It occurs to us that his clinic, even perhaps the whole medical university, may be financed by TEPCO. This would be consistent with the largesse meted out in the form of jobs, schools, roads, and other amenities by electric-power companies elsewhere in Japan to neighbourhoods willing to accept nuclear reactors. Whatever the reason, Professor Sato aggressively defends the safety of the Fukushima environment, and denies that it will be subject to long-term damage.

We notice a similar attitude in Billy McMichael. Billy has a wife and two-year-old son, who are at present with her parents in Nara, where she is about to give birth to their second child. Billy regularly drives down to see them, and will bring them home a few months after the birth. Since the Japanese government has exempted all vehicles with Fukushima plates from paying road tolls anywhere in Japan, the trip by car is much cheaper and more convenient for him than by rail. Billy wants to continue to live in Fukushima. Since the reactor accident, he says he has made an intensive study of the hazards of radiation, and has concluded that it is not harmful if elementary precautions are taken. He says the reactors themselves will soon be in ‘cold shutdown’, emitting no more radiation. He believes nothing stands in the way of him raising his children in a safe environment in Fukushima city. He has risen from the position of JET teacher to be an adviser to the governor, and now has plans to expand the international program at Fukushima University. He says the medical university will take advantage of the disaster by turning itself into a world centre for research on the effects of radiation.

Who can deny the reasoning, even the courage, of Billy McMichael and Professor Sato? Or of Mari Kobayashi, an outgoing 46-year-old widow and fashion designer, who before the catastrophe raised free-range chickens and grew organic fruit on her 5-hectare farm in Iitate, one of the most heavily irradiated towns in the prefecture? Mari now lives in a borrowed home, 40 minutes away, and wants to return. As she told Evan Osnos, who interviewed her for an article in The New Yorker of 17 October 2011, she will not let a power plant take her life away. Like some local officials, students, and other residents we met in the prefecture, these three have made an informed decision about their lives and those of their families. Or as informed as they can, with the confusing jargon of becquerels and sieverts that assaults them daily. They are faced with a difficult choice: continue to enjoy a comfortable and productive existence with neighbours they know and jobs that suit them, at the price of a heightened risk of cancer for themselves and their descendents; or evacuate to some distant place and re-establish their lives in the face of ignorant local discrimination, and uncertainty over employment and income.

A similar choice must be made by residents of a new apartment block in the town of Nihonmatsu, around 55 kilometres from the Fukushima reactors. As later reported by Akiko Fujita on American ABC news, the building was constructed using gravel quarried from the irradiated town of Namie, within the 30-kilometre exclusion zone. (Gravel from Namie was exported to many construction sites around Honshu before high levels of radiation in the town forced its evacuation.) Officials in Nihonmatsu discovered radiation emanating from caesium-137 deposits in the apartment walls, with doses higher inside than outside the building. A high-school student living in the complex was found to have been exposed to 1.62 millisieverts in three months, well above the somewhat-elastic officially permitted annual dose of 1 millisievert.

Will all residents evacuate the Nihonmatsu building and seek a healthy life, free of radiation? Will inhabitants of other buildings, made from the same radioactive aggregate, also leave their new dwellings? Their decision is more complex than that of the foreigners who quickly fled Japan because it was not their home, or of single Japanese who could easily leave and establish homes elsewhere. In the hope of better lives, boat people leave countries riven by war. But unlike bullets, radiation is invisible. It may or may not kill you, depending on your genetic make-up, your exposure, and other incalculables. The people who stay are prepared to take the chance; and, in accordance with human nature, they rationalise their decision by talking down the threat from ionising radiation.

Our last three appointments are in Tokyo.

Tsuneo ‘Nabe’ Watanabe is the director of foreign and security policy research at the Tokyo Foundation, an independent non-profit think tank in the modern Nippon Foundation building, in downtown Akasaka. He is well connected. His father was a member of the Fukushima prefectural assembly when former prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone opened the Dai-ichi and Dai-ni complexes. His cousin Yuhei Sato is governor of the prefecture.

We follow Nabe down a dark corridor, lined with books, to a modern, well-lit conference room. Like the inhabitants of all large, modern buildings in central Tokyo, he is trying to cut electricity consumption to a minimum. Nabe thinks the main damage from the Fukushima disaster is economic and psychological. The ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has been quite good at putting out the facts; TEPCO, quite bad. The DPJ has the political advantage of claiming that the disaster is due to neglect of nuclear issues by its conservative predecessor, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) — a party it portrays as having been in the pocket of TEPCO. Former DPJ prime minister Naoto Kan and chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano were anti-nuclear, but Kan’s successor, Yoshihiko Noda, is politically in the middle of the road. Nabe thinks that whatever the calibre of the prime minister, future Japanese governments of every colour will continue to be weak and indecisive, without coherent policies.

