October 2014,

with a Hanford excursion in August 2015

THE RED ZONES

1: Over Ten Times the Level Measured the Previous Week

First those faraway Americans had forgotten about the accident*—after all, its fallout barely showed up in Oregon milk—and presently most residents of Tokyo (excepting steadfast Friday night protesters and a few tired self-educated Cassandras such as Mr. Yamasaki, whose NGO had tested my Iwaki tomatoes) took heart again, because Reactor Plant No. 1 had matured from a national calamity into the merest affliction of distant country cousins—three cheers for the wall of ice!—while in Iwaki people diligently defended themselves against harmful rumors by eating whatever was set before them, even as the decontaminators improved everything into neat islands of black bags—and by the time of my third visit to the disaster zone, when I managed at last, thanks to months of effort on the interpreter’s part, to penetrate legally or quasi-legally well into the exclusion zones—yes, I even got to see and photograph Plant No. 1 from a convenient radioactive overlook!—it turned out that the people who guided me, which is to say those with knowledge and local experience—a district head, municipal employees, a former reactor worker who had been on duty at Plant No. 2 on and after March 11, 2011; and I should also mention the various taxi drivers and rental car personnel daily or almost daily associated with travel through the red zones—had become as blasé as the rest of us. At the Iwaki gas station where an old man and a young boy were cleaning our hired vehicle, which had just returned from Tomioka, Okuma and Namie, I asked the former reactor worker to warn them that they were scrubbing away fallout, which must be particularly spicy around the wheel wells—to which the old man courteously replied: “Never mind.”—He and the boy went on scrubbing.—All hail! At last (and so it must be for you who live in my future) radiation contamination had been normalized.*

It was invisible, you see. There was no immediate danger. They’d done it for the nation. One had to fight harmful rumors.

As for me, I felt the opposite, because at last I possessed an adequate toolkit, and measuring the real-time scintillations of the objects around me in those red zones proved unnerving.

THE PANCAKE FRISKER

Because the dosimeter (as I have so often complained) could only show accrued gamma radiation, not alpha or beta, and because it could not reveal hot spots with sufficient timeliness to prevent them from quite possibly hurting me, I decided to call Clyde up in Richland, Washington. He told me that what I required was a pancake frisker. It looked like a little yellow golf club, he said. He took his everywhere; it seemed to be a pretty swell machine. Scrap metal dealers appreciated it because it enabled them to weed out the odd radioactive nightmare in a pile of junk—an increasingly frequent situation, Clyde confided, at which point he and I shared a millisecond of telephone silence, to mark the eternal wickedness of this world. Extolling the device’s sensitivity, Clyde now entertained me with the truckload of anecdotal hay that had alarmed some ingenuous soul who imagined himself into an emergency; one needed to remember, Clyde said, that alfalfa fertilizer, like bananas, contained a naturally occurring radioisotope of potassium.—By now I liked him considerably. He was as cheerful as a cricket. He even offered to loan me his very own frisker, but only if the results stayed off the record, since he had been too busy to recalibrate it. I replied that I might as well just buy one. The price was $750. Clyde gave me the direct number of the main office in Sweetwater, Texas. I fretted aloud that some other salesman would deprive him of his commission, which he had certainly earned with his amusing stories, but he said, “Don’t worry; they take real good care of me.”

First things first: The Sweetwater people warned that their product was subject to export license regulations, so I wrote a note to whomever it might concern that if I happened to carry my new toy outside the United States, I would exert every muscle to bring it home. That was good enough, they said, and which two units did I wish the display to read in? Out of loyalty to the dosimeter, I chose microsieverts; the other unit might as well be cpms, which the Tepco friskers had employed at Tomioka. So I placed my order, hoping that the pancake frisker could fulfill at least some of Clyde’s claims. The company was busy; orders got backlogged (another omen that radioactivity would scintillate ever more brightly in our collective future); but a week sooner than they had promised, I received my Model 26-1, which was truly yellow, and did look sort of like a golf club. Eli in the technical support department advised me to slowly sweep it back and forth when I was in the field. I asked how well it could measure food.—“It should be very helpful, I would think,” he said. He was an au courant and tolerant fellow, whom I ended up calling several times. He said that gamma rays should definitely register in any meal; as for beta, at least one of Fukushima’s two common cesium isotopes would announce itself in a friskable sort of way. The iodine-131 might or might not be revealed; I consoled myself that hardly any of that should remain in the red zones, for it had been an immediate product of the accident, and its 10 half-lives occupied only 80 days. As for Nuclear Plant No. 1’s continuous flow of ocean-bound tritium, those emitted beta particles were minuscule and might not be friskable. To measure their concentrations I would need, among other apparatus, a cart to carry my own private tank of radioactive potassium-10 gas. Beset by a peculiar feeling that my nation’s guardians of airport safety might not look favorably upon such luggage, whether I checked it in the hold of the plane or brought it on board to stow in the overhead bin, I gave up on monitoring tritium. Who could say whether I would even reach the ocean? (As a matter of fact I did, in Okuma. According to the pancake frisker, the air dose there was astonishingly low. But I abstained from chasing waves.) What then about a river or a glass of water? Remembering what that lying salesman named Ray had promised me when I bought the dosimeter, I now inquired, with more curiosity than hope, whether I could simply sweep the frisker over either of those. Sadly, Eli explained that the hydrogen atoms with which water is afflicted tend to mask neutrons. But I hereby testify most heartily that the thing did everything that Eli and Clyde said it would. In Japan its readings correlated extremely well with those of municipal and prefectural officials; moreover, it was, as I’d hoped the dosimeter would be, fun. I immediately fascinated myself by measuring the radioactivity of my daughter’s cat (0.12 microsieverts per hour, which was twice as high as my darkroom coating table and exactly the same as my kitchen counter). My neighbors in Sacramento took pleasure in the frisker at first, although the low and stable levels around there rapidly bored them; you in the future doubtless enjoy more interesting readings.

The pancake frisker was about 13 inches long from the top of its rubberized handle (which concealed two AA batteries) up to the forward point of its hexagonal head. Three buttons decorated it. When I pressed the leftmost one, the machine uttered a three-tone chirp not unlike the sound one of my sweetest girlfriends used to make when she climaxed. Then its screen lit up, and in NORMAL mode the frisker began to express the moment-by-moment scintillations of, say, the dining room table of an apartment in San Francisco: 46, 30, 35, 40, 26, 19, 27, 34, 22 counts per minute—and with each new figure the thing stridulated adorably. Anytime I wished, I could push the middle button, to toggle the units into microsieverts per hour, and from that dining room table I now present several of those: 0.022, 0.118, 0.50, 0.32, 0.20, 0.102, 0.122 and 0.118. These altered with such rapidity that in the red zones, where I was always in a hurry, I sometimes scribbled down only the first digit or two of each item in this ever altering series.

My friend Jay loved the pancake frisker, and said: “It’s like having another sense!” This comment was on the money, for I can and will tell you what such places as Tomioka, Okuma or Iitate looked like to me, and observations of abandoned decrepitude do convey something useful, but what about an innocent-looking thicket or meadow? Please recall Ed Lyman’s aphorism: “The issue is how uniform are the hot spots?” Without a scintillation counter I could not have addressed that issue.*

In sum, the best way for me to complete my word-pictures of the red zones is to overlay my descriptions with numbers: Here is how that meadow appeared . . . and in that meadow a plume of pampas grass was emitting so many nasty microsieverts.

I ask your pardon if I now devote a further couple of paragraphs to the frisker’s modes of measurement, and to how I interpreted them. Since these numbers are of extreme importance in my accounts of the red zones, I owe it to you to say where they came from. For any reader who is repulsed by arithmetic (and also for me, because the results bemused me), there is that basic comparative chart back here, so that rather than wearying yourself with converting from counts per second to microsieverts per year, you can simply look up an interesting shrine torus or sidewalk-stretch and see how many tens or hundreds of times more radioactive it was than my kitchen counter in Sacramento.

So. NORMAL produced a string of numbers. Well, in practical terms, how “hot” was that dining room table in San Francisco? Whenever I cared, I could push the frisker’s righthand button. On my first click, the device would go into MAX mode. The display then showed only the highest reading. If the emitter were stable, the local maximum generally ceased to alter within 30 seconds. Here in this dining room the radiation usually got up to around 0.2 micros per hour, or, if you prefer to toggle into other units, 65 cpms. This proved convenient and useful in its way: Whenever officials of the Transportation Security Administration, a well-meaning but arrogant institution that sometimes bullied American air travellers back in the days when I was alive (their agents specialized in slicing the linings of my various suitcases), refused to tell me how powerful their X-ray was, all I had to do was forget to shut off my pancake frisker, which accidentally happened to be in MAX mode as it rode down their conveyor belt.* That told me just what I wished to know, and if you are curious you can look it up in that same comparative chart.

A second push of the rightmost button, and then a touch of the lefthand button, and the frisker entered what came to be my favorite mode, SCALER, which averaged all scintillations over the course of a minute: The dining table was 30 counts per minute, or 0.002 micros per minute. That worked out to 0.12 micros an hour—the same as my daughter’s cat, and indeed my average reading for San Francisco. In actual fact, this was two and a half times higher than Tokyo’s Shinjuku district had been on the day before the nuclear accident. In 2014, San Francisco and Tokyo were (by the frisker’s measurement) nearly equally radioactive, which is to say well below normal background for many parts of the world.

Multiplying this innocuous number by 24 gives 2.88 micros per day. You may recall that in San Francisco and Tokyo the dosimeter usually turned over a single microsievert* in 24 hours. To have one device reading nearly three times more radiation than the other concerned me, and I spent some time considering it, because once I reentered the hot zone, my health would depend on the accuracy of my measurements. Calling the ever patient Eli, I told him about the granite countertop in the bathroom of my hotel suite in Charleston, West Virginia. I had measured it 10 times for one minute each in the SCALER mode. Usually the display read 0.005 or 0.006 micros per minute, but once it showed 0.004 and once it came back 0.007—a considerable variation, I thought.

“Well,” said Eli, “there’s bounce and sway on the needle, especially in the low values. Make sure you let that thing run on NORMAL in that energy field and let it settle.”

I had done this in Charleston. So I asked: “Is it less accurate in a low-radiation environment?”

“The hotter the field is, the easier it is for that thing to do its job.”

He looked up the calibration test for my serial number. That particular frisker had measured 3,000 counts in a 10-microsievert field. The correct figure was 3,200 counts. “So it’s just a little under, but within the typical range,” he said.

I inquired what their typical background radiation might be out there in Sweetwater. He said that at the factory they took in about 10 microrems per hour, which would be 0.1 microsieverts—more or less what I received in San Francisco or Tokyo, and half of what Ed Lyman got in his apartment in Washington, D.C. That sounded reassuringly plausible.

Perhaps the frisker read higher than the dosimeter for low values because it was picking up alpha and beta while the dosimeter could not. More likely, one or both suffered from a higher margin of error as the field approached zero. At any rate, the dosimeter’s measurements had corresponded, more or less, with officially reported values in Tokyo, Koriyama, Tomioka and Iwaki. The pancake frisker readings I took in the United States were comparable to the numbers that Ed Lyman and Eli had given me. Hoping for parity once I had entered a hotter field, I decided to be warned by whichever value of the two instruments was higher.

I further decided to use the SCALER mode in preference to the other two. There were many occasions in the red zones when I had to fall back to NORMAL, because it was discourteous to keep others waiting for a full minute time after time, all of us meanwhile absorbing radiation; and when I ascended the unpleasant stairs of the White Bird Shrine in Iitate I frisked my surroundings continuously, and thereby both got to record and to avoid the unhealthiest spots. But as often as I could do so considerately, I would make a one-minute timed walk in SCALER mode, or take a scaled measurement of such interesting objects as the drainpipe in Tomioka that Mr. Kanari had measured earlier that year with his municipal scintillation counter.

So I whiled away the months, hugely entertained by my pancake frisker. When I reached Japan, the first readings were no eerier than at home.

Tokyo. Japanese risotto restaurant, Kabukicho red light district. 33 cpms / 0.12 micros [once again, the same as my daughter’s cat].

As you might imagine, the red zones were hotter.

I used to get impressed by the difference between 0.06 and 0.18 micros an hour. At 0.36 micros, that granite countertop in Charleston certainly beguiled me. In Moscow, Molotov’s grave was three times hotter than Gogol’s—which in turn proved equivalent to the National Orchid Garden in Singapore. After going to the red zones I forgot to care about such piddling variations.

GRANITE AND PLUTONIUM

In terms of average radiation levels, Portland, Oregon, was certainly the healthiest city I visited (come to think of it, the little California town of Dunsmuir was just as good). As for the unhealthiest, well, the red zones more than overshadowed every other place I went in those days—including Hanford, Washington, where in September 1944 our government most secretly commenced to make plutonium. At first there had been three 800-foot-long separation facilities. Columbia River water kept the irradiated slugs cool at a depth of 16 and a half feet, flowing through the aluminum cylinders of the largest plant Du Pont had ever constructed. Downstream from there, eddies, bends, sediments and creatures grew “hot,” but war aims exempted our G-men and their pet scientists from responsibility from all such secondary issues. Had Japan been on a war footing 67 years later, Tepco might have been equally carefree about the contaminated outflows from Plant No. 1; I guess some entities are luckier than others.

(Here I wish to reiterate that no one with a heart can read unmoved the stories of those Tepco people who tried to deal with the catastrophe—for instance, Mr. Yoshida Masao, the chief of Plant No. 1, waiting for the containment vessel of Reactor No. 2 to possibly rupture, meditating on the floor, going through the names of his best-known colleagues: “There were about 10 or so. I thought those guys might be willing to die with me.”)

The atomic weapon that struck Nagasaki was named “Fat Man.” It contained 9 kilograms of plutonium. It is a thing of beauty to behold, this “gadget,” wrote the journalist who flew in the plane that dropped the bomb. We removed our glasses after the first flash, but the light still lingered on, a bluish-green light that illuminated the entire sky all around. So satisfied with that result was our government that production of the lovely silver metal continued until 1987; eventually there were nine reactors at Hanford.

An Atomic Energy Commission pamphlet from 1969 boasted that the Hanford reactors, then still creating or for all I know even satisfying demand, enjoyed environmental conditions more favorable than most power-plant . . . sites, being relatively remote from towns and . . . adjacent to the Columbia River, with its high volume of flow. The activated impurities got held for a good 1 to 3 hours, which reduces the activity by 50 to 70%. Then they got diluted by the streamflow. In the case of unusual radioactivity because of leaks of fission products, the water was discharged into trenches and seep[ed] into the ground. This percolation is very effective since the soil retains the radionuclides. And a diagram of the “underground crib,” decorated by “monitoring wells,” showed the plutonium on top of the rare earths, then the strontium, followed by the cesium, ruthenium and NO3.

Decades and trenchloads of “hot” river water flowed by under the slogan “the peaceful atom”; who am I to argue against such a delightful sentiment? For one thing, plutonium is less poisonous than arsenic, and perhaps even less hazardous than cesium-137 or strontium-90—although that judgment is more relative than it sounds, due to plutonium’s scarcity and chemical immobility.*

In practical terms, Hanford became the primary source for plutonium, thanks especially to the zealous industry of the N Reactor (built 1964), whose design approximated Chernobyl’s,* and except for small experimental quantities, it produced all the American-made plutonium that eventually reached the Northern Rio Grande system in New Mexico—through contamination, of course.—Let me now anticipate this book’s section on fracking, in which a consultant for resource extraction companies explains in Greeley, Colorado: “When you’re doing oil field, it’s not the fracking, it’s the piping. Things leak, things go wrong, when they have thousands of feet of piping in the surface. That’s human nature. I can’t go through a day without making a mistake; neither can they.”* Thus Hanford; thus Fukushima.—A guide for river paddlers called the site the most serious long-term threat to the Columbia River and the livable communities along its shores. Meanwhile The Japan Times praised Hanford thus: It’s among the most toxic nuclear waste sites . . . Apparently some 212 million liters of radioactive poisons had been cached in aging underground tanks . . . Gravel fields cover the tanks themselves, six of which had already been found to be leaking 1000 gallons . . . a year of highly radioactive stew, possibly reaching the groundwater—but for all I knew, they might have been more secure than King Tut’s tomb, thanks to the “big five”* miracle called “concrete cocooning.” The Japan Times article was even headlined: Hanford offers Tepco lesson in cleaning up Fukushima.

Suitably inspired, I decided to take a little frisk. Clyde in Richland had insisted that I would detect nothing of dramatic interest, but back when I was alive I used to be a curious sort.

According to a certain William L. Graf, whose Plutonium and the Rio Grande charmed me in the library stacks, sediments always contain the largest quantities of heavy metals, so that soils and sediments are the major repository for plutonium. Continuing his train of thought, Graf remarked that inhalation of plutonium-spiced sediments seemed probably the most important from the standpoint of human contamination. Well, then I would put on gloves and a painter’s dust mask, after which I could measure a couple of streambeds or gullies, with the frisker’s pancake head close to the ground. A Japanese nuclear engineer* advised me to measure both with and without the plastic cover, which was thick enough to prevent alpha and beta particles from reaching the device’s scintillating crystals. The difference between the two readings would reflect alpha and beta levels. Trusting myself not to detect that extremely scarce beta emitter Pu-241, which has no relevance to Carbon Ideologies, I settled for hunting the alpha in Pu-239, which had been employed in the MOX reactor at Fukushima, and should be Hanford’s dominant isotope—and in Pu-238, which in 2012 was detected in the Japanese red zones.

My detector was rated, said its spec sheet, at an efficiency of 11% for plutonium-239, so I figured I would need to divide whichever alpha number I got by 0.11 to obtain a rough plutonium level in counts per minute.* Later on, some nuclear Samaritan might provide me with the proper factor to convert this number to microsieverts.—Ed Lyman informed me that it would be more complicated than that. “You need to know the isotopics,” as he put it. I should send a soil sample to a lab for spectroscopy. That was the only way to learn the proportions of different plutonium isotopes, which would determine subsequent calculations.

I telephoned a dozen soil testing companies, and none of them would or could sample plutonium. I wish I had written down the stern and horrified things they said; it might be entertaining to learn how many of them then launched good-citizen e-mails to the Department of Homeland Security. Well, so why not just go to Hanford and see what I could see?

The drive from Portland took five hours. Arriving at a gate with a darkened booth, and a sign which ran: WHEN FLASHING TUNE TO 530 FOR HANFORD EMERGENCY INFORMATION, we turned south on Highway 240 toward smoke-hazed, dust-hazed Richland, where for all I knew Clyde was right then on his hands and knees in the back yard, happily frisking the grass; the temperature was 95° Fahrenheit. Rolling across the sagebrush flats, with the Hanford Reserve on our left for many a mile (there were only some 1,500 sq. km. of scrubland to search in—1,518 square kilometers, to be precise), we glimpsed well in from the fence a red-and-white radio tower—frequency 530, I assume—then two other slender white towers and a distant row of boxy white buildings—almost certainly not the reactors, which necessarily followed the south bank of the Columbia as it curved northeast before twisting sharply southeast along the White Bluffs. We ourselves were now angling more southeast than south on Highway 240, passing the brilliant whitish-yellow grass that was silver-pocked with sagebrush, and that long white fence so cheerfully decorated with yellow warning signs.

Below the reserve, not far past the southern extremity of Richland, we crossed the Columbia, came into Pasco and swung back northwest and north, paralleling the reserve’s eastern edge. Within another half-hour we had arrived at the put-out by the Ringold fish hatchery—one of the few places where our government would allow us to camp. This spot had received the highest fallout dose from Hanford—although most of it had been the extremely short-half-lifed iodine-131. My companion proposed stopping here, which was fine by me.—The Mormon crickets must have died off; for he said that two weeks earlier the river had been thick with them. The chirring of cicadas vibrated almost continuously through the buggy underbrush, and there was a fishy smell of muck, while there in the smooth lavender-grey river the sun lay reflected as a long orange bulbous-tipped wand not unlike the pancake frisker itself; and I felt (as I certainly never did in the red zones) so joyous and free in this novel part of my native land; no doubt in your time the heat must be worse at Hanford, and perhaps civil order has so far failed to let all 212 million plutonium-contaminated liters of progress seep out; I hope that those who cannot read remember from their grandparents not to go there. In my time it was a sweet enough place; since it was open to the public, I credulously believed myself safe, and my credulity got rewarded.

Directly across the river lay the widest sector of the reserve. I saw nobody on it, which failed to amaze me, because according to a pamphlet from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the Department of Energy’s side of the river, south and west shores, are closed above the high water line.

There on the shore the humidity had already begun turning cool, but when I strolled the few steps back up to our grassy campsite where Tom was looking over the motor of his beloved Water Witch it still felt almost sweltering.

Now it was nearly dark. Walking toward the trees, I commenced another measurement and then strolled back to the aforesaid Mr. Tom Colligan, who was a classicist and could explain exactly how difficult it might sometimes be to parse a sentence of Thucydides in Greek. While the frisker shone like a glowworm in the sweet-smelling grass, counting down to zero, I requested his opinions on Catullus, the coyotes meanwhile howling like young girls at a carnival, with a ring around that bright moon which tonight was so distinctly bat-winged with continents. I went to collect the frisker, which read 0.24 micros an hour, 72 counts per minute—identical to the library interior at Estes Park, Colorado.—And by the way, the presence or absence of the plastic cover never made a difference at Hanford.

