The Best American Travel Writing 2016

by Bill Bryson

  When it comes to Japan, arithmetic is now one of my favorite distractions. One sievert is the equivalent of a thousand chest x-rays. A millisievert, the recommended maximum annual dose, is, of course, a thousandth of a sievert; a microsievert a millionth. American first responders are recommended not to exceed 250 millisieverts when saving human lives, but we know surprisingly little about the perils of extended subacute radiation exposure. The so-called linear hypothesis would have it that the multiple of any given dose is the multiple of the danger. For instance: radiation sickness may begin to appear after a dose of one sievert, but the situation described by this statistic is a rapidly delivered dose, such as a nearby H-bomb detonation or a brief foray to the reactor at No. 1. Fifty millisieverts a year delivered over 20 years, which works out to the same total dose of one sievert, may or may not cause perceptible harm; no one seems sure.

  Reactor No. 1 exploded at 3:36 on the afternoon of March 12, 2011, when its exposed fuel rods reacted with the air’s hydrogen. The authorities quickly drew two rings centered on No. 1. The 40-kilometer radius demarcated the voluntary-evacuation zone. The 20-kilometer radius marked the restricted, or forbidden, zone. As the work of decontamination advanced and wind patterns became better known, the circles were replaced by areas of irregular shape. Once I decided to base my explorations near the 40-kilometer mark, the most convenient place looked like a midsize city called Iwaki. Here the radiation had achieved its maximum at four o’clock on the morning of March 15, 2011: 23.72 microsieverts per hour, or about 600 times Tokyo’s average normal background exposure. Iwaki’s municipal authorities distributed iodine tablets to residents under 40 years old and to pregnant women. For the others, as always, there was “no immediate danger.” During my stay in Iwaki, three years later, the dosimeter almost invariably registered its daily microsievert, which is to say, about 0.042 microsieverts each hour. Reader, what might this mean to you? Later that year, when I could afford to buy a scintillation meter, I measured the following good old American values:

  0.12 μSv/hr: Average San Francisco reading, June 13, 2014

  0.18 μSv/hr: Volume II of 1880 census, Boone-Madison Public Library, West Virginia, June 21, 2014

  0.30 μSv/hr: Marble countertop in my room at the Embassy Suites, Charleston, West Virginia, June 22, 2014

  0.48 μSv/hr: Ten Commandments granite tablet in front of courthouse, Pineville, West Virginia, June 23, 2014

  2.46 μSv/hr: Airborne, 36,000 feet, 30 minutes out of Washington Dulles, June 30, 2014

  After disembarking from the train in Iwaki one chilly afternoon, I asked the girl at the tourist-information office which local restaurants she would recommend. She replied that the town had always been proud of its seafood, but that because of the nuclear accident the fish now had to be imported.

  On one of the maps she gave me, I saw that the international port was a few kilometers south. Several beaches lay east, and Route 6 followed the shoreline north toward the reactors. That was the road I would take for my trips to Tomioka, a town partly within the forbidden zone.

  In Iwaki, the hotels were nearly always full. One of them smelled of cigarette smoke and was only for decontamination workers. I asked the receptionist at another why she was so busy. She laughed and said, “TEPCO!” Decontamination was a booming business, all right.

  In the Iwaki port, which I had expected to find deserted, a dozen sailors in blue coveralls and white hardhats were unwinding a fishing net, planning to travel two hours southward, where the fish were still considered safe; the smaller boats rocked empty on the water. A patrol-boat captain told me that fishing for personal consumption was not restricted, and that fish were tested for radiation once a week. In the meantime, the fishermen, along with so many others in the city, were surviving on what he called “guaranteed money from TEPCO.”

  I motored up the coast in a taxi. It was a lovely morning, and the pastel sea was very still. The tsunami-destroyed homes had been deconstructed into foundations, concrete squares upgrown with grass. What I remembered from my visit in 2011 was the black stinking filthiness of everything that the tidal wave had reached. Surely Iwaki’s affected coastline must have been similarly slimed, but these pits looked merely mellow—historic, like archaeological sites. Soon the taxi reached a gleaming skeleton of half-built apartments for people who had lost their homes in the disaster; later I would see many of the temporary barracks-like buildings, all of them still and raw, where nuclear refugees were housed.

