CHRISTINA CHUNG
I.
Japan’s Joban Highway carries my husband, Yuichi, and me out of Tokyo, and northeast toward the coast. Though Yuichi is a Tokyoite and loves the city, I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey, and for me it is a chest-releasing pleasure to escape the congestion, the infinity of walls, the maze of unending concrete.
We pass scruffy towns and billboards, gas stations and outbuildings, and then the land frees up. It lifts in waves of brown and gold, with black tile roofs of farmhouses tucked into its nooks and curves. It soothes my spirit—burnished grasses, dark green trees, and hills lightly dusted with snow.
At a rest stop, I wait in the shiny white rental car as Yuichi runs into the bathroom. I fiddle with my camera, then look around for something to photograph. Just meters away, on the gray cement wall, shine four fresh panels of Japanese folk art—a school girl gazing at clouds of cherry blossoms, a costumed horse and rider, boys and men in white with bare legs and festive flags. I tilt my camera and notice a pole blocking my view. When I zoom out, I see it holds a black digital panel that spells out in neon orange: 0.1 microsieverts . Suddenly, I realize: It’s the level of radioactivity we are driving into.
Thus begins our trip to Fukushima—nearly six years after the magnitude 9 earthquake, the devastating tsunami, and catastrophic meltdowns at the Daiichi nuclear plant. It was the fourth-most powerful earthquake on record. The disaster left more than 15,000 people dead, and more than 200,000 without homes.
Today, while the Japanese government claims that everything is under control, some people see a disaster still unfolding. Yuichi and I have been invited to visit. We will meet with local activists, witness their events, and see if my work in art and community-building is of use to them.
When I point out the radiation meter, Yuichi inspects it. As a physicist who has worked at high-energy physics labs, he is used to radiation alerts. But, he concludes, “It’s hard for me to say what kind of danger this shows.” That makes two of us.
“What’s it doing in the middle of the fields?” I had asked.
“There’s no place else to put it,” he replied. “ No one will take it.”
We pass huge mountains, thick with pine, their twists and curves outlined against a blazing blue sky. Down in the fields, strange-looking piles wrapped in green plastic catch my eye. The plastic covers rectangular mounds, some almost flat and the size of swimming pools, others two or three meters tall and twice as long. They’re packed neatly with rows to walk between.
“Oh my god,” I give a start. “Those must be the radioactive piles that Shun told me about.”
Shun Nakamura, a neuroscientist friend of ours, had told us about his visits here and the piles of radioactive soil.
“What’s it doing in the middle of the fields?” I had asked him.
“There’s no place else to put it,” he replied. “ No one will take it.”
“How long will it sit there?” I’d asked, knowing that radioactivity can last hundreds of years.
Shun looked back at me.
“Mm” was all he’d said, letting the realization sink in.
There is no other plan.
2.
We continue driving. On our left, another sign says: 1.5 microsieverts. There is also a sign, which Yuichi translates for me, forbidding motorcycles on the highway.
“Why?” I wonder out loud.
“Exposure to radioactive dust,” he tells me. “If it gets in the body, it can be an enormous hazard. You breathe it in and it goes directly into your system.”
I’m glad our windows are closed and the intake duct is shut.
A fresh road sign for “Tomioka Town” flies past. It’s light blue with a band of spritely cherry blossoms. What a lovely place! it seems to say. Below in the fields, I spot more green plastic mounds. Here and there, cropping up like giant toadstools, thick black garbage bags are neatly packed in fat cylinders. These too, I learn later, hold radioactive dirt. Tomioka Town is deep in the heart of the “No-Go” zone, evacuated, shut down.
We pass another sign: 3.5 microsieverts.
I think of what would happen if our car broke down out here, if we got stuck on the road.
We pass a yellow diamond sign with a silhouette of inoshishi (wild boar).
“Inoshishi!” I sing out to Yuichi, trying to get a photo of the sign. I love that word in Japanese and the notion of wild boar in the countryside. But, I wonder: Are these the wild boar we heard about? The ones coming down from the mountains and taking over abandoned towns? The ones that have become radioactive?
A shiver runs through me.
Of course, the wildlife here—the boar, the bears, the rabbits, the mice—know nothing about avoiding radioactivity. How could they? What could a bird know as it dips down into the invisible poison of the streams and rivers?
Piles of radioactive soil in fields (left) and near houses.
3.
Around 1:30 p.m., we drive into a town.
“Minamisoma,” announces Yuichi.
It looks like any other Japanese town to me, though I learn later that part of it was once in the evacuation zone. We drive past the gas station, past the 7-11, down a couple of streets crowded with apartment buildings and shops, past a white building painted with three running horses, and into a parking lot.
As we pull in, a dark-haired woman steps out of a white SUV. It’s Hoshino-san, one of the organizers of our group. A survivor of the disaster, she looks to be in her forties, sturdy, with short black hair, a beige sweater, and glasses.