Where trucks and boats were parked, and Tom had parked tonight, the level held steady at around 0.30 micros and 88 or 90 counts per minute (the same as a brickyard in Bangladesh).* Down toward the trees the dose fell off by 20%. It could have been that decades of contaminated Columbia River water dripping off of boats had increased the radioactivity, but that was the merest night hypothesis, and in the morning it proved incorrect.

I thanked Tom again for bringing me, and he passed me a beer and said: “Always happy to be out here where there’s nobody else.”

Mosquitoes kept biting my wrists, so I pulled my gloves on. Now it was chilling down pleasurably. We talked about Homer and ate meat with our nut-buttered bread until Tom felt ready to snooze in his truck. I fluffed out my sleeping bag in the mildly radioactive grass; Clyde might have reminded me that a truckload of bananas was worse. Tom had brought an inflatable mattress for me, but the grass was so soft that I used it only for a groundcover. The coyotes fell mostly silent. The moon was a fruit hanging from the black tree-spider just beyond that outspread its black arms in limp curves.

Mosquitoes annoyed us for most of the night, but before dawn the air chilled down farther, and before I knew it, morning woke me. Tom made us coffee and I brought jerky, berries and more bread with nut butter to the occasion. Then my friend strolled back down to the put-out. He said the river had strengthened enough that his motor might not be able to take us upstream; evidently Priest Rapids Dam had let out some water.

So we drove farther north and west, toward the White Bluffs put-out where (so Tom had heard from an old lady) there used to be a bridge, and before that an Indian crossing; once upon a time there had even been a town (the old lady claimed to have lived there), but the Manhattan Project expelled the inhabitants and razed the buildings, most likely for reasons of perpetual political security, although radiation levels might have had something to do with the action. The day was warming quickly. Could we have gone straight our route would have been 10 miles northeast, but it took us more than 15, and I was just as happy—for we were in a lovely land, following R-24 almost west through the yellowish-greenish sagebrush, crossing a concrete irrigation ditch, heading toward the lavender haze (some of which must have been from forest fires); and to the north lay a low glowing ridge the color of grass.

Entering Grant County, we soon neared the entrance of the reserve, where a helpful sign advised us: FIRE DANGER EXTREME. A dirt road brought us suddenly to good pavement—installed, I should guess, for the benefit of the U.S. military—and then we reached our turnoff above the White Bluffs boat ramp, with the Columbia a wide grey line to the west. According to the map, we were four miles as the crow flies from D Reactor, which lay across the 90-degree bend above which the Columbia flowed northeast.

So we backed down to the ramp. The Water Witch easily entered the water; Tom knew his business. When I waded into the lovely cool water and took hold of the painter, a dead salmon goggled at me. Tom drove the truck back up the road to park and lock it, and I gazed at a squat pale building across the river, wondering if it might be the lowermost reactor, while a white heron or egret bowed its neck far away. Up where Tom had gone, a doe slowly crossed the road, stopped, looked back over her shoulder, then carefully pranced into the underbrush.

I felt happy, not only because it would be fun to learn the frisker’s sensitivity to plutonium isotopes, but also because according to Tom’s river guidebook, the leg from Priest Rapids Dam to Ringold Springs, if done from the Vernita Bridge, runs along the longest wild and free-flowing, non-tidal section of the Columbia River in the United States . . . Keep in mind the U.S. Department of Energy prohibits public access to many areas of the Hanford Reach National Monument . . .

Tom returned, and seated himself in the stern. I waded out a little, pushed us off and crawled into the bow. He started the motor, and we were off.

I had a dosimeter, too, of course; I kept track of every stray emanation I could.* In our 20 hours at Hanford, we accrued 1.6 micros of gamma radiation, or one micro per 12.5 hours; for that I could have stayed in bed! In my 39 and a half measured hours in Portland I took in 2.3 micros—a micro every 17.2 hours. So at Hanford I soaked up gamma rays one and a half times faster than in Portland—a minuscule difference, especially since at Hanford I was almost always outside, in Portland mostly inside, which certainly reduced my dose. So how did one factor that in? The proper thing to say was that from the standpoint of gamma rays, at least, Hanford was insignificantly “hot.”

Looking down through the dark water at the many-fingered hands of weeds, I listened to the motor, which was just loud enough (and we were far enough apart) for Tom and me to need to shout at each other if we wished to be heard; so mostly we let each other be. He looked pleased to be back out on the smooth glassy river, whose calm-appearing substance flowed so powerfully around the Water Witch that in places she could barely move upstream at all. A great silent fish splashed downstream near the restricted bank; and almost level with us sat a grey car, possibly containing a security guard. If I could, I would keep you here with me in this glorious if merely semi-wild place, instead of luring you into the red zones. But in my day I had to earn my keep, which meant informing my fellow planet-spoilers why it was hopeless; so at 8:57 a.m., with the building that Tom thought might be the lowermost reactor now enlarging off the bow, I set the frisker on MAX and held it out into the wind until 9:13. The highest reading was 1.184 microsieverts an hour, a laughably safe level which would not have been out of place as a one-minute timed SCALER average in a jetliner still ascending to cruising altitude. Multiplying this figure by 24 yields 28.416, which estimates the amount of radiobiological damage one would have accrued at this exposure over a full day. Receiving a month’s dose in a day might be considered vaguely unfortunate—but it was not a month’s dose, merely the extreme upper bracket of what the frisker sampled. I remembered from earlier that summer a certain walk of approximately 10 minutes’ duration in Saint Petersburg, whose levels were slightly higher than Moscow’s but still within the healthful or at least “normal” range; and going west along the Nevskii Prospekt on that breezy June afternoon, with the frisker set on MAX, my readings never exceeded 150 counts per minute, or about four times the average air dose of Sacramento—until as I crossed the Anichkov Most the count suddenly jigged straight to 480 counts per minute, or 1.579 micros per hour. Perhaps a cesium particle from Chernobyl had flown up against the frisker’s recessed circle-grid, whose crystals waited to scintillate—but the previous evening, when I had held the frisker straight into a wind on a Neva cruise boat as we neared the Peter and Paul Fortress, a full one-minute timed average measured only 26 counts per minute, 0.001 micros in that period (the lowest possible reading), which is to say 0.06 micros per hour, so I pronounced that Russian breeze salubrious. The likely cause of that scintillation was the Anichkov Most itself. It was a fine granite bridge, and some of the highest radiation levels I found in “safe” cities all around the world derived from granite:*

LOWEST AND HIGHEST MEASURED ONE-MINUTE AVERAGE RADIOACTIVITIES IN SELECTED SAFE CITIES, 2014–15

[in microSv/hr]

All readings were one-minute timed SCALER counts. By their nature, MAX doses read higher. [The highest MAX in Saint Petersburg was 1.579.] These and NORMAL readings are omitted since they were more ephemerally accurate.

Where several values were tied for highest or lowest, I picked whichever might interest you.

The range above each city name (for instance, “4” for Barcelona) is simply the highest reading divided by the lowest.

Range: 1.3

Singapore

Marble-tiled bathroom of suite, Grand Park City Hall Hotel: 0.18

Same suite near window: 0.24

Reason for high reading: Unknown.

2

Dunsmuir, California

Sacramento River, from bridge: 0.06

Nearly all locations: 0.12

Reason for high reading: It was delightfully low, actually.

2

Poza Rica, Mexico

Entrance to PEMEX refinery during small oil burnoff: 0.12

Table at Enrique’s Restaurant, near tile wall: 0.24

Reason for high reading: The ceramic tile, I suspect.

2.5

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Interior of room, Pan Pacific hotel: 0.12

Bricks in brickyard: 0.30

Reason for high reading: Bricks always measured high. See San Francisco.

2.5

Lausanne

Vineyard above Lake Geneva: 0.12

Granite wall, Jardin de Veant: 0.30

Reason for high reading: Three guesses. First one begins with “g.”

4

Barcelona

Subway L3 in motion toward Plaçade Catalyuna: 0.06

Air dose inside massive stone entrance tunnel, Montjuïc citadel: 0.24

Reason for high reading: Almost surely the stone. More usually, enclosed and especially subterranean spaces (such as the subway L3 noted above) measured very low. This is the rationale for a fallout shelter.

4

San Francisco

Intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets: 0.06

Brick tiles in backyard garden: 0.24

Other objects at this garden were up to 4 times “cooler.”

4

Pineville, West Virginia

Cow Shed restaurant, plastic bench: 0.12

Granite “Ten Commandments” tablet at courthouse: 0.48

Reason for high reading: Probably not any one commandment.

4.5

Denver, Colorado

Interior of Irish Snug pub on East Colfax: 0.12

Granite boulder in Denver Botanical Garden: 0.54

Reason for high reading: Not much of a puzzler.

4.7

Estes Park, Colorado [7,522 ft]

Trunk of blue spruce tree, bank of Fall River: 0.18

Lichened granite boulder off Highway 34: 0.84

Do you see a pattern yet?

7

Greeley, Colorado

Interior of Mad Cow restaurant: 0.06

Concrete loading dock near railroad tracks, old downtown: 0.42

Reason for high reading: Some mineral in the concrete aggregate, I would guess. The air dose in the same place was nearly 40% less.

9

Moscow

Marble floor of cafeteria in Tretyakov Gallery: 0.06

Granite curb of Molotov’s grave: 0.54

Reason for high reading: Well, he was a glowing old Bolshevik.

16

Saint Petersburg

Air dose in wind on cruise boat, Neva River near Peter and Paul Fortress: 0.06

Granite windowsill outside fancy cafe Kutsov Eliseevi on the Nevskii Prospekt: 0.96

I rest my case.

Typical air dose off the Hanford Reserve, downstream of the B Reactor

Slapping mosquitoes on my face, I toggled the frisker to a one-minute timed SCALER count, with a building that Tom thought might be D Reactor now off the bow at the 10:00 position, and got an air dose of 26 counts per minute, 0.06 micros an hour—the latter being once again the lowest reading possible.* My other frisks of river wind at Hanford yielded comparable results.

Looking upstream toward the chalky ridge on the northeastern bank—one of the White Bluffs, in fact—and the low olive grasses on the other shore where the reserve was (I saw a pelican on the forbidden side, and then mincing longnecked egrets, none of them diving yet, just watching the dark water), as Tom’s boat hummed over the water-weeds, which sometimes resembled corals or rock concretions, I now began to be pelted by caddis flies, which clung in hordes to my arms and shoulders, crawling inside my spectacles, hiding in my hair, sunbathing on the pancake frisker and thronging in the oarlocks. Tom was brushing them off, too, grinning a little; and slowly the Water Witch overcame the current of that creamy river. My friend had remarked on how deserted it always was out here; he’d called it a silent river, although come afternoon the fishermen might be out. Everything was hazy, muted and gentle, the river crabbed and crowded with ripples, caddis flies crawling on us, the pallid reactor (if that was what it was) growing and growing off the bow almost like a farmhouse. Dark vehicles crawled along what appeared to be the baseline of that structure (there must have been a road flat against the horizon). I could faintly taste wildfire-smoke on my tongue. Drawing level with the building, I took a MAX reading, then another timed count, followed by a series of NORMAL readings: 0.103, 0.051, 0.124, 0.079, 0.099 micros per hour; another near-identical timed count, and then we neared two yellow signs side by side, one in English and one in Spanish. Through the binoculars I made out the English-language one:

WARNING

HAZARDOUS AREA

DO NOT ENTER

Past the two signs was a dull-looking pale shed behind some power poles, with a white truck parked in front, and that long low graveled bluff before it, gently descending upstream; to tell the truth, the scenery was much prettier off to starboard with those cliffs of soft greyish-pinkish white, underlined by a long island of olive-green which resembled parts of the off-limits side. I saw a huge white bird, probably a heron. (As I revise this paragraph on an electrically-lit January night, with my words hoarded in a battery-powered device whose consumption of energy I have quantified here, I remember how as we motored upstream that island seemed to be sliding by itself, leaving the sand-cliff behind it untouched, because the latter was so much farther away.) Two MAX counts both read 81 cpms and 0.266 micros—nothing to write a book about. Squishing cold caddis flies on my forehead, with the boat droning upstream toward the bend where the White Bluffs and the reserve’s olive-green seemed to meet, I immediately took another one-minute timed SCALER sampling, with the usual results, my feet pleasurably cool in their dripping shoes; while on the Hanford side eight deer grazed close together just above the shore, watching us without fear, right by a tall sign labeled 14; then we passed more deer almost silhouetted on the bluff’s flat top; there looked to be a road up there. In a black tree sat a silhouetted osprey. There came a yellow sign too small to read, after which the bluff top had been fenced off for a good hundred yards; maybe waste tanks had been buried there, so that might have been a good place to frisk, but the bluff’s gravel remained smooth and even, with no sign of any creek or gulley to sample from. Here the bluff began to rise, its gravel still evenly sloped and now overlined with a long dark stripe that must definitely have been a road. A sign announced that we were entering Area 13. The bluff momentarily dwindled into a marsh, rising again up at the bend; then far back on the plain were more of those odd whitish buildings; and Tom now thought that these might be the reactors.

There was a pumping station, with a curving road behind it, on which two white vehicles were parked side by side, until one followed the other down the bank, and they both vanished behind the station. A vast flock of tiny black birds—cliff swallows, I should guess* (all silhouetted, too tiny for my binoculars to make out)—rushed over the reserve. It was 10:59, and the frisker read 0.06 micros an hour, 26 counts per minute. Just past the pumphouse, by another English-Spanish pair of yellow warning signs, with my three-minute MAX reading almost the same as before, Tom announced that we had better turn back; the current was getting too strong. It became evident that we had never even reached D Reactor, having come about four curving miles, with another three to go. But since the entire Columbia was supposed to be contaminated, anyplace downstream of the reactors should do.

Two hundred yards below the pumphouse we might have made a hypothetical landing, but that would have been illegal, so let us call the rest of this paragraph a work of fiction as Tom paddled us close, and I stepped out, frisking pebbles on the beach while the Water Witch slowly began to descend the stream. The one-minute timed count was about as I had expected: 45 cpms and 0.12 micros. After all, the pebbles were river-licked and not particularly porous. In the dirt up on the bluff, where I never went because that would have been even more illegal, was deer scat and yellow grass, with a reading of 65 counts per minute and 0.24 micros—pretty close to the edge of the trees at our campsite. Chasing after Tom’s driftboat, I reentered nonfiction.

At 11:50 we could have made another hypothetical landing, although of course I love authority and must respect all laws. Up on the flat plain where mulleins grew in towering isolation and that mysterious boxlike structure looked out at me, with a tall skinny entity behind (Tom had thought it an emergency siren) and the predictable sign proclaimed Area 13, I could fictionally have measured sandy soil at 52 cpms and 0.24 micros, after which, covering my face, I might or might not have troweled a two-inch-deep hole and frisked again, in which case the frisker would have read 66 cpms and another 0.24 micros.* There were many more hypothetical caddis flies here on land, and I was glad to get back onto the Water Witch and push us off. Then for awhile Tom happily fished on the river with a red lure that dove and jittered, as he told me about the big steelhead that got away.

Tom on the river

About three miles downstream lay a good muddy place I would have liked to sample, since it lay on the shore of the reserve, where radiocontaminants might tend to wash down from the bluff and maybe even stop and sink—because plutonium dioxide, you see, is heavy, its density being 11.46 grams per cubic centimeter, while common quartz is only 2.5; unfortunately, just then a busload of approved individuals appeared, so it seemed best to keep this landing even more hypothetical than the others.

At 1:00 p.m. exactly (the dosimeter at 578.6, up from 578.3, when we had embarked at 8:41 a.m.) we emerged from the river at the White Bluffs boat ramp. I had not heard of any law against “fishing around,” so I did just that. Remembering the following rule to live by, courtesy of William L. Graf: Heavy metal concentrations are usually highest in the finest stream sediments, I took my trowel and commenced to scoop up black mud and water at the river’s edge, just below the surface.—Why the water? Because, at least at Los Alamos, plutonium content of suspended sediment is greater than that of bedload sediment.

Two days later, when that watery mud and muddy water had dried somewhat, in the kitchenette of my Portland hotel room I opened the bag and frisked it: 35 counts per minute, 0.024 micros an hour. Clyde was right. I might as well have frisked my own back yard!

Frisking a bag of mostly dried Hanford mud

I consoled myself with this finding of William L. Graf’s: The grand mean concentration for plutonium-238 in river water from the six major regional sites (on Rio Grande) is nearly zero . . . and the mean concentration for plutonium-239 and -240 is 0.0041 pCi/l, a value close to the minimum level of detection.* In which case, why not fight global warming with plutonium fuels?

CONCERNING BIOLOGICAL CONCENTRATIONS

The Japanese anti-nuclear engineer Hirose had noted (and in his book he spoke specifically of Hanford) that even after the radioactivity of waterborne particles decreases, the danger (or, as energy technologists might call it, the benefit) will continue to concentrate in plankton, and accumulate still more in the plankton-eating fish.

Hanford’s plutonium, then, might well have built up in the tissues of various organisms. I did not know how to measure those.

The following illustrates this phenomenon in the case of other Hanford pollutants:

CONCENTRATIONS OF RADIOACTIVE PHOSPHORUS AT HANFORD NUCLEAR SITE,

1954–58

[in milligrams per gram]

In Columbia River: 0.00003*

In egg yolks of ducks and geese: 6

CONCENTRATION FACTOR = 200,000*

OTHER CONCENTRATION FACTORS AT HANFORD,

1954–58

[also in milligrams per gram; original water concentrations not given]

Cesium-137

From waste pond water to muscle tissue of waterbirds: 250

Iodine-131*

From “desert vegetation” to thyroids of jackrabbits: 500

Strontium-90

From waste pond water to bones of waterbirds: 500

Sources: Eugene P. Odum, 1971, citing Foster and Rostenbach, 1954; Hanson and Kornberg, 1956; Davis and Foster, 1958; with calculations by WTV.

The pancake frisker failed to detect any of these radiocontaminants at Hanford—doubtless because they had been dissolved or suspended in such dilute concentrations.—The case of potassium was sobering.—The concentration factors for iodine, cesium and strontium bore grim relevance to Fukushima, where all three of those had been detected after the accident.

As Eli had told me, “The hotter the field is, the easier it is for that thing to do its job.” “That thing” certainly found its job easier in the red zones. When you consider the radiation levels I discovered there, please consider concentration factors. Imagine being encouraged to return to your home in Tomioka. Remember that the pancake frisker was optimized for cesium-137. Consider that much or most of the radiation I measured derived from this isotope. Multiply my readings by a factor of 250, and imagine bearing that amount of radiation in your muscle tissues.

And my failure at Hanford raised another unpleasant question, which will be germane to all subsequent chapters of Carbon Ideologies: What other dangerous substances right in front of me was I unable to detect?

All I could do was my best. On that subject, I had already learned from Mr. Kanari* that in the red zones, bricks and granite dwindled in importance; drainpipes were a better object of the frisker’s attentions:

Frisking a grating in Tomioka

MEASURED RADIOACTIVITIES OF SELECTED DRAINPIPES AND SEWER GRATINGS,

2014–15

[in microSv/hr]

In “normal background” areas

Sacramento

• Sheet metal pipe down the side of my studio: 0.12

Sidewalk 5 ft from same: 0.18

Charleston, West Virginia

• Grating in asphalt parking lot, Budget Host Hotel: 0.12

Asphalt curb 2 ft from same: 0.18

Williamson, West Virginia

• Drainpipe on side of Ryan & Ryan, attorneys, at ground: 0.18

Grass 1 ft from same: 0.24

Estes Park, Colorado

• Metal drainpipe, measured at sidewalk: 0.15

Concrete sidewalk 1 ft from same: 0.36

Barcelona

• Grating at Passeig de Sant Joan (frisker turned on its side): 0.18

Maximum air dose (sampled over 5 minutes) in vicinity of same: 0.08

Saint Petersburg, Russia

• Thick, painted, cast iron (?) pipe down courtyard wall of Hotel Nevsky Forum: 0.18

Sidewalk directly below same: 0.18

• Painted drainpipe down side of cafe Kutsov Eliseevi on the Nevskii Prospekt, frisked where it crossed exterior granite window-ledge: 0.54

Window-ledge adjoining same: 0.96

In Japanese green zone

Hisanohama [16 km north of central Iwaki]

• Drainpipe of traditional Japanese house being decontaminated: 0.49*

Rain channel in concrete driveway of same residence: 0.16*

• Next door neighbor’s drainpipe: 0.17*

In Japanese red and yellow radiation zones

Iitate

• Decontaminated drainpipe: 4.00

Roadside vegetation near same: 1.048

Tomioka

• Grating on border of green and yellow zones, frisked at 1 ft: 3.01

• Drainpipe near TSUBA, frisked at base, February 2014: 22.1*

• The same, frisked 1 ft from ground, October 2014: 12

• The same, at ground level, October 2014: 32

Air dose 2 ft from same, October 2014: 5

Okuma

• Grating near Ono Station, frisked from 3 inches above: 4.20

Air dose nearby, continuously sampled: 6–10

• Another grating in vicinity, frisked at 1.5 ft: 11.52

• The same, frisked at 10 inches: 21.9

• The same at 8 inches: 23.3

• Rusty grating at fish hatchery (deep drainage well beneath), frisked at waist level: 20.0

• The same at 3 inches: 30.0

Air dose in vicinity: 9.46

And now, reader, you are as numerically prepared as was I to visit the red zones.