  Eventually I arrived at the Northern Iwaki Rubbish Disposal Center, whose monument is its own big smokestack. That is how I first came to see the disgusting black bags of Fukushima: down a 45-degree slope, behind a large wall with a radiation-caution sign, a close-packed crowd of those bags stood five deep and I don’t know how many wide. I strode slowly toward the edge of the grass, where the slope began. That was close enough, I thought. The dosimeter did not turn over a new digit.

  “This is debris they burned in Iwaki, not fallout,” my taxi driver told me. “They don’t know where to put it.” Several times during our excursion he said that the bags we saw contained ash from the decontamination of Iwaki. In this he was mistaken; the city did not burn radioactive matter. But in saying that they did not know where to put the debris, he uttered a truth. By the time I departed Fukushima I hardly noticed the bags unless many happened to be together. The closer to No. 1 one drew, the more there were.

  In spite of the reminders that No. 1 was not far away, Iwaki strove to present itself as safe, and maybe it was, given the innocuous dosimeter readings. Contrary claims were considered to be “harmful rumors.” “Even after one week from the earthquake,” according to an official city report, “harmful rumors on the nuclear problems kept blocking the distribution of goods to Iwaki.” In other words, during that first week some fuel and grocery trucks refrained from making deliveries to the city for fear of contamination. The same document told me that “harmful rumors due to the accidents at nuclear power stations degraded the status of Iwaki local products tremendously. To regain its reputation, Iwaki City has participated in more than fifty events held in Tokyo metropolitan area.” Thanks to such efforts, Iwaki had nearly defeated the harmful rumors. Most people’s fears seemed to have been repressed, interred behind a wall of ice as effective as TEPCO’s. Consider my first taxi driver, who was round-faced and patient, and smiled often, wrinkling up his cheeks. Although his hair was still black, he had entered middle age. I asked what he thought when he heard the radiation warnings after the tsunami.

  “Even in Iwaki most people tried to flee, but I didn’t mind. I have an elderly person at home, so I couldn’t leave, anyhow!” When I asked if anyone was to blame for what happened, he told me that it was “just bad luck.” In general, he explained, he felt cheerful and hopeful because the taxi business was now thriving thanks to the nuclear power situation. “Those who work for TEPCO use taxis. If I were a fisherman I would be suffering a lot, but that’s not the case for me!”

  My driver the next day had almost as merry an outlook. He was a bald and active old man who wore a paper mask over his mouth, as do many Japanese when they have colds or wish to protect themselves from germs. I asked him to describe the disaster, and he very practically replied: “In the beginning we were busy. Now that the bus services have recovered, it’s quieter for taxis.” On occasion he had entered the prohibited area with Red Cross passengers.

  When I asked about the radiation, he replied: “Since it’s not close to here, it has no reality. If someone around here got cancer, I might feel something, but it’s invisible, so I don’t feel anything.” A third driver, asked the same question, said: “There’s nothing to do but trust them.”

  I kept asking people in Iwaki how safe they felt; most of their replies were calm and bland. But it did strike me as funny that no doctor I asked would agree to meet me. And it did disconcert me to read in the newspaper that the Fukushima Prefecture Dental Association would now, with family consent, examine the extract
ed teeth of children aged 5 to 15, first checking for cesium-137 and then, if that was found, for strontium-90. Of course, a test is not a result. Maybe there would be no cesium in anybody’s teeth.

  One young man, a recent graduate of the local university, told me that when it came to eating local food, he didn’t “think twice” about it.

  “When you go to a sushi restaurant, do you wonder where the fish came from?” I asked.

  “I eat what is in front of me,” he replied.