“Hoshino,” she pronounces her name for me. “It means ‘field of stars.’ ”
We’re joined by our friend Shun, who has also just arrived from Tokyo, and the four of us have lunch at a nearby café. It’s small and homey, with only three tables and a bar. My paltry Japanese vocabulary could fit in the tin ashtray on the table. Yuichi translates for me.
We talk about children and learning disabilities, and how schools in the United States and Japan handle these issues. Hoshino-san has read a lot on this topic. Later, I’ll understand why. I feel a sense of belonging; this is a discussion I could have in any language and care about.
Then, in Hoshino-san’s SUV, we drive to the first community event. It’s in a gray metal-frame school for kids from the evacuation zone. Soon it will be shut down, as the families move away into permanent housing.
“You must be happy to have it closed.” Yuichi says in Japanese.
Hoshino-san sighs.
“The thing is,” she tells us, “the community will break up. Everyone will be spread around, wherever they have found housing. Now, each one will be alone. Each one will be the only one who has been through this, in their new place.”
As we stand beside it, one of the school windows opens, pushed out by a small boy of about eight. It looks like he is trying to escape. He squeezes halfway out into the parking lot until a yell comes from inside. He laughs, yells back, and slides back inside.
We are met outside by a thin, dynamic Japanese man with a bushel of black hair that runs white at the roots. This is Ohashi-san, a theater artist in his fifties and workshop leader of “applied drama”—a way of using drama in community settings. He has come from Tokyo with two assistants. He crosses the parking lot and addresses me in limited but very confident English.
“Where do you come from? How long are you here?”
His wide brown eyes are clear and direct. I like him immediately. I answer his questions and catch his ready smile. After our talk, he loops his red-purple scarf around his neck and laces his long hair back in a band.
“OK,” he says, “let’s go.”
In the lobby, we take off our shoes and boots and slide into brown vinyl slippers. We enter a classroom that is vacant except for two small boys who look to be about eight (including the attempted escapee) and two adults, a red-haired woman and an older man. The center of the room is open, with a light blue carpet. The three theater people take off their coats and put on neon yellow T-shirts, becoming an obvious team.
We wait, until finally the classroom door opens and a handful of kids come in. Others follow, until there are about a dozen, mostly around ten or twelve years old, both boys and girls. They look somewhat confused about what all these strange adults are doing here.
In a loud voice, Ohashi-san proclaims they are going to do daimyo exercise. (Daimyo means a “powerful Japanese feudal lord.”) He is met with disbelieving frowns, and a couple of kids retreat to the edges of the room. Unperturbed, he blazes on, waving his arms and demonstrating a daimyo jumping jack. He starts a verbal chant of rising up and squashing down and doing silly gestures that the kids start to imitate. By the end, all the kids are into it, calling out what creature is exercising—a cat, a monkey, a mouse . . .
“A butt!” shrieks out the eight-year-old boy who had tried to escape.
“A butt!” echoes Ohashi-san. “Butt Exercise!” He shouts merrily, stretching out his rear end and beginning the jumping jack. The kids roar with laughter and follow his example.
Ohashi-san introduces me, the strange blond foreigner in their midst, to each child one by one. We shake hands. Now we’re ready for the core lesson—the “applied drama.”
Ohashi-san holds up a large format book with pictures and reads out the story, as his assistant, Utae-san, a quiet lady in glasses, acts out the part of the bird. A dog finds a wounded bird, carries her to safety, and befriends her. They become inseparable. They meet a fox who envies their love. The fox eventually carries the bird away and drops her in the woods, far from her beloved dog.
As the story unfolds, Ohashi-san asks the kids what they think. What would they do here? How else could the bird act? What does the bird feel? They call out suggestions for Utae-san to act out. A few children step forward and act out their responses themselves.
Finally, Ohashi-san asks: What happens now? Does the bird find the dog again? Does she remain alone? Everyone is asked to write or draw something the bird would say or do, which they take turns sharing. When the exercise ends, everyone applauds.
Later I talk to Ohashi-san about his process.
“The most important thing is the end,” he says.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because Japanese people don’t have the habit of expressing their feelings or their opinion. We need the chance to practice saying our opinion. Nobody asks us this. But we need to be able to say our feeling, yes or no. Does the bird find the dog?”
4.
The next morning, we attend as Ohashi-san and his team lead another workshop, this time for a group of mothers and their children. Afterward, Hoshino-san asks Yuichi and me if we’d like to see the place where her home was, the home that was washed away.
Radiation meter on highway (right) and solar collectors over radioactive soil.
5.
We wind on narrow roads out of town, following Hoshino-san’s SUV, passing rows of cabbages in a field. Then, suddenly, we enter the site of the tsunami. The land looks as if the surface has been scraped right off—whether by the tsunami or earthmovers, I can’t tell.
From the main road down to the ocean, the swath is enormous—maybe a mile or more of bare land, flattened like an ancient battlefield. Along the edges on the right, we pass backhoes digging in small hills and cliffs, leaving the earth exposed and raw. We pass workers in cloth sun hats, backpacks, and blue rubber gloves. They bend down, shoulder-to-shoulder in a line, crossing the dirt, gathering something into white plastic bags. Later, I learn they are looking for bones, and still finding them. In 2011, thousands of adults and children were swept away by the tsunami; 2,500 are still missing.