Meanwhile, the war on nuclear bureaucrats, declared in 2008 by the first DJP prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, goes on. The Ministry of Economics, Trade, and Industry want its alliance with TEPCO to continue. The finance ministry is worried about the consequences of the Fukushima meltdown on the country’s financial future. The Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology has a huge science budget that it wants to protect. Bureaucrats have a common interest in preserving the status quo — they want to keep their salaries, and will frustrate politicians of whatever stripe from cutting their numbers or reducing their pensions. Despite the nuclear-power industry’s success in preventing anti-nuclear academics and intellectuals from influencing popular opinion, the public is now more anti-nuclear than ever, and will remain so.

Nabe thinks the United States has gained much public admiration from the way it reconstructed Sendai Airport after the tsunami. It was an efficient exercise carried out with military precision: helicopters swarming in with equipment to clear landing strips, and huge fixed-wing aircraft following with heavy earth-moving equipment. The airport was quickly made operational, allowing evacuations and the rapid deployment of relief supplies. But the Americans also persuaded prime minister Naoto Kan to close the Hamaoka nuclear complex, south-west of Tokyo, which supplies electricity to Toyota, Suzuki, and others with large industrial plants, west of Tokyo. Close by at Yokosuka is a US naval base, where the aircraft carrier George Washington is deployed. If the reactors at Hamaoka were to melt down like those at Fukushima, radiation would spread across the greater metropolitan area, as well as the arteries linking Tokyo to the heavy industrial areas in Osaka and the Kansai region. Such a catastrophe would permanently change the character of Japan. The chaos of evacuating 35 million people from Tokyo would far exceed events at Fukushima.

Indeed, continues Nabe, the government has emergency plans to relocate the capital, if absolutely necessary. In the past, it was moved periodically between Kyoto, Nara, Edo, Nikko, and Kamakura. After the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, a plan was formulated to move the core government apparatus — the emperor, the imperial-household agency, the legislature, and the executive — to an emergency capital in Nasu, in Tochigi prefecture, from where essential government services would continue to function. After Fukushima, the Nasu plan was revived, and could yet be implemented — or another site chosen, if there are more severe earthquakes on the Kantō Plain.

Yukio Okamoto, president of Okamoto Associates, is a retired diplomat and adviser to previous LDP prime ministers. A man of considerable gravitas, he receives us in his elegant Toranomon office suite, on the walls of which are photographs he has taken of marine life around the world, including Australia, where he often goes scuba diving. Although he admits that Fukushima was a huge disaster, he believes the reactors are now stabilised and under control. But he also admits that residents can never go back to areas of major fallout. Fukushima city, Iwaki, and Sendai have been spared. But of Japan’s pre–11 March fleet of 54 nuclear-power reactors, only 11 are still operating at the time of our visit. Mr Okamoto confirms that residents are against resumption of operations, and there is a real prospect that the remainder of the fleet will also be shut down. (As if to reinforce Mr Okamoto’s point, towards the end of November the Fukushima prefectural assembly voted against restarting any reactors in the prefecture, and for their permanent closure. And in May 2012, the last operating reactor in Japan did in fact shut down for structural safety checks.)

In Mr Okamoto’s opinion, former prime minister Naoto Kan’s decision to subject all Japanese power reactors to rigorous stress tests, which many failed, was foolish. Kan’s successor, Yoshihiko Noda, wants to relax the standards and resume operations, but former chief cabinet secretary Edano, a nuclear sceptic, crony of Kan, and now METI minister, won’t agree. Before Fukushima, nuclear energy supplied 29.2 per cent of Japan’s electricity, eclipsed only by LNG at 29.4 per cent. Coal was used for generating 25 per cent; oil, 7.6 per cent; and pumped hydro, 7.3 per cent. More than half of the increase in Japan’s electric-power production since 1970 has been generated by nuclear reactors. The technology increased living standards and life expectancy to the highest in the world. But suddenly the whole calculus has changed. Nuclear power is no longer a viable way to ensure that Japan will be self-sufficient in energy.

Warming to his theme, Mr Okamoto claims that Kan was Japan’s worst prime minister, at the worst possible moment. He didn’t believe in consultation except with a handful of close advisers — all university professors, not experts. They told Kan that Japan had 54 million kW of reserve power, but most of it had already been sold by power companies. Seismologists told him which nuclear reactors would be hit by earthquakes, predicting that Hamaoka was the most likely. But Mr Okamoto shows us a map which indicates the predictions were wrong in almost every case. Instead of closing Hamaoka, Kan could have ordered a 15-metre-high seawall to be built around it. Kan thought it would be possible to abolish nuclear power and rely on renewables, but Japan can’t do that. It only generates an inconsequential 1.1 per cent from renewables, and has insufficient access to the sun or wind (except at the tip of the Aomori peninsula) to make a serious go of it. Harvesting wind offshore by wind turbines on pontoons has been proposed, but this presents serious technical problems. Japan has the sixth-largest geothermal reserves in the world, but an association of hot-spring resort owners would stand in the way of any attempt to harvest them.