THE RULES

Regarding these interesting places I should express my admiration as an American citizen—for when I lived we believed in “states’ rights”: In certain zones two women could marry each other,* or a cancer patient could legally drink marijuana tinctures for his pain, or a gun owner could stroll down Main Street loaded at the ready, while in other parts of the same nation any or all of those things were forbidden—that their rules of entry so colorfully varied. The red areas of Tomioka could be permissibly entered only through a national call center whose policy seemed less than favorable to non-residents. As for Okuma, that seaside paradise now rendered even more salubrious by the presence of Nuclear Plant No. 1, one could apply directly to the municipality, a written process that took months and required an exact route to be pre-approved, a vehicle (in this case another $600 taxi), a guarantee that each member of the party would possess protective gear and a dosimeter, and of course the construction of the most satisfactory answers to certain questions. In my case, for instance, it seemed better for me to be an author than a journalist, and best of all for me to be a photographer, as indeed I was. An official car would escort me, to ensure that I kept all my promises. So I anticipated a blinkered, commanded experience. But when push came to shove, nobody cared if my driver or interpreter had dosimeters; the driver even declined my offer of shoe covers, a mask and a paper painter’s suit. He was supposed to remain in the taxi at all times, so he got out whenever he felt like it, taking happy breaths of sea air and tramping through the radioactive weeds. Smiling, he said: “Just write that I stayed in the car.” (Now I have.) Once we had exited the red zone through the final security gate, the interpreter and I were sent for decontamination, while the driver and the two municipal officials (who had led rather than followed, and obligingly allowed me to wander around wherever I liked) stood passing the time, unmasked in that presumably particulated breeze. My painter’s suit, I sadly report, immediately tore across the crotch, while my shoe covers, which had soon become pincushions of significantly radioactive stickleburrs, stayed on until we were in view of No. 1, at which point the left one finally tore off. So there I was, ponderous and ludicrous, frisking the world with one hand while I photographed and scrawled notes with the other. I suspect that those two officials, so elegantly unencumbered, quickly lost whatever respect they might have felt for me, not that I much cared. Soon enough I had unzipped my paper suit halfway down the chest; except when we were admiring No. 1, from which an ill wind blew; I left my mask dangling around my throat (the prudent interpreter wore hers, although when we dropped by Tomioka later that day she put it on backwards, presumably inhaling whatever Okuma fallout had accrued to it, at which we both had a good laugh); so I was an unkempt shambles of a foreigner, but at least I could not later accuse myself of protecting my health more than did the people who were helping me. That was Okuma. In my university Russian language class our instructor, a Russian émigré, once joked that Russians were Italians trying to be Germans; and comparably peculiar were Okuma’s rules: strict in advance, mild in practice.

Iitate and Namie occupied still another category, for each of these places opened itself to me by means of a private tour. My guide for Iitate headed the Nagadoro subdistrict, which owned the unfortunate distinction of being the only part of the village actually in the red zone. When we approached the security gate, I asked whether he had obtained permission from the central government to bring me in.—“You’re not really allowed,” he explained, “but I will take responsibility.” How I loved that answer!—As for Namie, there too a kind of tour materialized—this one with a former Tepco worker who believed in nuclear power.

BUSINESS AS USUAL

In the summer of 2014 I entertained myself at home, cooking soup on my fossil-fueled stove, flying to the West Virginian coal country and generally doing my mite to burn more carbon while I awaited the approval of my Okuma application. Wishing to someday become a canny journalist, I even read the newspapers. That was how I kept up with Japan.

In April, Tepco’s attempt to freeze radioactive water in a tunnel between Reactor No. 1’s turbine building and a contaminated trench achieved disappointing results. I wasn’t awfully surprised.

A June headline ran: Tepco’s ice wall runs into glitch.

No matter how hard they tried, they could not seem to lower the temperature far enough. Since July they had injected, they said, more than 400 tons of ice and dry ice.

In August, an equal 400 tons of groundwater were still flowing into the reactor’s basement every day. There it got spiced up with cesium. That month Tepco petitioned to construct a facility to dump radiation-tainted groundwater . . . into the sea—but don’t worry, it would be after filtration, of course.

Then came another headline: Ice wall at No. 1 plant fails.*

Two weeks before my return, Typhoon Phanfone added its mite (168 millimeters of rain) to the groundwater around the four reactors of Plant No. 1, so that a monitoring well between Reactor No. 2 and the ocean now presented 150,000 becquerels per liter of tritium, a record for the well and over 10 times the level measured the previous week. That was very special.

The day before I arrived, what seems to have been the same well set a new record: 251,000 becquerels per liter of cesium—a concentration 3.7 times greater than four days earlier. It was the highest recorded in water samples from any of the wells. And, oh yes, strontium-90 and other such beta emitters had also increased their presence, to 7.8 million becquerels per liter.

I interviewed some Tepco P.R. men that month, and one of them, a Mr. Hitosugi Yoshimi, set my mind at rest on this issue: “We do sampling of the ocean water, and all of the results are publicized on our website. From immediately after the accident, if you compare to now, it’s much lower. It’s almost unmeasurable; that’s the fact.”—When he was saying these things I felt as sorry for him as I had for my hometown utility spokesman who could not bring himself to mention global warming.*

And poor Tepco kept working away. What else could they do? They could hardly sit pretty, as the U.S. Department of Energy had at Hanford. The plan was to clear away explosion debris from Reactor No. 1 in the winter of 2015. In 2013, they had attempted this at Reactor No. 3, incidentally contaminating various rice paddies with fallout. Maybe it would go better this time. If it did, then sometime in late fiscal 2017, they could attempt to withdraw No. 1’s fuel rods.

The tsunami that wiped out the backup cooling defenses of the four reactors at Plant No. 1 had been 15.1 meters high. Certain number-crunchers now projected that a 26.3-meter tsunami might strike the site—perhaps tomorrow, maybe 10 or 100,000 years from now. If that happened, said Tepco, 100 trillion becquerels of cesium could reach the ocean. It would certainly be nice to decommission the reactors before that took place.

They hoped to clear away Reactor No. 4’s fuel rods by November. And on another wonderful note, No. 1 fuel rod removal to finish ahead of time, Tepco chief says.

In fact the news grew so good that the Nuclear Regulation Authority approved the restart of a two-reactor plant in Kagoshima Prefecture.

As for me, I bought spare batteries for the pancake frisker, and stocked up on those cheap painter’s suits I have mentioned; frisker tests would establish that they could indeed keep the alpha and beta particles off my clothes. Perusing The Japan Times, I learned enough to hunt for swallows with white spots and peculiarly sized butterflies. (I saw the second but not the first.)

It was October, and the cities and ricefields grew ever foggier as the bullet train shot northward. In Koriyama the white fog resembled smog, and the buildings looked as ugly as ever. The air dose from the train platform was no worse than Tokyo’s, although a few days later my walk around the block measured 0.30, .36, .42 and .54 micros an hour with the frisker out before me at waist level. Even the granite flagstones of the station plaza were less radioactive than some boulders I later frisked in the Colorado Rockies.—Proceeding to Fukushima City, where the average value of my 40 frisks would be 0.24 micros (about two-and-one-third times higher than my home town), I lay in my hotel bed, listening to the rising and falling of a negligibly radioactive wind.

The following table is expressed in multiples of the average radiation level in my home town, Sacramento. It may be interesting for you to compare this table with the one here.

The figures here seem less alarming than the ones in the other table. They are also less accurate. By making claims about the average radioactivity of a given municipality, as opposed to merely reporting what is emitted from this or that specific object, this table pretends to do what only an army of friskers could achieve in fact. To record a few measurements here and there, many of them from within a moving vehicle, is merely to suggest. So be it.

Red zone border marker in Tomioka (2.34 micros per hour)

COMPARATIVE AVERAGE RADIATION LEVELS, 2014

in multiples of the Sacramento average

(from pancake frisker data)

All levels expressed in [microSv/hour]. Headers over 10 rounded to nearest whole digit.

1

Sacramento [0.08 microSv/hr]. This equals 0.7008 millis/yr.

1.43

1 milliSv per year. Maximum dose for ordinary citizens, per the International Commission on Radiological Protection. [0.11416].

1.63

Tokyo and San Francisco [0.13*].

1.75

Poza Rica, Mexico [0.14].

2.13

Namie, Japan [0.17]. Based on only 3 measurements along decontaminated highway. Had I been given more time, I probably would have found significantly higher levels.

2.25

Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan [0.18].

2.38

Hirono and Singapore [0.19]. Many of the 11 Hirono readings were taken in vehicles en route to Tomioka. Since Hirono lies north of Iwaki, I suspect that a more thorough and accurate sampling would have found higher radioactivity than in Iwaki.

2.50

Iwaki, and various places in West Virginia, U.S.A. [0.20].

2.85

2 milliSv per year. Japanese national target air dose (“1 additional milli”). [0.22832].

3.50

Fukushima City [0.28].

4.00

Koriyama and Naraha [0.32].

5.14

3.6 milliSv per year. Alleged average worldwide dose. [0.41095].

7.14

5 milliSv per year. “For an individual steadily receiving 500 millirads per year, the chance of dying from cancer or leukemia is increased by 30 percent.” Disputed. [0.570776].

16

Iitate outside red zone [1.24].

18

Commercial airline flights [1.43]. These readings include takeoffs and landings but exclude any runway measurements. At cruising altitude, where airplanes spend most of their time, but where I frisked less often, my measurements generally fell between 2 and 3 micros an hour, so a truer (less eclectic) sampling might have averaged more like 30 times the Sacramento figure.

29

20 milliSv per year. Lower limit of yellow [“residence restriction”] zone designation. [2.283].

29

Okuma outside red zone [2.35].

35

Tomioka [2.77].

39

Iitate red zone [3.12].

71

50 milliSv per year. Upper limit of yellow zone designation; lower limit of red [no-go] zone. [5.708].

89

Okuma red zone [7.14].

143

100 milliSv per year. 0.5 percent increase in probability of fatal cancer, if this dose is received for a year. [11.416].

7,441

100 milliSv per week. Emergency exposure limit for nuclear workers in Japan, 2014 (susceptible to upward revision, which the government was considering). [595.238 micros/hr].

12,673

U.S. Transportation Security Administration X-rays [1,013.82].

2: No Crime in Nagadoro

Although Iitate Village lay a good 40 kilometers from Plant No. 1, and might have been expected to be as safe as anywhere on the outer ring, the place proved unfortunate in its winds. Perhaps this was the case which persuaded the Japanese government to replace that convenient system of the two rings with a more realistic fallout map.

It was another “combined village,” like Tomioka. “We took one sound from each included area to make this name. First four villages became two, Odate and Iiso; so we took Ii and tate,” explained a man from Iiso; the two towns had joined “30 years ago, or maybe 50.”

You may recall that the pre-accident population of Tomioka had been 16,000 at most. As for Iitate, in 2016 someone mordantly remarked: There every day 7500 workers are “decontaminating” the village where 6500 lived.

Iitate apparently received its first cesium, iodine and tellurium* in a snowfall after the explosion of Reactor No. 3. It was the most distant of the 10 localities to be blessed from plutonium from the accident (Okuma, Minamisoma and Namie also got improved in this way). I remember in 2011 watching the weather reports on Japanese television; this village always figured in them. Some of its subdistricts grew more contaminated than others, Nagadoro being the most dangerous—which is why it owned the lonely distinction of being a red zone.

Mr. Shigihara Yoshitomo (the man from Iiso) was the head of Nagadoro. He had once been a welder. His household had contained six persons, including two grandchildren. On his dairy farm there had been four breeding cows and three calves—all sold on June 22, 2011.

He wrote that on March 15, 2011, when they were making riceballs, the radiation level was 44.7 micros an hour—slightly higher than my own worst reading ever in Fukushima. A day later it was 49, and the day after that it had reached 95.1. On April 6, a Mr. Takamura found 28,000 becquerels from soil in Nagadoro. Come the end of that month, the government announced that radiation accumulation in Nagadoro now exceeded 20 millisieverts.*

At that time, people were still allowed to stay in their homes, but not to eat what they had planted. As for the cattle, eventually they slaughtered nearly 3,000 head. All the same, everyone in Iitate had remained in Mr. Shigihara’s words free to come and go for 14 months after the accident. At the end of May 2012, compulsory evacuation measures fell upon them. Each of the Nagadoro people was to receive 6 million yen* a year for five years. When Mr. Shigihara told me this, I remarked on the difference between his compensation and Mr. Endo’s—for as you may remember, the latter got nothing, his house being insufficiently damaged by the tsunami. Mr. Shigihara replied: “The government policy is to isolate all the evacuees. If they are too powerful, they are against the government. At the beginning we were all united against Tepco, but not now.”

His family left home on June 22. On July 17, Nagadoro became a no-go zone. Mr. Shigihara believed that the subdivision of contaminated areas into red, yellow and green further separated the people from each other.

On July 4, a whole body counter found his exposure of cesium-134 to be 1,200 becquerels; he also bore 1,400 becquerels of cesium-137.—How badly was he poisoned? At Chernobyl a certain Colonel Vodolazhsky, who died from his injuries, is said to have received 600 becquerels, evidently on a single overflight of the reactor; and from context this appears to have been a very high level of irradiation. But I should note that the colonel made many other flights; hence this dose might not have been lethally carcinogenic in and of itself.—At any rate, Mr. Shigihara’s 1,400 becquerels could scarcely have been good news.

By 2013 he had begun to wonder whether decontamination were even possible. In a typescript which he prepared at that time, he noted the immense amount of time it required to decontaminate a place. In addition, he wrote, the resulting radiation level decrease is only to half.

Here are some other thoughts from that sad document:

What hurt me most is that I left my grandchildren exposed to radiation . . . I often say that the truth will be revealed when my grandchildren have babies. This is unbearable . . .

I feel we are now being tamed. There is no dream or hope. Nagadoro residents and Fukushima people are all supposed to be angry. I don’t really like “social movement[s],” but after experiencing this, I now think that we need to voice against what we think is wrong . . .

My house was built when I was a child, carrying logs from the mountains, and [construction] took 2 years. After all these years, you can’t easily leave the village, which was constructed through our ancestors’ efforts generation after generation.

His “young son” announced that he would never return to Nagadoro. The same went for his grandchildren. Saying that she could not imagine life without them, his wife informed him that in that case she would not go back, either. Mr. Shigihara: So I thought, there is no point for me to return there alone.

Think about it. Why [do] people gather and hold festivals at the shrine? Why do they dance? What is your home? I can’t explain well myself, but perhaps gratitude to the ancestors . . . I realized for the first time after I left my home. It is like you realize how you appreciate your parents only after they die.

That September he measured the levels again, reading 5 to 7 micros at the “Nagadoro intersection,” 4 to 6 micros both in front of and inside his house, and 8 to 15 micros in his ricefield and his vegetable garden; the latter two, he noted, had certainly fallen off.

I was to meet him on October 23, 2014. On the twenty-second, at 4:30 in the afternoon real time, according to the Nuclear Regulation Authority website, which a lovely Japanese angel accessed for me, it had transpired that of Iitate’s 40 monitoring posts the highest official value was the senior high school at 2.338 micros per hour; the junior high school was the merest 1.441; there even appeared to be a few zero points in the yellow zone. Then the angel’s cursor froze up; certain station values did not appear; should I have labeled that human error or was it the machine kind? I calculated that 2.338 micros an hour meant 20.48 millis a year, but I would hardly be in Iitate for a year, so who cared?—As it happened, 2.338 micros was an understatement. (Shall I say that the NRA lied, or simply that certain unmentionable things happen?)—On that cool afternoon of light grey rainy sky and dark grey concrete buildings it came time to consider the practicalities of one’s painter’s suit and half-face dust mask which was recommended for use against harmless dusts only; one also carried the shoe covers and blue gloves at the ready.

The twenty-third was a grey morning. I wondered if it were drizzling; then a cyclist rode by with an uncovered head, overflown by two crows. The next thing I wondered was whether sunscreen would adhere alpha and beta particles to my skin or in fact keep them from blowing down inside my clothes. Unable to guess, I skipped the sunscreen.

The dosimeter read 0.571 millisieverts accrued over more than a year in Tokyo—the usual a micro a day, or very rarely two. Before tonight, several more digits might turn over.

In the lobby of my business hotel, men bowed over their breakfasts at small round tables, one fellow, perhaps a student, for he wore cheap black clothes, rapidly chopsticking sticky rice from his plate into his upturned bowl. The other men were all dressed at least in stiff white shirts and black business slacks; some were in full suits, one of those latter, a balding chubby specimen, having just finished eating, wore a four-faceted paper mask over his nose and mouth as he sat with folded arms, rapidly tapping his feet; while behind him at the reception desk the plump young lady in the yellow pseudo-military uniform complete with black and gold epaulettes as required by that corporate chain stood waiting to give or take a key; and two meager-faced elder women in white blouses, green aprons and green kerchiefs carried dirty dishes to their den on the other side of the room, where they now began washing them. Faced down by a scene so stoutly quotidian, the red zones faded into the merest harmful rumors.

The railroad clock displayed 11.9° Celsius at 8:00 a.m. The bulky, jolly, headshaved taxi driver sped us over the half-dry river. He said: “I don’t mind about the radiation. It’s the younger ones who have to worry.” And so we arrived at the apartment block.

Mr. Shigihara was a roundheaded grandfather with very short spikes of grey hair. He said: “It hurts me when they say that radiation causes mutation. It hurts me that the government evacuated Okuma and Futaba but not Iitate. They first said that even 10 microsieverts per hour was no problem at all. At our community center it was 15 or 17 . . .”

To his young-looking wife I offered to frisk anything in their abandoned place that she might wish to have with her, but she calmly replied that the neighbors would be too frightened if it came out that she had brought anything back from there. She served tea. They seemed to be a loving couple. Their story had a typical village beginning: Her family’s home had been only 1.5 kilometers away from his. I thought it kindest not to inquire what had happened to her parents.

Mr. Shigihara remarked that the Nagadoro people hardly kept in touch anymore. “People from Okuma and Futaba, 70% of them are in the same place. From Iitate they are spread all around, because the other places were evacuated right away, and by the time we were told to leave, no good facilities were left.”

We got in his car, and I turned on the pancake frisker: the merest 55 counts per minute, 0.18 micros. That was higher than Tokyo and San Francisco but just barely lower than Singapore.

I asked what he used to do when he was a boy.

“We went after birds. There were no toys, you know. No swings! We made swings using big ropes. We played marbles. We just went into the mountains to make charcoal. At that time we didn’t grow much rice,” evidently for lack of flatlands, “so mountain jobs were more important. Forestry keeps you busy for the whole year . . .”—and we were winding up into the mountains, paralleling the sparkling grey-green river.

“We would sell the charcoal for cash,” he said. “You put the charcoal on the back of a horse and you walked 30 kilometers. That was what we did until the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. Then we started to go to other cities to work. In Iitate we earned 400 yen per day, and in Tokyo we could get 2,500 yen per day. From January to March there was nothing to do here; that was when people went away.”

We passed steep rock outcroppings, higher than in West Virginia. There were lush banana trees, rainy sky, high round hills of yellow-green forest. I wondered how contaminated they were.

“After the Olympic Games there was a company set up in Iitate to make electrical parts,” he was saying. “Women worked there and also in a garment factory . . .”

“When did you first hear that nuclear power was coming near you?”

“Forty years ago. I was about 20. That was when I heard about it. At that time Iitate Village was against it, but we had no say since the plant was more than 30 kilometers away. Futaba and Okuma* received many subsidies, but we got nothing.”

He might or might not have been a jealous soul, but he paid most definite attention to what he and his were given in relation to others.

He said: “In my opinion, the people who benefitted would like to go back by any means, but I think they should compromise a little bit; my grandchildren can’t go back.”

I saw bamboo and something like honeysuckle and a few trees turning yellow.

“The government says they are going to make a facility for temporary storage. I think that temporary and final storage should be the same,” he said.

“Whom do you blame?”

“The government, and nationalists, including me. I personally don’t feel responsible, but everyone blames Tepco and the government alone, and that’s wrong. Our parents, the earlier generation, they accepted it. Everybody including me is responsible. The government shows the least intention to be responsible. It doesn’t even want to decide threshold radiation levels for whenever we should go back to Iitate. They say that we should decide it, because they’re just trying not to take responsibility.”

“When do you think your home will be safe?”

“The head of the NRA*, Mr. Tanaka, he came to my house to carry out an experimental decontamination. At that time, he said that it would take at least 20 years. It was as if he were talking to himself. It won’t be good in 20 years . . .”

He added: “Around then the front of my house read 8 micros an hour. Mr. Tanaka said they would make it one-tenth, but they only reduced it by 50 percent. That made him so disappointed . . .”—and we were passing through the high town of Kawabata, whose cemetery steles glittered on the hills; just here (in the car, at least) the radiation was as low as in my kitchen back home.

“Up to here we used to sell charcoal,” he said. The dosimeter remained at 0.571.

Every little flat space had long since become a ricefield. We turned onto our mountain shortcut, lurching up into the red and yellow leaves.

“So Japan is going to deteriorate,” he said. “If you don’t take care of these fields and forests at the prefectural level, the water and air will not be remediated.”

We passed a field of scarlet maples, rolling uphill past the terraces.

He said: “I believe that if the nature is beautiful, then even if the living level is economically lower, it’s still a better life.

“There is no name for the road,” he said. “We are almost at the border of Iitate.”

Suddenly we were in a forest of cryptomeria and pine which to me appeared quite wild, although Mr. Shigihara said that it had been planted only some 30 years ago. He said: “I don’t wear a mask, nothing. The government, I don’t see many of them wearing masks . . .”