We turn onto a dirt road and head up a hillside. The vehicles stop and the four of us—Hoshino-san, our friend Shun, Yuichi, and I—get out. In the late afternoon sun, Hoshino-san points out a small archaeological sign on the right.
“This is where I used to work,” she says. “There is a mound here from 6,000 years ago. We used to find shells and bits of ocean life here.” We walk down a dirt path to a grassy mound—rounded and a few feet tall, not unlike the burial mounds near Minneapolis, where Yuichi and I live. Straight ahead, the whole devastated valley stretches out to the sea. All is flat beige. Near the sea, tiny machines are scooping dirt into barrels in dozens of rows near a bare white building. Hoshino-san points to a cluster of trees on our right.
“Our home was right down here,” she says. “We had a neighborhood of a hundred families there.”
We look, and see nothing.
“Our boys used to play down there,” she says, pointing further down to the beach.
“The sea wall was five meters high. When they gave the warning, they predicted seven meters. They told people to evacuate. But some people didn’t think they needed to . . . only a trickle of water would get over, they thought.”
The tsunami, when it hit, was four stories high. “It wasn’t like water, where you could float or swim,” says Hoshino-san, who was spared because she had left to pick up her son from school. “It was like a mountain smashing into you, swallowing you, crushing everything in its path.”
In videos from March 11, 2011, the massive dark waters climb walls, cover highways, pour into cities, carry away ships, cars, bridges. You can hear the voices of those filming it on their cell phones cry out, “Hey, look out for the water!”
Soon after came the meltdown of three nuclear reactors—at first flatly denied by the Japanese government, now confirmed as fact. According to recent news reports, radiation in at least one reactor remains dangerously high. A human in this level of radiation would die in seconds. The reactor is less than seven miles from where we stand.
“Why do you stay here? Having lost your home, lost everything?” Yuichi asks Hoshino-san in Japanese. I lean in to listen.
She looks out toward the sea.
“We felt welcome here. It’s our community.”
Her older son, she explains, had a different learning style: “His rhythm was slow and he was bullied.” But in this community, “people were kind. Maybe it’s the rhythm of the village life versus the town. He had friends here. He was appreciated. We felt at home in this place.”
Hoshino-san, her husband, and their younger son now live in Soma, the next town. They are away from the sea, but still in the area.
6.
We thank Hoshino-san and Shun for the visit. Yuichi and I get back in our small, dust-covered rental car and follow her SUV back down the road.
We continue on, passing abandoned homes. Torn shades blow in the wind from the second floor of a Japanese-style farmhouse with shiny black roof. A service station stands with its garage doors wide open, a broken car body rusting away in the driveway. Side roads are barricaded, closed. We see people wearing white protective suits and helmets. I shiver, realizing we must have entered the No-Go zone without knowing.
Yuichi stops to use his cell phone to locate our path. I wish he would just hurry out of this godforsaken place. The sun is low as the road carries us out of town, past more and more buildings, each with its own stock of radioactive waste. We pass a field where hundreds or perhaps thousands of black bags stand in neat rows, while backhoes continue to dig.
The last new sight is the solar collectors. Down in the contaminated fields, they stretch like enormous blue insects, their tin feet stuck in the ground. The land gleams with rows and rows of them, like a thousand empty beetle shells over the waste.
The sun sets as we drive out of Fukushima. I imagine millions of people in Tokyo coming home, turning on their lights, and starting to cook their dinners. We are all part of the giant machine that sucks up this energy, from somewhere, from something. This time it was Fukushima, and the nuclear power plant on its beach. Next time, where will the meltdowns be? I worry about the United States, with its ninety-nine commercial reactors, many perched beside our rivers, lakes, and oceans. Will one of these be next?
A hawk rises in the sky and dips behind the shadowy hills.
The Japanese government has started to move people back into Fukushima, opening parts of the no-go zone like Tomioka, though their safety is not assured. And while Prime Minister Shinzō Abe has proclaimed the situation is “under control,” the reactors continue to release radiation into the groundwater and sea. No one has yet dreamt up the way to safely scoop out the burning cores and encase them in concrete—the single vision of how to stem the meltdowns’ threat to the life of this land.
7.
In Tokyo two weeks later, Yuichi and I are rushing through an underground passage to the
An invitation to travel to Fukushima.
subway. On the white-tiled walls, I see a lush, three-panel poster—it shows wooden temples lit by lanterns, rush-roofed villages, and green rolling mountains. I stop and look more closely. Yuichi reads the Japanese characters out loud for me.
It’s a new travel poster for Fukushima.
Susan Armington (www.susanarmington.com) is an artist and writer from Minneapolis who leads the Talking Suitcases project to bring communities together to share art-making and storytelling about their lives.