  Then there was Kuwahara Akiyo, a weary-looking woman with blue eye shadow and tiny sparkly earrings. She was a part-time employee of the Tomioka Life Recovery Support Center. She told me that she was only allowed to return to her home in Tomioka once a month. Of Tomioka, which I would visit several times, she told me: “There are animals: mice and rats. Also, the pigs interbred with wild boar. The authorities are trying to kill them because they damage the houses, and poop inside and bite the pillars. They don’t know humans, so they are fearless. Sometimes you can see them on the street. And there are so many rats! Wherever we go there, they give us some chemicals to kill the rats.”

  I asked Kuwahara what she thought about when she envisioned radiation.

  “Invisible,” she said, smiling, “and that is the cause of the anxiety. You don’t feel any pain or itching; it just comes into your body.”

  “Natural radiation also exists,” she explained, “and if it is natural, it must be all right. I think it’s safe to live in Iwaki. There are nuclear plants all over the world. You can’t flee anywhere.”

  “What is your feeling about nuclear power?” I asked.

  “My husband’s work is related to nuclear plants. Until the accident we were told that it was totally safe. Nuclear plants we cannot live without.” Then she said: “This was a manmade thing, but we made something so evil, so fearful, so dangerous.”

  Hamamatsu Kōichi, an Iwaki farmer with cropped gray hair, told me that on the urban farm he ran with his wife, an area of 600 tsubo, about half an acre, they raised cucumbers, eggplants, broccoli, lettuce, napa cabbage for kimchi, and green onions, whose fresh smell and enticing jade color far excelled anything I had ever seen in an American supermarket. He wore elastic wrist gaiters over the sleeves of his striped shirt, and his eyebrows rose and curved like caterpillars. His industrious wife carefully trimmed and cleaned green onions during the interview, smiling and sometimes even sweetly laughing at my corny radiation jokes. Local produce was still allowed, the couple told me, provided it tested well at the agricultural union. They did not eat the fish. For the first year after the accident, farmers from affected areas were not allowed to sell anything; in the second year, the radiation levels in their vegetables were lower, but they had to lower their prices too: people were afraid to buy the produce. Now the radioactivity had declined. Later, at the train station, I bought a kilogram of Iwaki tomatoes and sent them off to No Nukes Plaza in Tokyo for analysis. They were fine.

  I asked Mr. Hamamatsu how he felt about the radiation.

  “The TV news said it went even to Shizuoka and damaged their tea,” he told me, “so for sure this place must be contaminated. But we have no place to go.”

  “In ten years will you be able to go right up to Plant No. 1 if you wish?”

  Folding his hands across his apron, he said, “There may be some spots where you can never return.”

  West of Tomioka, at what was formerly the edge of the forbidden zone, lies Kawauchi Village. I had been there shortly after the accident, when houseplants had just begun to wilt in front of the silent homes. In 2013 the Japan Times reported that in Kawauchi the central government’s radiation targets had not been met: even after decontamination, almost half of the 1,061 houses in the “emergency evacuation advisory zone” were still receiving atmos-pheric radiation doses over one millisievert per year. Suspicious villagers had performed their own gamma-ray surveys. As the newspaper said: “Since the [environmental] ministry hasn’t explicitly promised to do such work again, municipalities are increasingly concerned about the future of the decontamination process.”

  A snowed-over tatami store, snow smooth and high across a little bridge over the river, snow heaped on a cemetery’s dark steles—such was the town now. It was almost romantic. It was also almost deserted, except for workers in the streets. I did, however, find the Kawauchi Village Residence to Promote Young People’s Settlement. There was a path shoveled through the snow to the unlocked foyer, though no one was in.

  Walking farther east on that street, which had been the dividing line between the restricted and voluntary-evacuation zones, I came to a house. Inside, a very small old woman was peering at me through a window. When I rang the bell, she came to the door and pretended to be deaf. Soon a middle-aged man with kind eyes, wearing a dark down jacket, came up behind her. He eventually invited me in.

  “That’s my mother,” he said of the woman I’d seen through the window. “My parents live here. They came back in November 2012.” He told me that about half the village was inhabited now, but most of the villagers who had returned only stayed four days a week; on the other days they returned to their temporary housing, in Koriyama or elsewhere. Only about 20 percent lived in Kawauchi full-time.

  “So your mother feels safe?” I asked.