At 9:49 we passed the sign that said IITATE VILLAGE. “This is the best week of the year for color,” he said. “You’re lucky,” and doubtless I was, although the pancake frisker was distracting me from my good luck, for almost immediately as we descended into the town limits the one-minute timed reading I obtained there in the back seat grew significant, displaying 226 counts per minute and 0.78 micros an hour. Were I to set up housekeeping around here, this level would present me with nearly seven times the international (not Japanese) recommended annual civilian dose, but since our tour was intended to last no longer than three or four hours, I felt no unease just yet; my venerable “incident guide” for nuclear first responders had set the worry threshold at 0.1 millirems, or a full 1 micro; you may remember that that lichened boulder in Estes Park, Colorado, was “hotter” than this—but I did feel it incumbent on me to pay attention, insofar as our situation was not invisible to me—what truly did I have but the frisker, the dosimeter (which had not yet turned over a single digit that day), and Mr. Shigihara’s confident experience?—“These fields are damaged by wild boar,” he was saying, and just then I was too occupied in writing down radiation measurements to look, but presently he pointed again (he was a lonely old man whose thick Iitate dialect, which sometimes baffled the interpreter and others, further isolated him, which might have been why he often repeated himself), and I saw how parts of the green abandoned fields had been pawed down to black dirt. “They eat worms inside the soil and also roots. That’s why they dig. You see them early in the morning . . .” In NORMAL mode the frisker was chittering between 1.0 and 1.1 micros an hour—the average 2015 air dose for Iitate (8 or 16 times higher than my home town’s)—after which it plunged to 0.5, immediately ascending to 0.6, where it stayed for a moment, then chirped to 0.7 and 0.8. In other fields, decontamination workers were servicing those horrid black bags. Some wore half-masks and others let them hang around their throats. Asking Mr. Shigihara to stop the car, I walked up to the security rope around a neat army of bags and thrust out the frisker in NORMAL: 1 to 2 micros only.

A quarter of an hour later we had reached the gate in the empty road where stood the sentry, who must be getting his innards tanned in recompense for controlling access to the red zone. He made a fine impression on me, that white-helmeted guard before the red zone of Iitate, with the paper half-mask tucked under his eyes and his gloved hands crossed and characters marching down his white suspenders.

Guard at entrance to Iitate red zone

“See, this guy has been here for three years,” Mr. Shigihara said. “I wonder why the government doesn’t care about him.”

The inevitable day when we Americans experienced our own true nuclear disaster would bring out our own national comicalities. The perimeters of our forbidden zones would be patrolled by self-important federal police officers or their bully hirelings. Some national agency would have all the authority; the locals would have none. In Japan, of course, it did not work like that. Mr. Shigihara was, as you know, the head of Nagadoro Subdistrict, a position which must have been less powerful than that of the village mayor; while the man at the gate, so I would have thought, had the whole central government at his back. Mr. Shigihara remarked that as a matter of fact he was only permitted to bring in journalists on the first and third Sundays, and this was a Thursday, but the guard asked no questions, checked no papers; withdrawing the central bolt from that two-section metal gate, he swung the pieces apart, and in we drove. I liked that.

It had come time to use the NORMAL mode more frequently, in order to save myself and potentially my companions from long minutes of being frozen in place while getting irradiated, so that is what I did. The frisker chirred quite busily, displaying 4 or 5 micros an hour, and once in awhile even 6. Six microsieverts—now, that was a hundred times higher than what I got on the Amtrak train in California. Still, it wasn’t all that bad, compared to the 95.1 that Mr. Shigihara had experienced on March 17, 2011.—Just now the frisker read 5.71 micros. That would be 50 millis if it went on for a year.

Mr. Shigihara saw me checking my dosimeter. In disgust he said: “If you have 10 of them, the results are all different.”

We arrived at White Bird Shrine, and I asked to get out and measure. Where we parked, a one-minute timed count measured 2.94 microsieverts per hour.

He bitterly disdained to wear a mask, and I saw him watching me, so I did not put mine on, either, and that was how I fell into bad habits in the red zones. Since he was willing to expose himself for my sake, I would rather take chances with my health than offend him. (The interpreter wore her mask in Okuma and sometimes in Tomioka—not today.) So nobody put on anything, not even shoe covers. It was a dryish day, with particles blowing in the faint breeze. Trying to play it cool, I asked what the shrine was dedicated to.

“This is to be grateful for the harvest,” he replied. “I would like to say thank you.”

He pointed out two votive figures. The one on the right had been erected because no villagers got killed by the Americans during World War II.

I checked the dosimeter again.—“People see these values and they get pale,” he said. “But we come here every three days.”

The two shrine figures (3.08 micros)

I read 3 micros beneath the torus. We ascended the front steps, and the level climbed to 4. I wished I had had the pancake frisker when I was standing at the ruined shrine in Tomioka with Mr. Endo.

“In the past we used to sing together and dance together,” said Mr. Shigihara. “This stone lantern came down. We fixed everything last year.”

There had been moderate damage from the big quake. He showed me the new plaque with his name and others’ on it to commemorate the repair; they had paid for the stone, then laid it in themselves, hired laborers being expensive and afraid.

I decided to explore the place’s radioactivities. Mr. Shigihara stood by the interpreter while I began to climb; and what I later most remembered from Iitate, after the bright red berries and lovely geraniums and all the other bright flowers of so many colors, each of them radioactive in its own way, was ascending that steep and narrow flight of shrine steps up through the darkness of the pine and cryptomeria trees,* my shoes sinking into the softness of reddish-brown cryptomeria needles on those long unswept steps, so that I wondered how contaminated they would be; holding the frisker before me like a torch (toggled to NORMAL so that its numerical flickerings would keep me updated to poisonous realities), I watched the readings go steeply up, from 3 microsieverts per hour to 4 to 5 as my head drew closer to those hideous branches—hideous, of course, only because the frisker made them so—and because I, an occasional sufferer from tree allergens in my home town, have sometimes found myself sneezing or even choking when I pass directly under a pollen-raining branch, I could not help but wonder whether in this enclosed space alpha and beta particles might be likewise sifting down to tickle my lungs with carcinogenic scintillations; but near the top of the steps, the ceiling of that tunnel of branches finally drew off from me a trifle, and the frisker began to chirp more slowly. The decrepit shrine stood right ahead of me now, so I climbed up to it: 3 micros, then 2, then 3 again. In spite of my creeping anxiety about the radiation, I paused on the topmost step to take a one-minute timed count: 721 counts per minute and 2.4 micros per hour. Well, so what? On one of my transcontinental business flights out of Washington, D.C. (cruising altitude, 36,000 feet), the frisker had read 733 cpms and 2.46 micros, so aside from the issue of inhalable particles, standing here was no more unsalubrious than airplane travel, which hardly anyone worried about.

Presently Mr. Shigihara and the interpreter came up after me. He bowed and thanked the god “for the land, the ancestors and everything.” I do not remember whether he clapped. He left no coins. On the way down he asked me if I were a Christian, and I said that I liked to express gratitude for my life. He approved of that; he said that he did much the same.

At 10:25 the dosimeter turned over a digit: another microsievert in my body. Down at the first torus the air dose had reached 5 micros an hour. Inside the car it was only 1.196 micros.

As we departed, Mr. Shigihara said: “Sometimes foreigners ask me why we don’t riot. It’s very difficult to make an action. I wouldn’t do anything myself. I know that’s not a good thing, but that’s reality. I just can’t.”

We stopped at the carp pond, where he came every three days. There were no fish in sight. When I checked my exposure, he said: “Your dosimeter is just for your peace of mind. No one will tell me what is safe, so it’s good for nothing.”

All the same, he kept pulling out his own scintillation counter.

Driving past another field torn up by wild boar, he said: “The monkeys eat chestnuts and persimmons. Over there is my land.”

At an abandoned intersection, probably the one mentioned in his writings, a red cross had been painted on the road to mark the point of highest radioactivity at some prior period. “They used to come every day to measure, and now they come every week,” he said bitterly. The pancake frisker was reading 4.81 and 4.91 micros an hour.—“Look at this!” he shouted, and from the logbox pulled out the radiation records. “March 17—95.1 microsieverts an hour! We were making onigiri* here—”

I suppose that if I had lived through such terrifying levels, I might have repeated myself, too—wondering all the while how long I would walk this earth before the radiation caught me out.

Calming down, he said: “You’re not supposed to be walking here anyway. Prohibited to ordinary people! But it’s nothing.”

Here on concrete supports stood a grand air dose monitor behind a heavy security grating, its top an angled slab of solar panels. He said: “I still think the government underreports the radiation. The sensor should be on the ground.”

I remember a certain dusty-windowed building of unknown purpose right there in the heart of Iitate’s red zone; the light industrial district of my Californian home town held many such former auto body shops and defunct printing establishments on which the weeds kept closing in; in Japan, of course, such sights were more out of place. I could see the reflections of trees and clouds in those dark windows whose grimy sashes quite stimulated the chirpings of my pancake frisker; and grasses licked up against them as the bright green leaves (now just beginning to go yellow or rusty with autumn) of what impelled itself to become forest groped toward the sun; their stalks were becoming trunks and one window was already smothered.

Going up the narrow road to the decontaminated community center I measured 0.8 to 1 micros. He said: “There used to be black bags here.”

The rusty leaves on the tree behind the community center, the do-not-enter sign on the empty blacktop at the intersection, the cloudy sky and the moss on graven stones made for a fine post-human picture. I walked around and measured 0.48 micros an hour—the same as that Ten Commandments granite tablet in front of the courthouse in Pineville, West Virginia. That had been the highest reading I got in the eastern United States. (Doubtless I could have fished around for radon in Connecticut basements, but why bother when Iitate put them to shame?) A few steps farther, the levels dropped to 0.42, which replicated my reading in a small commercial plane at 17,000 feet over West Virginia, and the air dose at Koriyama Station’s street plaza, two feet from the granite flagstones.—Although it was not so bad, I found myself trying not to breathe too deeply of the fresh chilly air. It was quite still. There were blue shadows on the rolling green hills. Yellow leaves twitched.

On the hood of the car hunched a very strange butterfly, greyish-orange and asymmetrical. I asked if he had ever seen one like it. “No,” he said angrily, “but don’t write that it’s a mutant because of the radiation!”

This was one of his bêtes noires. At his temporary home back in Fukushima City I had asked him, meaning no harm, to point out any plant or animal abnormalities for me to photograph, since the only other two ways for me to represent the radiation visually were to record abandoned decrepitude, or photograph the numerical display of the pancake frisker. He grew almost enraged. It seemed that he had conceived the idea that documenting mutations was the trivializing or even sadistic entertainment of journalists. Not wishing to provoke him, I dropped the subject. And I made a point of not photographing the deformed butterfly.*

Driving away from the community center, we encountered mild weather: about one microsievert per hour. When we reached his land, the frisker was reporting 1.8 micros, because exactly here the forces of good had established their usual multitudes of black bags; and on that green field now cut into berms and terraces, white-clad figures strode mysteriously yet purposefully, with a bulldozer and a crane behind them and clouds in the lovely sky. A big man in knee-high boots was standing at the lip of the well they had made, with his feet spread wide and his gloved hands hanging loose. A slender young woman whose white suit was too big for her stood facing him, bowing her half-masked face as if waiting to receive some order; from beneath the white hard hat her rich black hair fell loose across her shoulders; I wondered how radioactive it was. And Mr. Shigihara stood in the middle of the empty road, calling out to them.

I went up to measure a black bag, and the reading went down to half a micro! Mr. Shigihara laughed at me. He explained that the outer rows consisted of sandbags. I could have crawled onto the real black bags, but somehow I didn’t want to; come to think of it, back when I was alive it always put me out whenever I had to irradiate my testicles.

Ten meters back from the bags, the dose was 1.74.

Mr. Shigihara stood chatting with the smiling and laughing decontamination workers, none of whom were now wearing masks. After all, they said, alpha and beta could not get out of the bags! Aside from Mr. Shigihara himself, and the decontamination traffic cop who stood there on the road, directing nonexistent traffic, they were the only human beings I saw in Nagadoro. I strolled across the deserted highway, frisking weeds, flowers and pampas grass. They read one, two and three micros. The fallen leaves made a sweetly pre-radioactive sight: as they decomposed they would emit ammonia, which is known to draw cesium from the soil and make it more absorbable by plants. And now Mr. Shigihara had completed his pleasantries with the decontaminators. I could not judge how sad it made him to see this former field of his whose only present crop was black bags. They had compensated him 190,000 yen per 10 ar.*

A 21st-century crop on Mr. Shigihara’s land

We drove up the side-road to his house, which he predicted would read 1.2 micros inside. They had decontaminated his rain gutters to about 4, he said. They had taken five centimeters of topsoil from around the house, and pruned one of his favorite trees nearly to death; he still felt cross about that.

It must have been a pleasant home once. Even now it appeared far more liveable than Mr. Endo’s place. There was a pond, a dairy barn, a rich-looking pasture and many trees. Mr. Shigihara had been prosperous. The house itself remained in excellent repair.—Pulling out his own counter, he stood in the driveway, then said: “It’s the lowest reading yet.” I made my own measurement: 1.14 micros.* If the radiation remained at that level, staying here might be no worse than working as an airline stewardess.*—Where was all the cesium going?—I am guessing that a great deal of those 95.1 micros which had afflicted this place on March 16, 2011, derived from iodine-131, whose 10 half-lives of dwindling to 1/1000 strength would already have elapsed by early June of that year; by now the stuff’s concentration must be nearly indetectable. As for the cesium, whose ability to spread itself at significant distances from the locus of any atomic explosion was infamous (being the decay product of certain radioactive gases, it could travel high and quickly on any nuclear wind), it probably made up the bulk of Iitate’s present radiation burden. The two and a half years since the reactor failures comprised a mere 12% of cesium-134’s first half-life, and 8% of cesium-137’s. It must still be causing wickedness somewhere.

Inside the house it was chilly and there was a faint mildew smell. We sat down at the table. “We used to dry mushrooms here,” he said. The frisker settled down at 0.8. Why, that was hardly more than 7 millis a year!*—If he wore a mask, and never went out, perhaps he could have dwelled there awhile before the cesium built up in his muscles. “They used to say 1,000 becquerels is fine, but now they say less than 100 becquerels . . . ,” he wearily murmured.

CESIUM CONCENTRATIONS IN IITATE MUSHROOMS, 2014

(in becquerels per kilogram)

Japanese government’s safe limit “for regular food items”: 100

Found in matsutake mushrooms: “up to” 3,032

Found in shiitake mushrooms: “up to” 8,839

Source: The Japan Times, January 2014.

His grandchildren’s portrait hung on the wall. I frisked the air in front of it; it was only 1.084 micros. Sitting there on the floor in his house, he seemed, like Mr. Endo at that shrine in Tomioka, to have become younger; this was his place; for a few moments his lost world reorganized itself around him; when we went out he puttered across one of his fields almost happily.*

He had a camera set up to record night visitors. He showed me photos of the monkeys and wild boar that had visited. When I asked how often he found sick or dead animals, he answered, as people from the red zones always did, that no creatures showed any signs of harm.*

Mr. Shigihara’s grandchildren (1.084 micros)

His back window measured almost 4 micros—higher than the highest timed reading I ever got in an airplane.* But the rest of the house never registered much over a single micro—call it 20% of what he had measured the year before. I wish I had thought to frisk the floor. As always in those red zones, all parties preferred to get out sooner rather than later, and the sense of pressure I felt to hurry, less for myself than for him and the interpreter, who were deriving very little benefit from their radiation exposure, rendered thoroughness impossible. Had the floor been “hot,” the mystery of the disappearing cesium would have been solved.

Pursuing this question, I asked Mr. Shigihara whether he would let me dig a hole in his field, maybe over there beneath the big tree. He was hospitable; he even lent me a shovel. The air dose was nowhere near the 8 to 12 micros he had measured 13 months ago; in his pasture and over his pond I could only find 3 or 4 micros. He and the interpreter stood back as I began to dig, perhaps because they entertained considerations of radioactive dust, or maybe just to give me room; well, they continued to refrain from masking their faces, so I would follow suit. As I dug, I frisked. The topsoil was about 3 micros. From 6 inches to a foot deep, the levels went up from 3 to 4, then 4.5 and 5, after which they began to fall off again. At two feet deep, they read 3 micros. That was as far as I went.—As good old William L. Graf once put it: In the Savannah River area . . . 84 percent of the soil plutonium is within 5 cm of the surface, and 90 percent is within 15 cm . . . In Japanese soils, more than 80 percent of plutonium-239 and plutonium-240 is within 10 cm of the surface. Perhaps he was onto something applicable to all the heavy radionuclides. Happy to re-inter what my old chemistry textbook used to call an extremely active member of the Sodium Family, I shoveled the dirt back in and thanked Mr. Shigihara.

Mr. Shigihara in the parlor of his former home. His dosimeter hangs from around his neck.

He said: “Many people came to Iitate to evacuate. I thought it was safe. About a thousand of the Self-Defense Forces were here, and suddenly they had to go! The American government policy was 80 kilometers from Daiichi. I’ve heard the American soldiers are suing . . .”

I wandered into the reddish-brown dimness of his dairy barn, where a small bright window of tree-light bestowed on it some of the tones of an Andrew Wyeth painting; the walls were a little mossy and maybe moldy; nothing looked amiss; the cows could have come home at any minute, and the levels varied between 3 and 4.3. Then I elongated my arm (I don’t know why), and the frisker chittered up to 8.70 micros—the highest reading I got in Iitate. After that, the place felt less inviting, and I hastened out of there. Mr. Shigihara and the interpreter were ready to be gone. I played the frisker over the edge of the pond, and then across the leaves and red berries that were there, finding anywhere from 2.88 to 4.29 micros.

By now the dosimeter had turned over two digits, so we had absorbed 2 micros.

I had asked to visit the village’s most beautiful place, which of course meant the cherry trees of Iitate, which were green-mossed on their dark trunks and branches, almost but not entirely leafless—seven months out of blossom—growing out of the wet grass and ferns on a hill where, as Mr. Shigihara pointed out, we could see all the way to the ocean—which meant that cesium-laden ocean breezes had a straight path to that hill, and indeed it was somewhat radioactive—3 and 4 micros by the cherry trees, the car up winding around past hydrangeas (3.94). At our first stop the air dose was only 1.3, but as I stood looking down through the cherry trees, a fresh breeze arose from the ocean, and the frisker instantly chittered up to 5 micros. Higher up I took another measurement, on the face of the hill which must receive that particle-laden wind; certain glossy leaves read 6.79 micros; the air dose by a road sign with a curvy arrow on it measured 3.81, and then I drew back the frisker a little, and it read 5.80. There must have been gamma rays about (a fine indication of cesium), because the level inside Mr. Shigihara’s car had tripled, to 3 and 4 micros an hour, although it occurred to me that we might have let in too much fallout as a result of all the times we had opened the door; but in the end my cesium hypothesis seemed the more plausible, for as soon as we departed the red zone, the radiation inside the car dropped by itself, all the way back to 1.3, so there must not have been many conspicuously irradiating particles riding with us.

Mr. Shigihara and some others maintained these cherry trees. On July 6, 7 and 8, some 40 people had come here, representing about 70% of the households; they also spruced up the cemetery with a “weeding machine.”

I asked how radioactive it had been, and he grandly replied: “We didn’t measure it. We don’t care about the level.”

I did. It was 6.37 and 6.80 and 5.80—not too bad, compared to the next two red zones . . .

Amidst the dark, green-splotched curvature of Iitate’s cherry branches he stood looking out at the slit of ocean (which must have been almost in sight of Plant No. 1) and said: “For Fukushima City people it was lucky. We were sacrificed, but other people were saved. So we ask for more help. Futaba and Namie suffered a lot, but they evacuated before the explosion, while we kept getting told, no problem, no problem . . .”

Frisking the hill with the ocean view (6.79 micros)

Black branches curved gently against the sky, while below them the moist grass and the many flowers were as vibrant as if they had never been poisoned. Their slight decrepitude epitomized the Japanese aesthetic of sabi.*

Now it was time to go. We drove out through another gate; the radiation field dwindled, and then we were back in greater Iitate, which was merely a yellow zone, with islands and continents of black bags going on and on; none of the ones I could reach with my frisker read more than a micro and a half.—Where would those bags finally go?—Two months ago, after what I was told had been strenuous negotiations, the prefectural governor of Fukushima finally granted consent for the central government to store contaminated “debris” for 30 years in exchange for 301 billion yen. The politicians of Tokyo decreed that each radiopoisoned prefecture must find somewhere to store black bags within its own borders. And so a local headline ran: Tochigi town protests nomination as atomic dump site. Fortunately, Shioya was also “a candidate”—how lucky for Shioya!

At the mostly deserted town hall, on a walkway of hand-laid stones, just before a pair of cutesy stone figures, there stood on a metal pedestal the two stout metal legs and the two glowing red lights and the square metal face of the current air dose display, with its two readouts of red numbers composed of glowing squares; one said 0 and one said 44; no one could tell me what they meant; perhaps the 44 was the daily accrual in microsieverts, although according to my pancake frisker, a day’s worth of radiation at this spot would only be about 13 micros; it might have referred to the red zone, for it worked out to about 4 micros an hour, which correlated somewhat with my readings. Mr. Shigihara liked the two stone figures. They must have reminded him of the good old days.