Reinforcing his negativity, Mr Okamoto thinks that Japan’s economic future is bleak. Power shortages will force industry increasingly to move offshore. But successive governments have loaded industry with seven additional burdens so that it can no longer compete with Korea. He lists them: a high yen; anti-business legislation, including a 30 per cent increase in the minimum wage; a ban on the use of temporary (that is foreign) workers; environmental restrictions; a decision by the DPJ to reduce Japan’s CO2 emissions by 25 per cent by 2020; participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership which will force Japan to open its markets more; and a 35 per cent corporate tax, the highest in Asia.

Japanese companies, Mr Okamoto continues, moved offshore in the past to take advantage of cheap labour. This was ‘offensive globalisation’. Now, the move is defensive — a means of survival. The country can cut its cost structure to compete, but industries will have to leave Japan. The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown at Fukushima have destroyed corporate confidence. Mr Okamoto shows us a chart prepared by Forbes magazine of the 50 most successful and profitable companies in Asia — the ‘Fab 50’. In 2005, 13 of them were Japanese, ten were Australian, eight Korean, eight Taiwanese, and only one Chinese. But in 2011, 23 are Chinese, eight Korean, seven Indian, three Australian, and two Thai. No Japanese companies are listed.

Mr Okamoto’s final comments concern TEPCO and the future of nuclear power. Despite, or because of, the company’s massive debts and compensation obligations, Japan cannot afford to see TEPCO fail. Part of the company will have to be liquidated, as Japan National Railways was in the 1980s. Edano wants power generation and distribution separated, by breaking up the ten monopolies that now control both. The national consensus is that dependence on nuclear power must be drastically reduced. But the question is, over what period of time? Mr Okamoto thinks generation III, IV, and V power reactors will be a lot safer than generation II, but he won’t predict a resurgence of the nuclear-power industry in Japan.

We later learn that Mr Okamoto is quite a philanthropist. Soon after the disaster, he funded with his own money an initiative to rebuild the fishing industry in Fukushima. This is only one of his many self-funded social programs.

Yoichi Kato is the national-security correspondent with the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, and a former Asahi bureau chief in Washington. He takes tea with us at the Kokusai Bunka Kaikan on our last day in Japan. Picking up on Watanabe’s thoughts on moving the capital out of Tokyo in the event of a nuclear crisis in the neighbourhood, he says that most big companies have contingency plans of this kind, and maintain backup administrative centres in remote cities from which they could operate if they had to. Osaka is now a city on the same footing as Tokyo, and would expect to be chosen, but the San’in area is another possibility. In the south-west corner of Honshu, San’in (meaning ‘the northern, shady side of the mountains’) includes the prefectures of Shimane, Tottori, and parts of Yamaguchi. It is the least populated and least earthquake-prone area in Japan.

Meanwhile, Japan continues to face problems which had manifested themselves even before 11 March 2011, including a too-high yen, worsening pollution, and weak economic performance. Japan is ‘hollowed out’. The flight of industry abroad is symbolised by Uniqlo, a very successful and well-organised manufacturer of cheap suits and clothing. Uniqlo has just established a large retail outlet in New York, in response to falling earnings from its Japanese operation last year. A small but telling example of the hollowing-out effect, we are told, is the decline of certain dentists in wealthy areas of Tokyo, who used to cater exclusively to gaijin patients, for large fees. As the gaijin continue to leave the country because of Fukushima, these dentists are going broke.

And in spite of American help during the emergency, Mr Kato says, relations with the United States are strained over such long-standing issues as relocating US marines to another base on Okinawa, a plan deeply unpopular with Okinawans. Prime Minister Noda is expected to go to Washington to try to improve things.

Like Okamoto, Mr Kato is not particularly sanguine about renewable energy replacing nuclear. The technology exists for offshore methane electric generators, but the DJP government does not have experienced energy advisers because the best ones remain with the conservative LDP. In any event, if the country is going to move radically away from nuclear power, there must be an election first. The politicians will have to put the situation to the people in the next year or two. The adequacy of electricity supply is the key. Mr Kato recalls that in the 1920s, the youth of Japan were adventurous and courageous; they courted hardship. At Takushoku University, they were trained to run the empire. But the youth nowadays won’t go abroad if it involves hardship, such as being deprived of washlets (Japanese toilets that have warmed seats and highly efficient built-in bidets). On the other hand, says Mr Kato, as he puts down his teacup for the last time, he is encountering more and more young bureaucrats who are tough and highly motivated. There is hope for the future, and no one should anticipate the demise of Japan just yet.