  “Because she is elderly, it’s no use worrying about radiation. Of course she feels lonely; that’s why I am visiting her. The children will never come anymore. The grandchildren won’t come. That is the result of some fear information.”

  It turned out that he used to work for TEPCO. “I was not directly involved in the nuclear power plant,” he told me. “My work had to do with the buying and leasing of land for construction. Basically, my personal opinion is that given that original 1960s design, it was risky to choose this location at all. The major problem with the emergency-power generator was that it was installed at sea level, not in the correct place. All the contract workers were saying so, including me.” (TEPCO says that their belief at the time was that this was the safest design.) As emerald-green tea was served by the old mother in her green kerchief and baggy quilted clothes, her son continued, “It’s good to gradually reduce the use of nuclear energy, but now it’s like our blood, our life. All the nuclear plants are currently stopped. You cannot maintain this situation forever.” He spoke of radioactive mushrooms, honey, and wild boar.

  When I asked what Kawauchi would look like in the future, he laughed. “Probably it will eventually die out. The families with young children won’t live here.” His family had been in Kawauchi for close to 100 years. In that small tatami room, with the old lady half-tucked under a blanket, I watched the clouds and dripping snow through the window and thought what a pleasant home it was. I asked the old lady what she most liked about this place. She smiled. Her teeth were a lovely white. She exclaimed: “The air is clean!” Perhaps it was, for during my hour and a half in Kawauchi my dosimeter did not accrue any more digits.

  Kida Shōichi, at the time a decontamination specialist in Iwaki’s Nuclear Hazard Countermeasures Division, told me that he considered his city not to be badly off, thanks to the winds; as he explained when we spoke in his office, from the TEPCO plant “the northwest direction is high in radiation, so Iwaki is low.” On his laptop, he showed me Iwaki’s 475 monitoring posts. Then he zoomed in: “Here is the city office where we are right now. And here is the monitoring post. It’s 11:05 a.m., and we’re receiving 0.121 microsieverts per hour.” Clicking on Tomioka he said: “The highest is about 3 microsieverts per hour, so that’s only 24.8 times more than here.” He cut himself off: “No, here’s a place that measures 4. And here’s a 5, so that’s 41 times higher . . .” He next zoomed in on a monitoring site in Futaba Town, which was still in the prohibited zone: 13.61 microsieverts per hour. If those levels kept up, that unlucky part of Futaba would be 112 times more dangerous than Iwaki.

  I asked when he thought Plant No. 1 might be safe; he estimated that it might be 500 years. The next day, he telephone
d me with a correction: in only 300 years, barring further accidents, the radiation will have decayed to a thousandth of its original strength!

  When I got home, I asked Edwin Lyman, from the Union of Concerned Scientists, what he thought about 300 years as an estimate. “Well, there’s radioactive decay, plus transfer to soil; it will go deeper and deeper and get into the water and so forth.” He thought that natural decontamination would take hundreds of years at least.

  In Japan, the basic guideline for decontamination was to reduce radiation in an area to less than one millisievert per year. Thirty percent of the reduction in cesium isotopes around Iwaki had already happened naturally, and Kida gave me some multicolored information sheets to prove it. In November 2011 almost every part of the area had been yellow, meaning “decontamination required.” By December 2012 the yellow had melted into a crescent along the north and east, along with a few patches in the south.

  Wasn’t this good news? Iwaki was becoming safe much more quickly than I would have expected. But I wondered what was happening to that cesium. Did it sink deeper into the earth, as Lyman told me? Did it leach into storm drains and rivers? I had read that it sometimes got concentrated in roots. No doubt the radioactivity of the ground must vary just as the ground itself did, and presumably every square meter of Iwaki would need to be measured. (I did not yet have my scintillation meter, but on my next trip, that toy proved that small areas could vary insanely. In Tomioka, one spot might be 2 microsieverts an hour, and another might be 7 or 12. Deeper into the red zone, of course, the numbers were much higher.) At any rate, the Iwaki municipal report explained that topsoil in schoolyards was being removed if it emitted more than 0.3 microsieverts per hour—which works out to 2.63 millisieverts per year.