At last we came out onto Highway 399, leaving Iitate, the dreary armies of black bags bivouacked in mud, with green fields all around them, and the dosimeter accrued another digit.*

Mr. Shigihara said: “How I like to pass the time is have a draft beer and talk about Iitate . . .”—so that is more or less what we did. Remembering him now, I hope that by then he felt friendly toward me, since I had refrained from asking about mutants, never embarrassed him with pity, and breathed in the sweet radioactive breezes as masklessly as he. I must admit that at White Bird Shrine, going up that long dark flight of steep steps beneath the cryptomeria trees with fallen needles very radioactive and soft underfoot, I had wished for shoe covers. But Mr. Shigihara was testing me, and I meant to pass the test. Besides, he was still alive. The field would have had to be something like 117,000 times stronger to bring on radiation sickness, and if I got lung cancer in five or 10 years I could blame three cigarettes that I had half-smoked in my life.

He said: “Evacuees, they are suffering, but at the same time they are the objects of envy from those who do not get any subsidy. That hurts us.”

He said that 30 out of Nagadoro’s 70 households had already purchased real estate in Fukushima City. I think that made him feel pretty hopeless.

Lean, active Mr. Shigihara, who despite his grey-fringed baldness had the bright eyes and mobile mouth of a younger person, liked to keep busy. He must have been a conscientious farmer, back when he had a farm.—He patrolled the red zone every three days. I asked him if he encountered any crime, and he assured me that there was no crime in Nagadoro.

3: “Your Risk Is Close to Zero”

“No problem at all,” said Mr. Kojima. “Even Okuma. None at all.” He was referring to the rental car, which would carry us 180 kilometers round trip. The highway had been decontaminated to pretty low levels, but in Okuma Town one ought to wear a mask and protective gear—although since he and Aki didn’t, I didn’t, either.

“For a short time you don’t need a mask,” said Aki. “This is how small the actual effect is. However, if you are active outside, then you need a mask.”

I nodded cheerfully, and he elaborated: “If in a box is radiation, then you don’t need a mask. But if there is no box, then it is possible that radiation comes into your mouth. Then you need a mask. But even without a mask, your risk is close to zero.”

He estimated that in Okuma, one square centimeter might register up to 40,000 becquerels. I being ignorant, that failed to scare me.

“If there is dust, you need to wear a mask. Think about dust. The dust itself is radioactive. So the risk is higher then.”

It was 9:10 in the morning, and my brand new dosimeter stood at 1.5 micros, which made me feel almost young again.

Aki and Mr. Kojima living the dream in Tomioka (0.5 micros)

“If the meter catches a scintillation, that’s one count per second—if it catches it,” he said. As you can see, he knew his physics. He was the guide; he was a former Tepco engineer. Mr. Kojima was the go-between.

Aki’s family name was Yoshikawa, but since I told him to call me Bill, he invited me to call him Aki. The next night we got tipsy together, and I felt that I had done a good thing for international relations to watch him stagger off to his monorail. Mr. Kojima had already gone home; hopefully I had pleased him with the contents of the gratitude envelope.

As the interpreter explained the setup in a letter to me:

Mr. Kojima organized these tours as a member of a private organization, Isshin-Juku, that fosters human resources that may promote democracy . . . The graduates . . . include politicians, venture capitalists, . . . etc. Mr. Kojima works at Fujitsu for a living, but spends his private time . . . promoting a project of his own within the framework of Isshin-Juku—organizing tours to Fukushima.

Mr. Yoshikawa was graduated from a senior high school managed by Tepco . . . He worked at Tepco from 1999 to 2012. He quit the job as he wanted to work from outside to do something about the poor working conditions of the Fukushima Nuclear Plant workers . . . [and their] excessive bashing from others. He tried alone until November 2013, but to no avail. So he set up an organization named “Appreciate FUKUSHIMA Workers” hoping to make a larger impact . . . Since 2014 he has been working toward the following:

• To create an environment where people who had to rely on [the] nuclear power plant can live maintaining their local characteristics and . . . “traditional” industry . . .

• To create an environment where people who are involved in decommissioning work that will continue over 40 years can work safely.

This document reveals the unique situation of Japanese nuclear energy in this period. Of the other three carbon ideologies—coal, oil and natural gas—only coal found itself significantly embattled; and in the two places where I studied it, Appalachia and Bangladesh, coal miners, if not always the coal industry, were members in good standing of their own communities. As for oil and natural gas, proponents of those energy categories might feel somewhat prickly about environmentalists and criers of climate change, but they feared no existential threat.

The Friends of Coal and their counterpart organizations did vigorously defend their fuel against what they claimed to be disingenuous, politicized attacks. The enemies they described were “outsiders,” leftists, secular humanists, President Obama, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The few homegrown anti-coal activists were, as you shall see, a hated, intimidated minority.

But in Japan, nuclear power was on the skids, and Tepco workers the cowed minority. To be sure, some Japanese were beginning to turn against the evacuees, and everyone longed for the Fukushima catastrophe to be “solved.” Business as usual! If only that would come back!

I asked Aki: “What is your opinion about nuclear power? Is it desirable?”

“Currently in Japan under this situation, personally I think it is necessary. Whether it is good or bad is another story.”

He remarked that this area was deficient in flat land for rice. “Because the land is very narrow here. It’s hard to live. For the people of the locality, the most important thing is to survive. They need some industry, like nuclear power.”

Here we were again in Yotsukura, with the ocean coming back into sight as we rolled north on Highway 6. Aki said that the tritium here was so sparse as not to be measurable. Just then we saw a raccoon dog. At 9:34 the dosimeter remained at 1.5 accrued micros, as well it should have, and I asked whether the melted fuel at Plant No. 1 could be reused; Aki replied that the uranium had fused with the metal cell that once contained it, making it good for nothing now. We ascended the green forested hill to the tunnel, approaching Hirono, the northernmost habitable town.

“What’s the best way to decontaminate food?”

“No way.”

At 9:39 we arrived at Hirono, with the dosimeter remaining loyally at 1.5. Aki said that only some 30% of the original population had returned. There had been 1,700 people here. “During the day about 3,000 Daiichi workers pass here,” he said.

How could I not wish those decontaminators well? By 2016, according to Tepco, a recorded 32,760 toilers at Plant No. 1 had accrued more than 5 millisieverts a year. (A read of 5 millisieverts is one of the thresholds for whether nuclear plant workers suffering from leukemia can be eligible for compensation . . .) Of this lucky multitude, 176 individuals showed cumulative doses of more than 100 millis, a level considered to raise the risk of dying after developing cancer by 0.5 percent. The highest reading on any of their dosimeters was 678.8 millis.*

Their counterparts, the ones employed by entities other than Tepco, were often spared the tiresome duty of wearing dosimeters. In 2016 The Japan Times would report:

They typically work on three- to six-month contracts with little or no benefits, living in makeshift company barracks. And the government is not even making sure that their radiation levels are individually tested . . . Nearly 70 [of “more than 300 companies doing Fukushima decontamination work”] committed violations in the first half of last year, including . . . failure to do compulsory radiation checks . . . The ashes of half a dozen unidentified decontamination workers ended up at a Buddhist temple in this town [Minamisoma] . . . They were simply labeled “decontamination troops” . . .

Fortunately, I was still living in 2014, when these bad things were unthinkable. So I activated the pancake frisker quite cheerfully. As might have been expected, here the air dose within the car remained at most 43 counts per minute, 0.12 micros per hour. By that token we could have been in Barcelona or Veracruz.

I asked Aki: “What does the cesium actually look like?”

“Even a large particle of cesium you need an electron microscope to see.”*

Today was Sunday, a lovely warm day; and we were now passing the Hirono town office, with the pastel blue of the sea off to the right. “The middle of November is the best time for colored leaves,” he said.

We stopped at a farmer friend’s home. With that admirably typical Japanese communitarian spirit, Aki had begun helping him and others to grow olive seedlings, since the produce of those trees absorbs hardly any radiation. On that subject, the air dose (NORMAL reading) was already up to 0.30 micros, while inside the car it had dropped to 0.10—both of these being trivial, even safe.

We drove on. On the parking lot beneath the thermal plant a few children were riding their bicycles round and round. Aki remarked that it was now unusual to see them. (The local weather was only 0.14 micros.) “On such a sunny day before 3-11 you would have seen several hundred kids here,” he said.

We stood taking the air at the edge of the municipal park, part of which had been employed to house decontamination workers. No children played here; their mothers had instructed them to avoid the place, because (as he said with scorn) they foolishly believed the workers to be radioactive.

At 10:40 we reached J Village, which demarcated the beginning of Naraha Town. The air measured 62 cpms and 0.18 micros. Here we spied the first weed-outliers—mostly goldenrod and pampas grass as usual, growing unhindered from crevices between the asphalt and the concrete divider, with their shadows pleasingly distinct upon the empty highway. In an inhabited Japanese town they would never have been tolerated; and one of the most consistently striking signs of the red and yellow zones was this vegetative overcoming of stone-hard rigid constructions. I rather liked them even though they made me sad.

Aki was saying that he considered Tepco’s ice wall a good idea. It would be needed for only 10 or 20 years, until the fuel rods could be removed. In an enthusiastic military metaphor, he described it as “a thousand-ton tank.” Who was I to say that it couldn’t win the final victory? (By the way, every year it would require 45.5 million kilowatt-hours*—as much as 13,000 Japanese households used.)—I asked why Tepco could not separate the tritium from the water by means of simple distillation. Smiling, he reminded me to look at the atomic diameters; H30 was much more compact than, say, cesium-137; those radioactive hydrogen atoms would be too small to catch. Of course the Americans knew the secret, he continued; they had learned it when preparing their gifts for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since the technique continued to bear military applications, they had so far refused to release it.—And just then the dosimeter accrued that day’s first tenth of a micro, turning over to 1.6. While he joked around with Mr. Kojima, I took a one-minute timed walk with the pancake frisker, which read the air dose at 82 counts per minute, 0.30 micros per hour: I could have been measuring a brick sidewalk in West Virginia.—J Village continued silent, and a breeze rolled in at 0.35 micros.

Now we were passing the sign for Naraha, the frisker showing 0.2 inside the car, and we got a lovely view of the ocean, made still more splendid by tall waves of black bags, one of which appeared to already be leaking. The roadside was characterized by pigeons and goldenrod. Here and even in most places I saw in the red zones the highway continued to be in perfect repair, so that travellers could experience loneliness and get irradiated without any but financial inconvenience.—Aki said: “This used to be ricefield. Now, grassy marsh.”

The berms of the former ricefields were a slightly darker green than the rectangular pits within them. Since rice is an annual, the three years since the accident would certainly have sufficed to erase most of their vestiges.* Had I been more intrepid I would have clambered down to inspect those grasses, but the thought of radioactive stickleburrs deterred me, so that I postponed my weed-hunting for the next day in Okuma, when I was not only resolved but also would be required to wear protective clothes. Driving away from the ocean and into the tall pampas grass with its white plumes—the goldenrod again everywhere—we discussed those strange red pine trees that the decontamination worker had mentioned to me last March in Iwaki; Aki said that all around the nuclear power plant in Niigata he had seen many of them even before the Fukushima accident—which, by the way, had apparently deposited some fallout over there. He had not visited Niigata lately.—We now reentered the main highway, with central Naraha appearing more quiet than decrepit; and at 10:50 we stopped at the only functioning convenience store, in the parking lot of which the levels read slightly lower than before. I was surprised to see customers; Aki called them “those who used to live here”; they had come home for a few hours, since it was Sunday. Children aged 16 and under were not legally permitted to be in town, not even in this convenience store—and as a reminder why, just northward lay an organized myriad of black bags roofed with a green tarp.

We drove up to a vantage point and parked there, looking down on Highway 6 and the thermal plant. Here the air count was 116 cpms and 0.36 micros. Aki repeated: “Once we get into Okuma, none of us are allowed to get out of the car.”—Hoping that I could jolly him into letting me pass the frisker out the window when we passed the infamous Plant No. 1, I kept quiet and agreeable. So we turned our eyes northward past the empty playground to the sea-cliff at Naraha’s edge, enjoying the fresh breeze as slow blue-green waves crawled toward us from beneath two distant clouds, and then we gazed down on the empty playground. Had it not been a Sunday the sight would have affected me less; for then I could have supposed that the older children were in school, and the younger ones perhaps being carried here and there on town-errands by their busy mothers. It was a pleasant-looking field, well groomed, with the sea foaming white and clean against the rocks below. The swings hung still. A conical web of climbing-net rose around a central pole, with no child crawling up it. My companions were silent. Bending down to frisk a gutter from three inches, I read about 200 counts per minute—0.67 micros per hour. That would be about six times the average air dose of San Francisco, but after all it was a gutter, not the air. Aki said that immediately after the explosions this place had reached 6,000 cpms and more, which would have been a good 20 micros an hour—175 millis if that had kept up for a year, but it had not. Next spring the ban on living in Naraha would be lifted, “but maybe there will be some red places here for another 20 years.” I asked about Namie and Okuma. He thought that in 20 years their values might be as safe as Iwaki’s. Considering what Ed Lyman had told me about fallout disposition, I agreed on the “might be”; it might be unhealthy for a child to dig a hole in the back yard, or for a farmer to turn over the soil. As I would see on my final night visit to Tomioka, it “might be” worse than that.

Even past the cereal factory, the frisker (on NORMAL) flickered mostly between 0.1 to 0.276 inside the car, only very occasionally touching 0.3; but as soon as we entered greater Tomioka, our radiation level rose to between 0.270 and 0.30. At 11:38 the dosimeter read 1.7 accrued micros. Now as we approached Plant No. 2, where Aki used to be employed (he nostalgically informed us the jellyfish used to be the enemy, because they clogged up the cooling intakes), the frisker scintillated up to 0.38, then 0.4; once we had passed that place our average readings fell back to 0.20. Everything looked very summery; it was an unseasonably warm October; the interpreter once remarked that nowadays summer came a month earlier and stayed a month longer than when she had been a girl.

Deserted playground in Naraha

Immediately north of No. 2, we turned in toward the seashore, where the government had begun building great incinerators which would reduce the volume of waste in the black bags to one-fiftieth. I had never been here. From the scaffolding, the structures looked to be seven-storey buildings, and the cranes dwarfed even them, rising ugly and crazy like broken weeds, while black bags marched shapelessly across the tall grass, and waves smashed against broken concrete. Looking back along the shoreline, I got a last glimpse of those two misty thermal stacks in Hirono, where those children had been riding their bicycles. This was a different world, but my one-minute timed walk still measured but 116 cpms and 0.36 micros, with the frisker extended from my chest. Investigating several bags, I read around half a micro each. (It was now 11:54, and the dosimeter went up to 1.8.) Aki mentioned that his job at Plant No. 2 had been to burn waste, especially paper suits. Perhaps this was why the new incinerators were of special interest to him. I wished the burners luck, but could not help but wonder how many fallout particles might spread out with the smoke.*

The tsunami had torn away the ground floor from what used to be a ryokan, a traditional-style Japanese inn. It was passing ugly now. Not going out of my way to frisk it, I wandered along the seashore, among gravel and concrete where the beach used to be, with black bags endless off the west side of this narrow road which, said Aki, “used to be a sightseeing place.” Goldenrod grew tall behind the bags. Lacking the expansive brilliance of the acres upon acres of that I would find in Okuma, it staked its claims in individual stalks, but whether those were fated to sooner or later destruction from the machines of humankind I could not tell. The beaches as far south as Hisanohama remained as bleak with their tsunami-broken concrete hunks as if D-Day had just happened there.—“My exposure was one of the smallest,” said Aki, as if to himself, and just then, but only for a moment (I had it on NORMAL), the frisker scintillated up to an unpleasant 10 micros an hour, the highest I had ever seen it go so far. But the dosimeter accrued no new digit, and as I strode forward to photograph a blasted tree which towered behind black bags, the glowing numbers in the rectangular window fell back to 0.452 and 0.3 micros.

Half-built incinerators, Tomioka

Continuing up the highway, we soon arrived at the Japan Rail station where Mr. Endo had taken me that spring. A pigeon waddled very slowly up the road (no worry about traffic) and many more goldenrod grew up colorfully lovely against the faded red and green houses. A troop of black bags now stood on the seaward side of the station—more than I remembered. The station premises read only 94 counts per minute and 0.30 micros. I walked half a block down the street, where it was 111 and 0.36, and then found a well of standing water which perhaps had once been a storm sewer. Squatting down on the asphalt, I extended the bright yellow protuberance of the frisker over that white-lipped rectangular hole, whose cover must have been removed either because the earthquake-tsunami had cracked it or because some official had thought it wisest to let radioactive liquids drain freely. Down in the blackness was a bright reflection, whose boatlike shape and dark lines (perhaps the representations of power wires) reminded me of some many-paned arch-shaped stained glass window. But although it did in fact reflect the sky, the most churchlike association it engendered in me was with a crypt. Sticks and leaves floated unmoving on its stagnant brightness and its stagnant darkness. One foot over the hole, my frisker chittered back and forth between 7 and 8 micros, which was about as high as anything I had measured in Iitate. I refrained from measuring any deeper. The air dose in that spot was 7.52 micros.

At 11:38, when we first entered Tomioka, the dosimeter had turned over from 1.6 to 1.7; at 11:54 it read 1.8; at 12:20, 1.9; and at 12:28, 2.0 micros, so we were now accruing something like half a micro an hour—still less than we would at cruising altitude on a typical long-distance flight. On the other hand, much of our time had been spent inside a vehicle, so the situation for any unprotected person would have been worse. Once again I congratulated myself on not living in Tomioka.

We drove inland for five minutes, over the river into a yellow zone, the radiation rising to .7, .8, .9 in the car, and then I asked to measure the invading goldenrod, which was almost harmless: 148 cpms, 0.48 micros. I frisked vine-overgrown crevices in the asphalt; they were three times worse.

As we stood looking down over the tall white plumes of pampas grass, into a ditch of gently running water, I frisked the silent street; then, since Aki liked that gadget of mine, I passed it to him to play with, while the robot girl’s voice echoed and echoed, conveying new instructions. It was as if the fields had come closer to the houses; they retained their rectilinear shapes, but were not ricefields anymore.

Aki said that in the first year the air dose in this place had more than 2,000 cpms, which calculated to be about 6.6 micros an hour. Right after the accident, he said, the air dose at Plant No. 2 had been 8,000 cpms—26.667 micros—and his car read 300,000—in other words, a cool thousand micros an hour. (You may recall that the experimenters at the Brookhaven National Laboratory first began to detect adverse effects on plant growth and animal diversity at a thousand micros.)*—Aki was grinning and laughing as he told me about his radioactive car.

Tramping through mildly radioactive weeds, I got down on one knee to measure the ground dose, because he had assured me: “You don’t have to worry at all.” Once I finished frisking, I inquired: “You mean that there’s no internal exposure from breathing here? And it doesn’t stay in the lungs?”—“Probably yes,” he replied, “but take me as an example. I have an internal exposure beyond comparison with yours, just by working at the nuclear plant, and I have checked myself thoroughly. I was below the detectable level.”—I thought my thoughts about genetic damage, but my role was to learn from him, not to hurt or challenge him. His devil-may-care position might for all I knew be justified.

We returned to the car, speeding down the empty roads. Our interior dose, the frisker restlessly chittering in NORMAL mode, was 0.7, 0.8, 0.4 and 1.04. I had wanted to return to Yonomori, the cherry tree avenue of which Mr. Endo had been so proud, so we paused there among the silent houses. While our earlier halts had appeared strangely summery thanks to the tall and handsome weeds, Yonomori looked like autumn. Fallen leaves lay here and there on the clean blacktop, with many more of them along the curbs. The shadows of branches crossed the highway like wrought ironwork. To the north and south the highway dwindled beneath bare trees, with nobody coming or going, and the branches appeared to touch each other across the road, hiding the abandoned homes behind them. Whatever leaves still remained on the branches were silhouetted against the clouds. I should not have liked to walk alone down that long avenue at night. Strolling down the center line toward the ever receding vortex of that tunnel of trees, with the frisker extended at waist level, I read an average air dose of 1,226 counts per minute, or 4.08 micros an hour—nearly a micro more than I’d measured in a jetliner over the North Pole. (Or would you rather know that before the accident Yonomori’s air dose had been 0.042 micros—97 times less?) By now I was getting used to such numbers. The robot girl was saying: “The garbage has not been appropriately segregated.”

Aki said: “The center of this town was pretty busy. Even though my place was 20 kilometers away, I often used to come here. There was a large scale supermarket, and I liked the electrical shop . . .”

It had taken him three years to complete the cleanup at his home; in those days it was not so simple even to throw away the broken dishes. For three years no one would accept such garbage. (Hearing this, I imagined that I felt a burning in my nose.)

Driving off that cherry tree boulevard and past an army of goldenrod, we soon reached one of the meandering local borders between red and yellow zones, where accordion-grated barriers closed off ever so many side streets; the company that manufactured those must now be rich. In the red zones the weeds were often taller than elsewhere, and more ivy grew on the trees. I remember the way that in Tomioka the glossy-leaved tree branches and the pale green ivy could cradle a pole so lovingly that no explorer who lacked a pair of pruning shears could tell whether this had been a streetlamp or the support of power lines; it leaned, and the pavement around it was cracked and broken, evidently from the tsunami; it seemed well on the way to metamorphosing into a tree-trunk in a peculiarly indeterminate forest whose floor was grooved concrete—although even in the yellow zone’s commercial districts I often found pampas grass bursting out of planters.—About that latter plant an American guide to invasive weeds said: Growth is astoundingly fast—8 feet in one season is not uncommon—and it easily shoves aside other vegetation . . . Eradication is daunting. A gardener’s encyclopaedia described its genus as hardy to frost hardy . . . perennials forming clumps of narrow leaves . . . over which soar plume-like flower panicles in white, silver, gold or rose-pink in late summer or autumn. Cortaderia should be positioned in full sun and cut to ground level each spring to maintain healthy, vigorous plants. In the red zones it was getting plenty of sun, all right. Whether or not anyone was cutting it down (last February Mr. Endo had said that the weeds of Tomioka simply died back in winter and then came up again), it was healthy; it was vigorous—the pride of any radioactive garden. And so Tomioka’s yards had turned into vacant lots, never mind the shuttered houses within them.

Often the red zone announced itself simply through one of those vertical signs held against a guardrail by a red-and-white horizontal signal bar each of whose looped ends was affixed to a road cone. No fence or other physical barrier prevented anyone from stepping over the guardrail into the pampas grass and the darkness between ivy-grown trees; in fact it would have been more difficult to step through the pampas grass that occluded the patio of a certain decrepit house from whose eaves scraps of torn cloth inexplicably dangled; perhaps the householder had tried to curtain off a window with what he had, after which he fled and then the wind tore it off and hung it from the rain gutter. Some houses and driveways were in perfect repair, while their yards were hills of pampas grass and of saplings grown roof-high. I frisked the edges of a few of those yards, which then became for me as distinctly inimical as the borders of any red zone.

A house in Tomioka

Commencement of red zone. As the frisker shows, the air dose here in the yellow zone was 3.75 micros. To the immediate right of the warning sign, it was not significantly higher. In several other Tomioka locations the air dose rose within two or three steps after crossing into a red zone.

There was a pedestrian overpass flowing with vines as we drove through the yellow zone, toward the Futaba police station;* it was 101 cpms and 0.36 micros within the car when we came to the Tomioka Bridge; here came another overpass vine-grown and silent. The barricade on Highway 6 that had vexed me last February came down in September; so we rolled unhindered into the red zone, with the understanding that we not only could not stop until Minamisoma but also must keep our speed at 60 kilometers an hour. I didn’t mind; tomorrow I had clearance to walk around in Okuma. So we rushed past the thick grasses and goldenrod, finding no one else on the road, and the frisker’s numbers danced around 2 micros an hour: 2.0, 2.71, 2.67, 2.07, 1.8 (what must the level be outside?), and again and again, despite my horror and sorrow, I could not but find myself beguiled by the freshness, not to mention the vegetative silence that had overcome that corporate monoculture of convenience stores and shining vending machines, beautiful though it could sometimes be, as evinced by nighttime Iwaki, which offered the red and white glow of a long horizontal restaurant sign whose blood-color echoed behind the shutters and reflected brilliantly off the back window of a dark car; in my way I loved Iwaki, and of course I hated the red zones; I worried about cesium in my muscles, strontium in my bones and gamma rays stabbing through me; more than that I grieved for the people who had lost so much, and I worried about the worse atomic accidents that might at any time happen . . .—but these red zones were new places, not entirely ugly; when those oceans of goldenrod rose up in their own gentle tsunamis to drown the abandoned homes of nuclear refugees, I experienced something refreshingly nonhuman, reminding me that however much we might alter our planet, the planet itself would survive awhile, bearing its own loveliness, just as Jupiter or Venus must be lovely, even if lethal to us. Here came another ricefield now transformed into goldenrod, and the frisker chirped 2.18 and 1.95. Five kilometers into the red zone, we saw some red maple leaves and yellow goldenrod; the fall colors made Aki and Mr. Kojima happy. Now at last we were approaching the infamous Plant No. 1, whose power wires ran to our right, and as we got closer the frisker chirped faster, until I muted it; our interior air dose was 2.46, 2.65 (here came the hollow scaffolds of No. 1’s power towers, not unlike ideograms), 3.48, 4.14, 4.69, 5.46 micros; then we got a view of a stack at No. 1; Aki said that we were “two kilometers from the boundary of the premises,” and more than five from the No. 1 reactor building, rolling along at our legal 60 kilometers an hour. What wondrous readings could I have gotten now? Tomorrow I meant to find out. As soon as we passed that well-goldenrodded place, our dose fell to 5 micros—no harm done: from 1:02 to 1:19 we’d gained only another third of a micro.

By the time we reached Futaba our interior level had fallen to 0.8 micros an hour. Sometimes it even dipped to 0.6 (181 counts per minute).—At Plant No. 1, by the way, Reactors 1 through 4 lay in Okuma; Reactors 5 and 6 in Futaba.

Aki remarked: “My wife’s parents used to live around here, but now they can’t come. I don’t have a permit myself.”

A few cars now enlivened the highway; a policeman was running across the road, wearing a light mask; our air dose within the car went up to 1.3, then down to 0.45; and presently a simple blue marker informed us that we had reentered the yellow zone. We could slow if we cared to, or even roll down our windows.

“Here,” Aki said. “I used to live here. This is Namie Town. The apartment I used to live in, there. You need an identity card to visit.”

The external air was 112 counts per minute, 0.36 micros per hour; and the dosimeter read 2.9 micros at 1:31 p.m. Thus Namie, which according to that Nuclear Regulation Authority website offered 94 monitoring stations (I remembered from a day or two ago the senior high school, showing off its 5.969 hourly microsieverts).

I saw a few houses half crumpled into a soft russet meadow—tsunami relics—and then the radiation declined to 0.2 and 0.1 as we came into Minamisoma, which had once been a center of silkworm weaving, then became a textile wholesaler; now it was a moribund junky sprawl.—Aki pointed out the Odagakawa Bridge.

“And in this area, you can survive by raising rice,” he said proudly. “This is the same distance from Daiichi as Hirono, but the situation is so much better! Enough flat land.”

He said that in the “central area,” the population used to be 50,000; 43,000 people declined to evacuate. The area appeared quiet and grungy but by no means abandoned. A woman was carefully cleaning the windows of her half-shuttered retail establishment; most neighboring stores were utterly closed but we did see a few people walking, and here came a girl on a bicycle . . . These signs of life made me happy after Tomioka and Okuma, but Aki was sad; he remembered how much more vibrant it used to be. We stopped for lunch at a kind of automat where souvenirs were sold. Then we began our return.

In the car our dose was 0.060, 0.041 and 0.114 micros per hour. It was 2:46, and we had accrued only 3.00 micros since morning.

At 3:05 the dosimeter accrued another 0.1 micro, and the former ricefields were brilliant with goldenrod. (Praising its racemes or spikes of golden-yellow flowers, the previously cited gardener’s manual calls it a genus of vigorous perennials, and I do consider vigorous the best possible adjective). Some ricefields were indicated by dark grass and white pampas separated along an invisible line of peculiar straightness. In central Tomioka one could easily perceive the berms as raised frames around the bygone crop. Here the reversion had gone farther.—At 3:35 we reentered the red zone. This time a uniformed man stood at the checkpoint, although he did not require us to halt. Aki said that some of guards were former nuclear workers, especially maintenance men. I toggled the pancake frisker into NORMAL, and it showed 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, then almost immediately 1.3, 1.4, 1.8, 2.10 micros an hour; now the goldenrods were thick along the roadside. We were on the outskirts of Okuma, with another 0.1 micro in our bones and tissues to show for it.—As we once again approached the accident’s nasty locus, my pancake frisker indicated 4.8, 1.3, 1.8, 1.9, 2.10, 3.10, 3.52, 4.71, 4.99, 4.88, 5.05 and 4.94 micros per hour, with our windows cranked up tight, and goldenrod carpeting more ricefields, and the white plumes of pampas grass almost translucent in the late afternoon sun. I would not care to imply in any way that this time Aki proved willing to bend the law for me, and allowed me out of the car once or twice to indulge in a frisk, but if he had, and I did, both of which are preposterously hypothetical, I would have registered NORMAL roadside measurements of a stiff 10 to 12 micros: 100 times higher than my kitchen counter in Sacramento. Very soon we had returned to Tomioka’s yellow zone, alone on the clean and empty highway behind whose guardrails rose tall pale plains of pampas grass, some of whose heads glowed with great distinctness against the shaded wall of forest.

At 3:44 we were back in Yonomori District of Tomioka Town. We were all pleased: I myself especially enjoyed being able to stroll around in eerie freedom on the highway pavement, metering the warning signs and gratings of the red zone’s much-indented, many-gated frontiers to my heart’s content, with no one to hinder or befriend me but my own shadow. Sometimes the roadside was as richly disorderly, thanks to ivies and grasses, as some overgrown pumpkin patch, the pampas head-high and more. In the town itself, cracked, taped houses, up whose walls some ivy-tendrils had already nosed right up to the eaves, lay dark-windowed behind overgrown trees; from their unkempt yards, spears of pampas grass bristled outward at the highway. But I never saw more than a day’s worth of fallen leaves upon the asphalt. Sometimes the house windows were fogged up inside, and the notices taped within them looked waterstained or even moldy. Through the dark panes whichever objects I could see—they were usually jumbled, either by the earthquake or by panic—resembled underwater detritus perceived at the extreme end of a flashlight’s range. Weeds busily widened and elongated the cracks in driveways. Where the road had been wounded by the earthquake, flimsy articulated barricades whose tops and bottoms were defined by two long parallel pipes had been wrapped across the pavement in angular approximations of semicircles. From any distance, Tomioka’s houses, hidden behind their weeds, withdrew into the darkening forest that would quickly conquer them if humans kept away. Goldenrod resembled water-streaks on certain houses’ shadowed sides. Roofs sometimes missed tiles, and ivy kept growing up toward power wires.

Strolling down the expressway on a luxurious one-minute timed walk, I measured 261 cpms and 0.9 micros per hour—a mere 15 times higher than the radioactivity in Sacramento. My NORMAL readings fluttered around a micro.

In a neighborhood where I had never been, I wandered around with the frisker, foliage reddening for no one’s pleasure beside the weedy parking lot of a shuttered office in Tomioka, persimmons shining in the evening light, hanging in clusters over the wall of their jungle which was once someone’s garden in Tomioka; my companions stood around the car, waiting for me to finish.

Aki now proposed to take us to the substation whose failure, he said, had made the explosions at Plant No. 1 inevitable. Just then the frisker showed 429 cpms and 1.446 micros.

Persimmons shone against their almost silhouetted trees. The sky was gentle with stratus clouds. On the lawns some leaves had gone orange, and their reflections were vaguely pale in the dark windows of those houses around which the vegetation ever more tightly pressed. We came to a white sign almost overgrown with ivy; I frisked it, but the dose was merely 1.054 micros.

Tomioka street sign (1.054 micros)

There on the forest ridge a humanoid, insectoid figure with three pairs of downturned latticework arms stood letting out wires forward and backward from its six wrists. It was one of those high voltage electrical transmission towers that so many of us used to take for granted, back in the days when we were alive. Beside it stood a truncated cone of girders, with three round platforms and two Mickey Mouse ears on top; that must have been a microwave tower. Then there was a double-bridge conduit, built of the same latticework.

Just before dusk we began walking down the power plant road, whose air dose was 0.83. Then I spotted three of those wild boar I had heard so much about—young ones, dark brown, trotting toward me without fear, then veering into the weeds. I called my companions; they rushed to take pictures with their cell phones, then said we had better get out of there in case Mother Hog lurked in the bushes.

At 8:23 we reentered greater Iwaki with the dosimeter at exactly 4.0; so in hours it had turned over merely 2.7 micros—about 0.2 micros an hour—about three times more than in Sacramento. We returned the car, the greyhaired gas station attendant with his longhaired boy assistant bowing low, then diligently wiping radioactive dust from our windshield. I had told him that it must be contaminated, but he smilingly told me not to worry.

4: As Innocuous as Plant No. 1

The taxi driver said: “Nuclear power plants, I wish they would all be abandoned, because there was a safety miss. They promised nothing dangerous would happen, but then this accident clearly showed there was a miss . . .”

The new dosimeter read 4.7 microsieverts as we rolled out of central Iwaki, and the van’s interior radioactivity was a homelike 0.12 micros an hour—appropriate for Tokyo or San Francisco.

“The fact is, the government is trying to restart other nuclear power plants,” he said. “That move is unbelievable. With all these reactors turned off here, still electricity is not short at all. Renewable is better.”

It was a cloudy morning, promising rain to the west. The ricefields were stubbled green and brown, most of the crop having been harvested in mid-October. Occasionally a very few yellow-green shaggy fields awaited the gathering. Water was sparkling on young trees, and in several yards ripe persimmons glowed on the trees.

The driver’s notion was Okuma would be safe to live in after 60 or 70 years.*

At 8:07 we entered the expressway, with the frisker reading nearly unchanged. With the driver now silent, I gazed down on ricefields and an occasional scarlet maple in the light and dark green of forest. At 8:16 we could see the twin thermal stacks of Hirono, the frisker showing 0.24 micros an hour. Naraha read comparably at first; the sun shone there on a small hillside cemetery in a clearing, so that the stones looked almost cheerful. The mountain forest remained mostly uncut except for the so-called “laydown areas” where green tarps overlined the black bags.

In the four minutes that it required for us to pass through Naraha, the frisker readings (on NORMAL) climbed from 0.23 to 0.6 micros per hour—with ups and downs, to be sure. Then we entered Tomioka. Just here a digital sign advised us that the radiation was 2.34 micros outside. Departing the expressway so that the interpreter could use the washroom, the driver parked a few steps from the toll taker, who wore white protective gear in his booth; and I took a one-minute timed walk to frisk birdsong and pine-smell: only 374 cpms, 1.26 micros an hour. Why the radiation level was so much lower here than it had been at the digital sign was one of life’s mysteries; one could blame the frisker, the digital sign or local variation.

We now took a certain forest road whose air dose by brown pools and tall sedges was 1.644. High over a reservoir I read a happier 0.356. It was 8:40 when we entered the city limits of greater Okuma, whose name means “Big Bear”; the dosimeter read 4.9. Continuing onward, we came to the sign which warned: NO GO ZONE AHEAD, and presently arrived at the Okuma Town office, whose anteroom a NORMAL frisk found to be a remarkably salubrious 0.22 micros—not out of place for Moscow if on the high side for Poza Rica, Mexico. We took off our shoes and went upstairs. Especially for me the two officials had prepared their daily weather report:

Situation map at the Okuma Town office

They said that in one spot in central Okuma where the radiation used to be 100 micros it was now only 40. When I asked about Tomioka, they replied that the downtown there was typically 0.3 micros, which was far lower than the pancake frisker indicated. Perhaps they meant the air dose. Anyhow, they were full of good news.

According to the regulations, they were to follow our taxi and ensure that we did not deviate from the route plan, which I had been required to propose and clear several months earlier, at which time there had been an additional implication that I might not be permitted to get out of the car. In fact these two men were wonderful guides and hosts. They drove ahead, leading the taxi through the central downtown and to a temple, then to the ocean, a river, a shrine, a highly radioactive place and finally to a vantage point from which Plant No. 1 would be visible. Whenever I wished, I told the taxi driver to stop, then walked about and frisked to my heart’s content. We were all supposed to have dosimeters, including the taxi driver, so I had an extra one for him, but nobody cared about that. By the way, he was forbidden to get out of the car. Following the rules, I now supplied myself, the interpreter and the driver (who declined) with shoe covers, painter’s union suits and masks. Those items were all manufactured with pride in the United States of America, and they began to tear almost immediately. Duct taping my imperfections at crotch and thigh, shuffling about ludicrously in the flimsy, wrinkled shoe covers, I watched myself fall in the estimation of those dignified officials. Fortunately, years of disappointing and even disgusting the Japanese with my American gaucheries had made me an expert in looking ridiculous with extreme tranquility, so on that understanding we went downstairs and set out down the road. It was 9:09, and the dosimeter had accrued 5.0 micros exactly. I felt quite happy.

Approaching the red zone almost at once, we reached a narrow vertical warning sign of red characters on white; ahead stood a sign whose red and blue characters were facing in three directions. There were three sentries. Each one clutched a bright orange baton in his white-gloved hand. Unlike Iitate’s, the obstacle course of barriers they oversaw was of a merely suggestive character; anybody could have stepped over or driven through. Behind a tall tripod from which a dark lamp-bulb depended, a pale accordion gate, evidently for night hours, stood collapsed into irrelevance on the righthand side of the road. Stepping out of the taxi, I frisked the air, and was pleased to find the very moderate level of 1.54 micros an hour. One of the officers checked our permits, and my passport. Then they bowed us through. We entered the red zone at 9:21.

We were now in Ogawa Ward, where a one-minute frisk down the street captured 750 counts per minute, or 2.58 micros an hour—a bit “hot,” to be sure, but hardly exceptional for a red zone; even in the yellow parts of Tomioka it would have been in place. I remember another gate, and a lovely lane overgrown with the usual pampas grass and tall goldenrod, houses pleasantly secluded behind the trees. I saw two men in protective gear at an abandoned Esso station. Inside the taxi van the radiation was already more than 2 micros. We drove on, and then I asked to stop again. The air dose by some pampas grass was 3.27. The officials waited patiently in their car.

There were places where weeds were just beginning to break through the asphalt of what had evidently once been magnificently maintained streets, while at the roadside a clamor of ivy, goldenrod and other weeds almost obscured the houses behind them, with only a few roofs still showing, like the forecastles of sinking ships. A meter above one bit of weedy pavement I measured a cool 5.0 micros.

The officials wanted to show me their town hall. They proudly considered it to be “a model decontamination,” and I do admit without reservations that it read only 0.826 and 0.816 micros—800 times “hotter” than Portland, Oregon. They said that cesium was now found “normally,” as they put it, at three to five centimeters down, but no further, “because the nature of it has a particular affinity for clay.” My little excavation on Mr. Shigihara’s land in Iitate had detected what must have been cesium at a greater depth than that—but then the radioactivity had obediently fallen off. Perhaps the clay ran shallower in Okuma.—The officials remarked that removing five centimeters of farmland was easy, but expensive here, due to the asphalt, but (I detected understated pride) they had persevered in this spot all the same, to a depth of two to three centimeters. To decontaminate a garden, which they had also accomplished, one must excavate it all by hand. They were still “just learning,” they modestly said. I cannot now remember whether I complimented them on their hard work; I hope that I did.

They showed me the former health center. This edifice I did assure them now looked very nice.

The more talkative of the two was named Mr. Suzuki Hisatomo; the interpreter remarked that he was “very cultured.” I asked him which accident had been worse, Fukushima or Chernobyl. He said that in terms of the amount of radiation released it was Chernobyl, by far. Neither one of them showed any worry about today’s excursion. They wore dark galoshes, perhaps to keep from tracking home radiocontaminants, and they put gloves on and off at will, but declined to trouble with masks; as the morning warmed up they rolled down their hazard suits to the waist, revealing the crisp municipal tunics beneath.

CESIUM-137 RELEASED IN THE WORLD’S TWO WORST NUCLEAR DISASTERS

(in terabecquerels)

1

Fukushima (2011):

• Estimate by Tepco: 13,600

1.29–1.51

• Estimate by the Fukushima University Institute of Environmental Radioactivity: 17,500–20,500

6.25

Chernobyl (1986): 85,000

Source: The Japan Times, May 2014, with calculations by WTV.

The Okuma air dose monitor was not grated off as Iitate’s had been, but likewise crowned with a slanting plane of solar panels. It appeared to be turned off, for its display showed four zeroes in microsieverts per hour; behind it, dead leaves huddled against the curb, weeds grew up out of the sidewalk, and the hedge hung shaggily over them. And why not? All 11,000 residents remained evacuated.

We drove on. In a certain long commercial street, which strange to say had one parked car every block or so (perhaps the owners had fled by other means), the rectilinear geometries of sunlight and shadow emphasized its forsakenness more than did the relatively few weeds and vines; the place was being cared for after a fashion; and the shards and flotsam of the earthquake had been raked to one side. The radiation was 2,060 counts per minute, which is to say 6.9 micros an hour, so that was getting up there; a year of it would make for 60.44 millis—well above the maximum for nuclear reactor workers. Like an eager puppy I frisked about the central district’s shuttered shops. The almost immaculate pavement was cut by multiple jagged shadow-diagonals, and sometimes pierced by tall weeds. Broken pots lay on certain sidewalks. Fewer windows were broken than in Tomioka, perhaps because the higher radiation discouraged thieves. I sometimes saw tattered scraps of cloth hanging from abandoned facades, broken boards and bricks heaped on sidewalks here and there—but the streets were clean save for those weeds. (In one street, it is true, I discovered a sort of beach of broken tiles, all swept up against the curb but on the asphalt nonetheless.) From behind an air conditioner or space heater on blocks on the sidewalk grew one of those ivy-vines I was always seeing in Tomioka; it crept up the side of a shop, gripped a drainpipe to whose radioactive effluent it must have been partial, then insinuated itself through a door’s crack and behind some establishment’s dark window. What it did in there I cannot tell you. Ivy flourished over and through a barbershop’s barred gates. Other weeds bowed, spreading their many fingers over the asphalt. The air dose there was usually around 4 micros—35 millis a year. We drove to another part of the same district, and here several windowpanes had gone; behind wrinkled curtains lay books, crates, rectangles of corrugated siding. In one place that reminded me of the retail block across from the garment shop in Tomioka, the lower part of the blinds had been twisted down at a 90-degree angle and then mostly torn away, so that in the dark cell just behind it I could see a table on which sat a teacup beside several closed laptop computers. What had happened there? Had the proprietor drunk a last cup of tea before he evacuated, and had he feared that his computers might be contaminated? How had the window gotten broken? Most lives are unfinished stories (suicide perhaps comprising our best chance to “complete” a life), so the red zone’s plethora of such scenes of interruption as this was in a way extremely ordinary . . . but to have all these lives so interrupted at once . . . !—A crate lay beneath shuttered lattice windows. A great weed in full summer flourish rounded off that block, and then more closed doors and weeds decorated the next. It looked slightly tidier here than the neatest street of Tomioka.

Now proceeding to a more suburban-looking neighborhood, we came upon more hidden and thus more apparently similar interruptions, for here no windows had been shattered to reveal whatever wreckage, panic or quiet sadness lay within. As I paced the empty street, with a fresh-trimmed lawn giving way to pampas grass on the side of it, and a castle-like apartment tower rising behind everything, the air dose measured 2,060 counts per minute and 6.9 micros—almost as much as the interior of Mr. Shigihara’s dairy barn in Iitate. A power pole leaned over a parking lot. Over a weedy drainage grating by some decrepit apartments the level was 8.79.

Just before ten we were at Ono Station, the only Japan Rail stop for Okuma; for some reason there had not been an Okuma Station and might not be for awhile now. Mr. Suzuki said the target reoccupation date for Okuma’s less contaminated areas was three years; here it would take 10.

In the year previous to the reactor failures, Ono’s air dose had varied between 0.041 and 0.042 micros an hour. Above a grating in the street before the station I now measured 4.20 micros. Two steps away, another grating, frisked from about eight inches, read 23.2 micros, which in one hour would have given me what it took nearly a month to absorb back home. I was a little shocked; a year’s worth of that would be 203.3 millis.*—But when I raised the frisker slightly, to 10 inches, the count dropped to 21.9. At a foot and a half it fell to 11.52, which I considered spicy enough. Meanwhile the stairs within the earthquake-damaged station were only 1.604. I think that if I had to dwell in a red zone I would find a thick-walled place and keep within it as much as possible. In this connection I might note that during those three hours in the Okuma red zone my dosimeter accrued 9.1 micros of gamma radiation.* Call it 3 micros an hour. I should say we were in those two vehicles for at least half the time, so of course the “real” average dose one could expect to accrue in Okuma would have been significantly higher. But if one mostly lurked inside and managed on a budget of 3 hourly micros, which might not have been much worse than the working hours of an international airline stewardess, then 26.28 annual micros would be one’s portion.

The weeds around the overgrown tracks were 9 and 7 micros. Here they had truly been left to themselves, which encouraged my appreciation of the work which was being carried out against nature in the radioactive city; for in the long narrow zone of fenced-off tracks the pampas grass rose high above masses of whiskery weeds. As soon as I approached the fence to frisk it (about 10 micros), contaminated stickleburrs festooned the legs of my paper suit.

Mr. Suzuki remarked that he saw wild boar around here every day; yesterday they had trapped three; I presume they killed them.*

At one corner where weeds were growing mightily from broken pots and from right out of the asphalt, a white hard hat lay in the street. I pointed it out to Mr. Suzuki. With a smile, he said that the crows had carried it there.

The officials had explained that “former resident families” could return 15 times a year for up to four hours each, but I never expected to see them. Not far past the station, however, the officials stopped their car to introduce us to an evacuee named Mr. Tazawa Norio, who had once been a colleague of theirs. (Later I learned that his wife was inside the house cleaning, but I never saw her.) He was all dressed up in a mask, gloves and a white hazard suit so that he could trim the weeds in front of his home. Something like a shower cap crowned his head with a mushroom slit. From a narrow stripe of exposed but shaded face his eyes squinted sadly at me, although when he attacked the weeds with his clippers (they were taller than he), his eyes widened as he gazed upward. His dosimeter, Japanese-made, hung from a lanyard around his neck. It was an odd sight to see him beside Mr. Suzuki, who was barefaced but for sunglasses and whose coveralls had been rolled neatly down to his hips. Since that latter person entered the red zone nearly every day, one would think that he would be less raffish about his exposure. But perhaps radiation damage is merely another harmful rumor.

Mr. Tazawa Norio (left) and Mr. Suzuki Hisatomo (right)

“Three years ago my house was almost new,” said Mr. Tazawa. “What I now have left is nothing but a mortgage.” He was trying to pay it off as quickly as he could, to avoid burdening his descendants. “Birds come here, and their feces contain seeds.”

While I talked with him, those obliging officials began pruning and weeding for him with their ungloved hands. That seemed very sweetly Japanese. I could not imagine some American ex-colleague of mine ever troubling to do the same for me.

He said: “I was a worker in public relations promotion of nuclear power.”

“And now?”

He looked up at the sky. “If you have this kind of accident, then . . . I wish there were any kind of renewable substitute for nuclear.”

In his baggy white suit, with his paper mask covering him from around his chin almost to his eyes and his headgear resembling a shower cap, Mr. Tazawa stood on the street by the white line, determinedly working his pruning shears while the weeds rubbed against his legs. When he took a step forward, he was in those weeds all the way to his armpits. The stone gateposts of his home were nearly sunken in vegetation.

Glancing down at my own so-called “protective gear,” I saw that my torn paper pants, like the interpreter’s, now bristled with radioactive stickleburrs (1 to 3 micros). I was glad to keep them away from my inner clothes.

Weeds and their perfect shadows were conquering the asphalt, guarding what must have been the entrance to an apartment building (no weeds yet grew upon its stairs). We got back into the taxi van, where the frisker read 1.7 and 1.9 micros per hour, then turned onto a narrow weed-lined road, the empty fields looking the same as before. At 10:16 our interior count began to increase: 3.8, 3.95, 4.16, 4.37, 4.76, 4.41, 5.60 NORMAL micros per hour—“since we are approaching Daiichi,” said the taxi driver when I told him. He smiled; he too was enjoying the adventure.

Our next stop was a temple called Hen Jo, meaning unknown. The flight of entrance steps ascended a sort of inlet in the vegetation-crowned stone wall, some of whose bricks were disarrayed. Shrubs had begun to take over the steps, although someone had trimmed them partially back. At their summit were two character-engraven pillars, and then, set back within its flat yard, the red-roofed temple itself, whose white facade stood unevenly decomposed down to the inner wood. The place felt peculiar: abandoned and yet not exactly neglected; consider for instance the temple grounds, stripped down to sand, or perhaps stripped down and then sanded, by well-meaning decontaminators, with armies of goldenrod standing at attention in tall close-packed array just behind the wall. No weeds grew here, at least not for the moment. The decontaminators had aimed to make the tombs sufficiently safe for former residents to come and briefly pay their respects to the ancestors. Mr. Suzuki informed me that the air dose here had been 19 micros but after decontamination it became “officially 5.05 as of September.” A sign from September recorded a reading of 5.06, and today the frisker found even less to chirrup about: 3.9 micros an hour. Behind two metal-lipped incense wells, a stone statuette stood clasping together its palms and dreaming, with a tall tomb-slab at its back. Everything was as still as the folds of its stone robe. Close-eyed, serene and baby-bald, inhumanly patient, it waited for nothing that I could ever imagine. Bending down and extending the frisker toward that figure, I encountered the unpleasant value of 7.0 micros. Had I been condemned to stay here until I reached the nuclear worker’s five-year maximum of 50 millis, I would have served my sentence in less than 10 months.

Hen Jo Temple (7.00 micros)

Now we drove past house-islands in the great rich sea of goldenrod. Some of the homes had been swept away to their foundations by the tsunami. Disobeying a do-not-enter sign, we descended a narrow asphalt road as goldenrods towered on either side, more and more of them. So we arrived at the ocean, about three and a half kilometers from Daiichi. It was 10:45. The air dose had become an almost benignly mild 1.374.

How radioactive was the water? In May an unnamed site “outside the port” and three kilometers away (there was a fifty-fifty chance that it was right here) had measured 4.3 becquerels of tritium.* Remembering the difficulties that Eli had laid out before me when I asked to sample that very same contaminant, not least of them the fact that water is a neutron shield, I forebore to frisk the waves. Perhaps I could have scooped up some mud, waited for the water to evaporate, then measured what was left—but if H2O evaporated, why wouldn’t H3O? Wishing not to harm myself and others through ignorance, I abandoned that project.

The seashore at Okuma. Note the sheared-off crown of the pine tree.

The breakwater was wrecked, of course. A pine leaned toward the bright blue sea, its top pollarded by the tsunami. Birds flew up in flocks from the river’s mouth. Seeing a small dark beetle on the sleeve of my paper suit, I asked my usual question about whether the radiation was killing any creatures.

“I don’t know what your impression was,” said Mr. Suzuki, annoyed, “but no animals died.”*

The driver, wearing no protection at all, was happily wandering the seashore, which he had not seen since before the accident.*

I still remember the smooth grey rocks and pebbles of that beach, with here and there a paler stone, and a line of wet sticks and even a little kelp, and then the foam where those low slow waves of greenish-grey came in. Sometimes a jade wave was a little higher than its cousins, and spray leaped up from its shining white shoulder just before it struck. Even then the impression I got was one of gentleness. This looked to be a place to wade with small children. Perhaps it used to be. It was clean. The pancake frisker showed 4.16 micros an hour as I stood facing the ocean breeze, then rapidly went down to half a micro. To the landward, russet marsh grass struck an appropriately autumnal note on this magnificently clear day with the forest ridges very blue and distinct to the west. A raptor glided slowly above a broken tree. On a little rise a few steps from the shore, several other trees (pines, I believe, although I did not have time to go see them) seemed to flourish, never mind that their crowns had all been evenly sheared off; Mr. Suzuki explained that the tsunami had reached just so high, and as I gazed up at them, trying to imagine being right here and watching the approach of a wave of that height, some of the horror of March eleventh came back to me. The tidal wave had killed 11 people in Okuma; the 12th had not yet been found, and so there was an ugly mound of broken board, sheet metal, rags and other detritus on the beach where the bulldozers had gone corpse-hunting. Another of Fukushima’s incomplete stories was told by two dark sodden sneakers, and a single white shoe. What had happened to the other one, and was its owner alive or dead? Dark birds went swarming in a low flock over the blue lagoon. Among those mismatched shoes lay a woman’s purse, miserably sodden, and a framed photograph glittering with moisture; I had neither the heart nor the right to invade any of these in search of information. Clambering up what remained of the wrecked breakwater, I measured 5 micros and more in a puddle of rainwater or seawater on the steps. Angling the frisker up into the sea air as I neared the top, I encountered the dislikeable value of 10.14, and turned away. Mostly the levels there at the shore were less than a micro. I had asked to see a river, and so we all strolled to the mouth of the Kuma-kam. As we neared its wide bend in the marsh grass, myriad white birds arose, almost silently. Caught between my obligations to the frisker and to my companions, whose every remark must be tediously interpreted to and fro, I had not the time to make out what species they were. They ascended to no great height, then quickly settled back; evidently our presence did not much disturb them. Mr. Suzuki said that this place was famous for salmon, and indeed in that shallow, grassy, gently curving river, which in my country we would have called a creek, oblong palenesses wriggled in the crinkling water: spawning time.

I was astonished to learn that people could sell some fish from here—but of course the bottom feeders remained off limits.

I strolled up beside the taxi driver, who was taking deep breaths of the sea air, looking out across the white sand at the lovely lagoon and the low blue mountains beyond it.

Returning to our vehicles, we proceeded inland, more or less following the river. Within the taxi van the frisker within three seconds went from 1 to 1.8 to 2 micros. On a bridge I asked to stop. We could see spawning salmon wearily swimming upstream, and often simply weaving in place against the current, like long dark windblown leaves attached to some invisible stalk; a few were dead and drifted down; one kept turning over and showing its bright belly. In one minute the frisker scintillated 1,286 times: 4.26 micros per hour.

Now for a brief distance we retraced the route we had taken to the ocean. Along that immaculate empty road, on which a puddle vaguely reflected the clouds, and weeds were just beginning to rise up along the concrete blocks where cars had once parked, a glorious plain of goldenrod underlined the mountains, and in that yellow lake stood a few lonely white islets: abandoned houses.—How does one know that no one is at home?—When there is no way to it.—Silver-white plumes of pampas grass reached higher than their roofs. One three-storey white house with a fine balcony rose more distinctly from the goldenrod, in part because it was especially close to the road, and also because the tsunami must have hissed through here, for between the house’s wide-splayed legs was a dark cave where most of the ground floor had been carried away. When I walked up toward it, I began to see sky and pampas grass within the jaggedly peeling lips of that vacancy. Upstairs, one window-half was curtained, and the other dark; perhaps that darkness was the inside of the house. The frisker read between 5 and 6 micros. Less than one of my three allotted hours in this red zone remained. I had stopped too often. Approaching the roadside, I aimed the frisker at some goldenrod, and read 6.73 micros—only 112 times higher than my studio back home.

I took two steps into the goldenrod: 7.40 micros.

Tsunami-wrecked house (7.40 micros)

Hastening back to the taxi van, I asked that we drive a little more quickly, in order to see the reactors if we could, and we soon reached another checkpoint, with men in white protective gear bowing us through on either side of the road.

Everywhere the lovely weeds were more beautiful than anything humans could do.

Inside the taxi van as we rode up a low hill our radiation level climbed: 3, 4, 5 and all the way to 9.23 micros as we crested that hill. Now we were rolling through the lovely goldenrod wilderness of a former industrial park. To the right lay decrepit and sometimes broken building-cubes, and that pale blue ocean.

At 11:18 they showed me a tsunami-destroyed shrine: 2,551 counts per minute, 8.52 micros. Here was another of those places where the grass and flowering weeds massing along the edges had begun to creep onto the pavement itself. When I frisked the road, extending that pancake head at chest level, I found a patch that measured more than 20 micros, and I felt as I had when I first saw that gnawed-away house with the blue mountains showing through its missing first storey. Mr. Suzuki, unimpressed, reminded me that the level used to exceed 100 micros at the time of the accident.

He pointed, and I got my first glimpse of those infamous blue and white tanks: Daiichi. There were grey tanks also. Grey meant bolted while blue meant welded, which leaked less; Tepco was trying to replace grey with blue.

At 11:25 we reached the former fish hatchery, or, to give it its due, the Fukushima Prefecture Aquaculture Association, where the air was 3,260 counts per minute and 10.86 micros. Once upon a time the two officials had been quite proud of this establishment. Mr. Suzuki explained that the water used to be warmed for the hatchlings with waste heat from Plant No. 1. I agreed that that had been clever. Ruined houses grinned at me from the weeds.

The fish hatchery

Trolling the emptiness of the cracked pavement by the weedy buildings there where the land slanted down toward the seashore, I performed my usual involutions. The wounded half-cylinder of the hatchery gaped open high above the pampas grass. Sometimes the air dose was 6 micros and sometimes it was nearly 10. The pampas grass at the roadside read only 2 or 3 micros. I knelt down and frisked the air above the pavement: 29.5 micros. The white heads of pampas grass were shining beyond the bridge’s guardrail, which had been half pulled away like the top of a tin can. Wild thickets of pampas grass towered as high as the new trees, suffocating lost walls and foundations.

A grating by the hatchery (18.03 micros)

Over a well within a rusty grating I lowered the frisker from waist level to about three inches, and its count rose from 20 to 30 micros.

Not far from here I took my highest measurement in Japan: 41.5 micros. This very nearly reached the lower boundary of the radiation in outer space.*

On the bright side, by 1973 Okuma had achieved the highest per capita income in Fukushima Prefecture, all thanks to nuclear power! Wasn’t that worth a few gamma rays?

My highest measurement in Japan (41.5 micros)

Inside the taxi van at 11:36, heading straight toward Plant No. 1, I found our air dose to be fluctuating between 10 and 12 micros. The two officials had planned this tour superbly, for in four minutes we had arrived at my final requested point of interest: an overlook on Plant No. 1. This proved to be the grounds of an old age home, and here I finally lost one of my torn and wrinkled shoe covers. Consoling myself that I could hardly make a less dignified impression on my hosts than before, I resolved to keep that foot out of any vegetation for the duration.

In the three-quarters of an hour from the river bridge to the old age home, the dosimeter had accrued 4.6 micros. That calculated out to an unpleasant irradiation rate of 5.75 micros an hour. But thanks to dosimeter, frisker and this moving vehicle, I felt more or less in control of our exposure. Although the plant was merely 2.2 kilometers away, the air dose here rarely exceeded 2 or 3 micros an hour.

In the courtyard, goldenrod grew higher than the windows, sometimes bending and leaning against the walls.* The grass was not wildly overgrown, so the place seemed almost cheerful. One window was open, and the white curtain pulled back to show off its darkness. Given 10 more minutes’ time I would have gone inside, but it was already the stated departure time. In the other windows, trees, weeds and sky reflected themselves. Some of the grass was golden. A tennis shoe lay in it, sideways. The seedheads and flowers of those tall weeds blocked the doorway, invading the parking lot and reaching up toward the dark window beneath a roof overhang that was vertically streaked with blackish grime and fallout.

Proceeding to the road on the northern edge of the hill where the two officials waited, I read 2,200 counts per minute, or 7.38 hourly micros. Down below through the waving pampas grass I could see a horizon of ocean, cranes, tanks and low, wide buildings. They were guarded by a belt of dark green trees, which perhaps were those famous pines of the reddish trunks.* Between the trees and our hill lay a few houses and some fields whose verdant yellow-green I suspected must be goldenrod.—Mr. Suzuki now very precisely gave me the lie of the land: “On the right is an exhaust tower; next is Reactor No. 4, and left of that, two pillars in, then below that is Reactor No. 3. The white building to the left with the blue pattern is No. 2, and to the left of that is No. 1.”

Like so many culprits, they bore an unimpressive, even innocuous appearance. If I could only have gotten closer I would have seen the pipes, opened walls, rubble and crumpled latticework; and then, still unseen but conjectured, the liquefied and resolidified reactor cores, lumped and twisted around the reactors’ skeletons. And what a thrill it would have been to frisk Tepco’s underground trenches! Three days ago the poisoned cloaca beneath Reactor No. 1 measured at 161,000 becquerels of cesium, which once again made the highest reading ever. Tepco blamed the recent hurricane.

Since I had detained the two officials for an unscheduled half an hour, we now sped out of the red zone, passing a place where the taxi driver had seen wild boar four or five days ago, then a row of beautiful trees in red and yellow leaf, a plain of goldenrod with grey berms in the former ricefields, and to the right a cemetery surrounded by goldenrod; then we departed the last gate.

Plant No. 1, Reactors No. 1, 2 and 3

Reactors No. 3 and 4: Pacific Ocean on right*

Mr. Suzuki and his colleague drove straight back to the office, but the interpreter and I must now undergo decontamination screening at a roadside checkpoint. With great pleasure I tore off my coverall, mask and remaining shoe cover. Then they frisked me with their magic wands. They remarked that today’s surface contamination was 240 counts per minute, or 0.43 microsieverts per hour.* They measured me at a mere 230 cpms, which exempted me from abandoning any of my possessions or taking an immediate shower. The central government standard was 13,000 cpms for any object’s surface, not for the human body, which rated a flat 20 millis per year. (To me this sounded like apples-and-oranges obfuscation.) If a car was above 13,000 cpms, it must be washed or abandoned. Of course they did not inspect the taxi at all, nor even the driver.

“Yes, I never got out of the car,” the driver laughed.

Decontaminating the interpreter

MY FIFTH TOMIOKA IDYLL

Since the taxi driver was willing to earn more money (he cost me something like $700) and Tomioka, my metonym for Fukushima, lay so conveniently near, I proposed to take more measurements and photographs there—only in the yellow zone, of course; we lacked permission for the other. The ever agreeable interpreter acquiesced, and as soon we stopped she slipped her mask back on. That was when we got our laugh, to see that this time she’d worn it inside out! Some of those radioactive particles from Okuma which the mask had previously filtered out must now be in her lungs. Such are the amusements one finds in nuclear zones. As for me, wishing to emulate Aki, Mr. Kojima, Mr. Suzuki and Mr. Shigihara, I went maskless here as in Okuma; so it was an even bet whether she or I would get cancer first. Well, despite those harmful rumors there was no immediate danger.

Afternoon rush at the Night Pub Sepia

There on that side road I had come to know so well was the pachinko parlor TSUBA (today its facade and the weeds around it ran about 4.8 micros) and the Night Pub Sepia, which put out a mere 4. (By the way, these black-and-white reproductions will not reveal that the place actually had a peach-colored paint job.) Unimpressed by the scenic pulchritude of Tomioka, the driver remained in the taxi van, considerately driving after us as we strolled here and there. Within a few paces I came to a gap in a hedge of what might have been laurels, and then some fingers of a cryptomeria below and in front of me, the richly gloomy silhouettes of the same trees above and behind. The middle of that ovoid gap allured me with a glowing meadow of tall grass pale green and russet, silvered with pampas grass and illuminated with goldenrod, with hints of sky in those cryptomeria trees like tiny stained glass windows, and I longed to saunter there, all the more since there had been no time to make such excursions in Okuma; but as I introduced the pancake frisker through the hole and ducked my head as I prepared to follow behind it, the displayed numbers chittered upward, from 5.52 to 7 micros per hour, and the frisker not even half a meter in yet; then I felt a loathsome spiderweb on my forehead and the dusty leaves seemed on the verge of brushing against my face, so that in revulsion I drew back, cleaning off my head with my relatively uncontaminated sleeve, and that was when it struck me anew how dangerous last spring’s Tomioka idylls must have been. That morning the two Okuma officials had asserted that the level in downtown Tomioka was “typically” 0.3 micros. So this was not typical—although the average of my 151 frisks of Tomioka worked out to 2.77 micros. Such discrepancies do make a fellow wonder. All the same, as I think back on this meadow hole experience, it seems to say more about my state of mind than about the place, for what should a micro and a half’s difference truly have been to me? Given my ignorance and inexperience, those excursions into the red zone were a strain—and rightly so; it was the people who had been compelled into familiarity (precursors of you in my future) whose perceptions were distorted into dullness. (We were all fools.) Those spiderwebs and leaves, with their tactile content, affected me much as had my lonely walk up those dark shrine steps in Iitate, with my shoes sinking into leaves, and vegetative particles tickling my nostrils; probably they were no worse for me than the gamma rays shooting from the ground by the fish hatchery at Okuma, but as so many taxi drivers had explained, the invisible and unfeelable could be set aside.

HOW RADIOACTIVE WAS IT?

or, Extracts from an Official Website

Tsunami zone

Here the first reading listed is the first available.

ISHINOMAKI

Point No. 70, distance from Daiichi not stated

Aug. 1, 2012, at noon: 0.06 microSV/hr.

Oct. 28, 2014, at 8:00 am: 0.05

July 20, 2017, at noon: 0.05

KESENNUMA

Point No. 79, distance from Daiichi not stated

Aug. 1, 2012, at noon: 0.04

Oct. 28, 2014, at 8:00 am: 0.04

July 20, 2017, at noon: 0.04

SENDAI

Point No. 74, distance from Daiichi not stated

Aug. 1, 2012, at noon: 0.04

Oct. 28, 2014, at 8:00 am: 0.03

July 20, 2017, at noon: 0.03

—

Red and yellow zones

IITATE

Point No. 109, 38 km NW of Daiichi

April 1, 2011, at noon: 7.54

Aug. 1, 2012, at 8:00 am: 0.28

Oct. 28, 2014, at 8:00 am: 0.28

July 20, 2017, at noon: 0.28

Point No. 736, 37 km NW of Daiichi

April 1, 2011, at noon: 2.85

Aug. 1, 2012, at 8:00 am: 3.06

Oct. 28, 2014, at 8:00 am: 0.73

July 20, 2017, at noon: 0.35

KAWAUCHI

Point No. 650, 19 km WSW of Daiichi

April 1, 2012, at 8:00 am: 0.18

Oct. 27, 2014, at 8:00 am: 0.09

July 20, 2017, at noon: 0.07

TOMIOKA

Point No. 3955, 10 km SSW of Daiichi

Dec. 27, 2013, at 6:00 pm: 1.15

Oct. 28, 2014, at 8:00 am: 0.44

July 20, 2017, at noon: 0.23

Point No. 3966, 9 km SSW of Daiichi

Dec. 27, 2013, at 6:00 pm: 1.63

Oct. 28, 2014, at 8:00 am: 0.61

July 20, 2017, at noon: 0.35

Point No. 645, N of police box and W of post office, 6 km SSW of Daiichi

Sept. 8, 2011, at noon: 4.96

Aug. 1, 2014, at 8:00 am: 4.05

July 20, 2017, at 12:10 pm: 1.08

The two monitoring posts nearest to Yonomori were Point 645, 6 km SSW of Daiichi, whose reading on Oct. 28, 2014, at 8:00 a.m. was 1.92 micros; and (for “real time dose measurement”) Point 3954, 7 km SW of Daiichi, which at the same time read 3.82 micros. No readings for this or any other place in this table were posted for Oct. 27, the date of the visit just described. But on Oct. 28 I did make another visit to Tomioka, as detailed below.

Nuclear accident zone

VICINITY OF NUCLEAR PLANT NO. 1

Point No. 1373, 2 km west of Daiichi

April 1, 2012, at 8:00 am: 26.04

Oct. 27, 2014, at 8:00 am: 10.80

July 20, 2017, at 11:00 am: 6.20

Source: http://fukushima-radioactivity.jp/pc.

Engaging in my hobby of measuring drainpipes and culverts, I recorded 5, 3.5, 12, 32 and 5 micros. Over in the red zone, a lovely russet-golden sea of grass and young goldenrod and tall pampas grass was already halfway to drowning the closed-up little houses.

Departing from the hedge and from the repellent graspings of the ivy upon the Night Pub Sepia, I directed the driver to that uncanny garment shop in the business district, where the robot girl was echoingly advising us: “When you enter the town, please be very careful about wasps. Contact the Environmental Section for information.” We were already inside the garment shop when we heard this. Since February, heaps of rodent feces had been swept up into piles here and there; the rest appeared unchanged.

The radiation in there was 0.36 micros. Perhaps the “typical” dose for this area had been computed from interior samplings such as this. The sidewalk immediately outside varied from 0.7 to 1.3 micros measured at waist level. I walked a few steps down the street in both directions: 1.0, 2.58, 1.86 and 2.0. A fallen goldenrod on the sidewalk was 2.51.

On October 22, the Nuclear Regulation Authority website listed Tomioka’s 67 monitoring spots. The highest radiation reported was at the “multipurpose meeting place, east side”: 2.218 micros.—According to my frisker, the base of a pole for an asphalt parking lot’s barrier chain read 12 micros and more; the asphalt was 11.

In the garment shop I stood looking out through the darkness into the yellowish-white light of the glass doors, with the mannequin’s elegant silhouette gazing down through the open doorway at the two bright lines of grass that sprouted up from the sidewalk and the rubble before her and the ivy-grown ruined shops across the street.

The hole in the foliage (from 2 to 7 micros)

5: And You Can’t Live

Not far south of Iwaki stands Ganjo Temple, the site of Fukushima’s only National Treasure. I am told that it dates all the way back to the Heian period, although the Japanese have fooled me that way before; once in Nara I saw the oldest wooden building in the world, and felt quite impressed until I learned that they replaced the wood as often as it wore out—sometimes every 30 years. Well, who was I to say how others ought to count time and genuineness? I could not even tell whether Tomioka would be safe to dwell in by 2017 as the central government predicted;* that was only one-fifth of a cesium half-life; 10 half-lives would have left the town depopulated until 2311. So let me be magnanimous to Ganjo-ji, however ancient it actually might have been; I liked the 12 lightning Buddhas of Amida-do Hall. There was also a standing statue of Kannon Bosatsu, the all-gendered deity of mercy.

Central business district, Tomioka

As I learned from my pancake frisker, the temple grounds were a trifle more radioactive than downtown, although not unhealthily so: a quarter of a micro an hour, two millis a year.* I remembered Ed Lyman’s assertion that the fallout would remain longer in evidence in absorbent places. On the pond’s bank, dead lotuses stood crowded together like the chambers of crazy multicylindered rusty revolvers. This mud was no more radioactive than anything else in sight. Some of the Japanese maple leaves had already turned crimson and purple. Just now the foliage must be lovely in Iitate. Shadows lay long on the grass, and just below the bridge great carp kept opening their mouths, as greedily expectant as the grumbling and chuckling ducks. The bright sun was in my eyes, and birds were singing. It was nearly four o’clock.

We commenced driving north for the last time, with undulating tree-ridges sharply illuminated in the low sun so that one could see each pallid trunk and each irregular oblong vertical of shadow between the trees, sunshine gleaming and dazzling on certain angles of white house-wall or shoulder of silver car; and back in Iwaki many ribbons of power wire dangled down. I glimpsed yellow foliage against the dark glass of some office building. The gas station and strip mall signs and the traffic lights and the glowing cans on the shelves within the vending machines were all pleasantly lurid. Harvested ricefields all caught the light, their texture like that of flattened corncobs. Within the taxi it continued to remain less radioactive than at the temple; from that standpoint I could have been on the street in front of the hotel.

Now we were already in Yotsukura, the pavement on which we traveled slipping into shadow; the roofs of the cars ahead of us had lost their sunlight, although the forest ridges to the north were still as brightly picked out as ever. The sky had grown pale yellow over the ocean, and up on the horizon, seeming closer than they were, those twin white thermal stacks of Hirono arose as if out of the water. According to the frisker, our interior levels were still between 0.132 and 0.308 micros. Pampas grass began to flourish along the roadside, but all the little cemeteries were still neat and clean. Then we passed through the four hill-tunnels, none of which had collapsed during the great earthquake of 2011, and at 4:31 we entered Hirono, having not yet accrued even one-tenth of a microsievert since leaving Ganjo-ji, the levels within the cab more or less the same, the two thermal stacks even yet small ahead.

Flashing quickly through that town, the highway now passing darkly through a deep cut, after which the white plumes of the pampas grass began to go grey, we made fine progress, since hardly anyone was going north from here on. A few last ricefields remained under cultivation (I would have wished to frisk that rice), and we reached the sign for J Village, the ocean now out of sight for awhile, cars with their taillights shining red as we came into Naraha right at 4:40, where the levels remained the same both outside and also in the dreary convenience store, whose only customers at that hour were decontamination workers with longtailed hachimaki tied around their foreheads, samurai style (I have been told that sometimes even high school students about to take some difficult exam will fasten these on, in order to nerve themselves up for some especially demanding work).

Then we were rolling down, down, everything vaguer except for one glimpse of flat calm sea, a crimson maple tree going dirty-brown against the pale sky. Even now we had received only a tenth of a microsievert since the drive began; after all, it was just 4:54 now as we entered Tomioka. To our right, the bridge across the ravine and up to Plant No. 2 glowed with the headlights of stalled traffic, including a busload of decontaminators. Our interior levels remained trivial. We continued down that hill, passing a long line of headlights going south: decontaminators off shift, most likely; as before, no one at all was going our way. Almost immediately the pancake frisker began chirring more busily, and the illuminated head, which made a pretty good flashlight to take notes by, displayed 0.664, 0.904, 1.748 and 0.896. A one-minute timed count measured about three-quarters of a micro per hour. Well, that still wasn’t much.

Tomioka was awfully dark. Right away I found myself more disoriented than ever before. I had been under the impression that the municipality kept streetlights on in order to deter theft, but this did not seem to be the case. The driver, who had not been here since before the accident, could not be prevailed on to slow down (perhaps he was nervous), and so before I knew it we had sped past the left turn to that main street where the garment shop was, and came all the way to the former checkpoint, which now of course allowed through traffic to Namie but was still manned by police who stood guarding the barricaded side streets. Then at last the driver made a U-turn, and it became clear that the street I had wished for had been likewise closed off; this must be the nightly practice. So we asked a policeman how to get on the Kawauchi road, and he directed us a good kilometer back to the south. He was masked, helmeted, in greatcoat and boots; his orange light-stick flashed coldly. I wondered whether he would die from cancer. Thanking him, we went as we had come on Highway 6, the driver going too fast as usual, not that it mattered, for there was only one possible westward turn through the dark empty town, a mound of black radioactive bags darker than the dusk in a strip mall’s parking lot.

This road skirted the urban core, and after two or three dark blocks of abandoned offices there was not much to see but weeds in the headlights. For the moment, our interior levels rose no further. That meant that we might as well have been anywhere or nowhere—for all I really had to see by in this dark empty place was what the frisker saw. The driver kept speeding in terror.

In the blackness in the direction of the town office, our headlights pricked very dark thick masses of weeds on either side, and then a ridge of silhouetted blue against a pale yellow sky—the very last light. This place seemed very rural and lovely. We must be near Yonomori, and Mr. Endo’s house, and that shrine with the broken stone lion. If we continued any farther on this road, we would leave Tomioka, and be rushing uselessly down the Joban-do toward Kawauchi. It took half a dozen requests before I could get the driver to slow down. The next problem was to halt him entirely. His anxiety was catching, of course, which made me cross, but at last he did stop, and if there was no more light left in the sky, at least there was some kind of purplish pallor.

Stepping out of the vehicle with the interpreter, with the frisker on NORMAL, I encountered pleasant night weather conditions of 2.6 micros per hour—less than 23 millis a year! . . . the Emporium Kindergarten in Koriyama had been significantly more radioactive than that in March 2011. Scribbling into my notebook words I could not see, I noted a crescent moon, cool air, no crickets; perhaps it was already too cold for them. Unable to perceive very much, and unwilling to dwell on nasty realities, my mind soothed me with a plausible projection of a happier place, so that this spot began to seem to me almost like high ranch country in its loneliness, with just a single distant blue light here and there in the darkness, as if I were back in the California desert where I had once been safe and young. Now the stars began to come out.

Walking forward on what must have once been a two-rut dirt road along the north side of the ricefield, I found the radiation levels rising almost at once, to 3.9 and 4.7. There were more digits than this, of course, but they kept changing, and I had to write blindly, and the trend was plain enough: 4.07, 5.34, 4.63, 4.80, 4.90, 5.74, 5.75, 6.96. Now that my eyes had begun to accustom themselves to the night, I could see black bags on my left. That sight did not please me. I was walking down a lane of pallid grass. Between the lanes I could feel the grass rubbing against the sides of my paper shoe covers, which I trusted not to tear, although just the other day in Okuma one of them had come off. Sooner or later some taller weed would brush against my trousers and deposit radioactive stickleburrs. Well, in Iwaki I would put all my clothes in a plastic bag and then take a shower. My shoes I could always frisk. There were tall dark trees on the right, and on the left, that crowd of black bags. Stepping to the edge of the road, I extended the frisker down toward them, as far as my arm could reach, and although it must have still been a good three or four meters away, it instantly read 12 and 13 micros. If the statisticians were correct, it might take a good year at that exposure to raise my risk of fatal cancer by half a percent; all the same, those measurements increased my uneasiness, being a couple of hundred times higher than back home. I can still remember the horrid crowd of black bags down there as I went along that road that was shaded by tree-darkness, an equally horrid sighing of wind, and then columns of pallid light between the otherwise solid-dark trees, hands of plants, weed-hands with many long thin twitching pallid fingers, hands of pale grass splayed out, slits of pallor in the dark tree-wall—but here the average timed value was only 3.12 micros.

“Forward or back?”—The brave interpreter replied: “I will follow you.” I decided that we might as well go back, and seek out another place. So we returned to the taxi, neither rushing nor dillydallying by the black bags, and there sat the poor driver with his lights and engine on.

The next site was not far away: a dark intersection, the road empty but for an orange-and-silver-striped cone with a flashing red light on it—the centerpiece of a knee-high barrier of cones and cross-poles, marking the border of the no-go zone, into which I slowly, cautiously, illegally stepped, with the frisker ahead of me (a small marker proclaimed this to be Hometown Appreciation Road), and on my left hunched another fat black bag. Standing in the center of the pavement for a good long timed minute, with the frisker in my left hand and the rest of my body as far away from that bag as possible, I presently learned that the level was 1,098 scintillations, 0.061 microsieverts—a mere 3.66 micros per hour. I almost laughed. There were ever more stars in the sky ahead, and on either side were trees, and cold autumn wind licked my sleeves.

What in fact I could have learned, and what I am telling you here, consists of little more than blindness, uneasiness, helplessness and ignorance. The frisker and the dosimeter were all I had to go by, and what they told me was disputable. For the general public, it is recommended that the total radiation dosage (exclusive of medical dosages) for an individual by age 30 not exceed a specified dosage which is about 50 times the annual natural background dosage. For radiation workers . . . the guideline is . . . about 100 times natural background dosage per year. So my old college physics book had it, back in 1974. But a hundred times natural background had not worried Aki, not one bit. As for me, I began to feel uneasy in the windy darkness, watching the frisker’s numbers go up. That crescent moon and those stars lost their charm. Advancing a trifle more down that silent dark street, I received notice from the frisker that I was now taking in 4.08 micros. Then, from the trees on my right I heard a deep loud grunting—surely another of those radioactive wild boar, who were said to be aggressive (I felt more afraid of them than of the radiation), so I returned to the taxi, within which the level was only about a micro per hour.

When I asked the driver whether he could find the ruined Japan Railways station to which Mr. Endo and then Aki and Mr. Kojima had guided me, he, enthusiastic to finally be set a more straightforward goal, quickly keyed this destination into the electronic guidance system, so that once again we began speeding, much too fast as usual, through these dark and empty streets which were all the darker for being walled in with radioactive vegetation; to tell the truth, he was more confident or at least hoped more wishfully than I, who began to suspect that his software might not have been updated since the accident; indeed, we soon reached another roadblock. Stepping out to sample the darkness, I found an ugly pit ahead, followed by scaffolding; for once the difficulty was not radiation but simply earthquake damage; in any event we could go no farther. Taking a timed measurement, I found the radiation quite low—only 0.78 micros.

Almost desperately the driver sped down this or that other dead road, so that it occurred to me to ask him if he could find the way back to Highway 6 if his software did not pan out; as for me, sitting in the back seat, scribbling notes and staring at the pancake frisker, I would have been well lost had he asked me how to go, which he did not. It began to strike me what a nightmare it would be to get trapped in Tomioka all night in this taxi, rushing purposelessly from street to street, with nothing to show for it but maybe a month’s worth of genetic damage. As it happened, the numbers around here continued to be nearly pleasant—mostly around a half-micro as we whipped through the dark forest; then came a hateful line of black bags on our left; even in the taxi the frisker’s numbers went up. But that was a mere anomaly, like the accident itself, so we continued stubbornly down that empty road, a single yellow traffic light blinking far ahead, our levels now 0.8 and 0.7, after which we reached the next National Treasure, which is to say a dark field of black bags, the driver stubbornly faithful to his navigation system, still speeding no matter what I said, often coming up against another roadblock; once he admitted that we had been on this particular dark road before; but finally we were back on Highway 6.

My next intention was to have him stop on the shoulder near the barricaded side-road that led to the garment shop; I was pretty sure that I recognized it now even in the dark, but as usual he overshot it. (He was the worst taxi driver I ever had in Japan; in the end I paid him $600.) So I gave that up, contenting myself with a final excursion to that ruined pachinko parlor called TSUBA.

On the east side of the highway as we rolled back down into town, I glimpsed a small house in which greenish-yellow light glowed behind two curtains. Who could possibly be staying here? Remembering the tale of the stubborn farmer who cared for abandoned pets and cattle (but didn’t he live in a red zone?), and the woman who looked after her paralyzed relative, I wondered if this light marked some kindred story of small defiance; I never found out. Here came that nasty carnival of whirling lights upon a police pole at the former checkpoint, the headlights of a police car muted, somehow not carrying very far in that darkness; and we neared the double line of glowing poles, policemen standing lonely in the dark. Just before that was our familiar sharp right, which the driver miraculously failed to miss. Promising not to leave him alone in the car too long, I stepped out, and the interpreter with me. Now for another one-minute timed stroll in view of TSUBA: 3.9 micros an hour beneath the pale dangling plume-fingers of the pampas grass, that crescent moon momentarily bisected by a power wire; we passed a streetlamp, then approached the pallor of the shuttered nightclub on the right—sickly greenish weeds across the front of that white, white building, yes, the Night Pub Sepia, and on NORMAL the frisker read a mere 3.7 or 3.8, the pampas grass pale and reaching, while on the left loomed a broken sign nearly devoured by bushes, then the tall vertical NO ENTRY sign on account of radiation; the interpreter had translated it before. Past the Night Pub Sepia rose a dead building with black windows and shadows black upon it; the space between it and the Night Pub Sepia was black, black, solid black, and the frisker chittered up to 4.59 and then higher.

As the U.S. Atomic Energy promised us back in 1966: Atomic energy is revolutionizing life today . . . The men and women who enter the world of the atom invariably find that they are exploring a world more exciting than . . . the dreams of Marco Polo . . .

There were places where a building seemed to hang above the darkness rather than rise out of it, because as I later (but not then) remembered from daytime excursions there, swells of radioactive vegetation rose up around the bottom of it, almost obscuring the main window, and vines grew thickly across the entrance steps and up the front door, while pampas grass stood pallidly behind.

Here came that vegetation which had scared me the other day; well, well, it was just a wall of grass and spidery weeds, and pine trees up ahead. This time I refrained from poking the frisker into that poisonous stuff. Ahead stood a familiar house with broken dark windows and a porch; that was where the decontamination workers had been so busy last February. How much good had they accomplished? Toggling the pancake frisker to SCALER, I walked forward for a timed minute, measuring an unexceptional 4.02 micros—twice the national target air dose. That pallid dry cold grass on my left was something to keep away from. Farther ahead, at the edge of the road rose the next looming pale wall of house and then a dark tree above and behind it, there where the dead street curved leftward into darkness—a place of death, one might have supposed, and yet there came the piping of a single frog. Staring into the darkness behind the pampas grass, I saw nothing, of course, then turned back to the decontaminated house. As I swung the frisker on NORMAL at my hip, it began by showing only 3.75, 3.4, 3.44 micros, but then I thought to lower it toward the pavement itself, and right away it shot up to 11, 12, 13.5, 15, 18, 21, and at 21 it stayed. When I reported this number to the driver, he cried out. For all I knew the decontaminators had done their job, but trailed fallout from their truck, or very possibly some dry breeze this very day had sifted cesium-137 from the vicinity of Reactor No. 1 right to this spot. Once more I marveled at the unpredictability of fallout distribution; here for instance was water running under a dark culvert, 4 micros at waist level and still only 4.8 at culvert level, perhaps since it flowed so rapidly.

The interpreter and I stood watching that roadside pampas grass which was so much higher than our heads; there we stood and there it stood, pale and still in the dark. What was there to understand? Thus Tomioka: dead grass with stickleburrs, and the curving road, that tall pale pampas grass on the left and the grim nightclub on the right with its darkness, this night of dead houses overgrown with weeds—a creepy, vile experience.

The instant we reentered the taxi, the driver began to roll homeward without further instructions.—“What do you think of Tomioka?” I asked him.

He replied: “I feel that three years have passed and you can’t live.”

“Do you ever worry about going into a place like this?”

“I don’t worry too much, because I’m over 60 . . .”—but he sped and sped until we were up the hill and past No. 2 and coming into Naraha.