This story was originally published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and was supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center.
The word of the year last year in Japan was bear. Black bear sightings doubled from the previous year. There were 200 injuries and 13 deaths. Okuma, meaning “big bear,” is a town on the east coast of Japan. But it is not the bears that people in Okuma fear the most. It is radiation.
Okuma is the closest town to the three nuclear reactors that melted down at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant on March 11, 2011. On that day, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami destroyed the backup generators and cooling pumps at three reactors loaded with nuclear fuel. A fourth reactor was unfueled, but its building, filled with hydrogen from the neighboring unit, exploded along with the other three.
The wave that washed over Japan’s eastern shore killed 20,000 people, many of whose bodies were washed out to sea and never recovered. As radiation levels spiked around the destroyed reactors, 160,000 people were evacuated from Okuma and 11 other towns. A 20-kilometer ring around the plant, an area twice the size of New York City, was declared a nuclear exclusion zone. Hit by a freak snowstorm that covered the town with cesium 137 and other radionuclides, even Iitate, a village 60 kilometers to the northwest, was evacuated.
Fifteen years later, 4,000 workers struggle to control the ongoing disaster. The three melted reactors remain so radioactive that they destroy the robots sent to explore the damage. No one knows exactly where the melted fuel is located or how deep it has burrowed below the reactors’ concrete pedestals, possibly into the ground.
The water used to cool the reactors is stored in more than 1,000 tanks that reached capacity in 2023. This cooling water, which Tepco initially claimed was clean and has been releasing into the Pacific Ocean since 2023, was found to be contaminated with 62 radionuclides, including cesium, strontium, and plutonium. Two fuel pools packed with spent nuclear fuel have yet to be emptied. They sit precariously on top of units 1 and 2, which are exploded tangles of metal ready to fall over and spill into the ocean.
Cesium-laden microparticles from Fukushima have been found in air filters across Japan. As one drives the highways in Fukushima, some of the large green road signs that would usually indicate towns and turnoffs have been replaced by panels displaying radiation levels, given in microsieverts per hour. (A microsievert measures the biological effect of ionizing radiation on human tissue.) These readings can spike to dangerous levels depending on which way the wind is blowing. The radioactive material blown out of the destroyed reactors made Fukushima’s forests, which cover three-quarters of the nuclear exclusion zone, unsafe to enter. The wild boars that used to be hunted here, as well as the plants and mushrooms that used to be foraged for food, are too radioactive to eat.
Radiation levels in town centers and school yards were lowered, but a short walk into neighboring patches of grass will spike the needle on a dosimeter.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Japanese government denies that Fukushima is an ongoing disaster. “The situation is under control,” then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the International Olympic Committee as he lobbied for Japan to hold the 2020 Summer Olympics (which were delayed until 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic). Dubbed the “Recovery Olympics,” the torch was run through Fukushima’s depopulated towns before the first games were played at a baseball stadium in Fukushima City.
Okuma is the centerpiece of the government’s plan for resettling Fukushima. The government has spent millions of dollars decontaminating the streets and rebuilding the train station and other public buildings. Large subsidies and free schooling are offered to anyone willing to move into Okuma. Despite a new gym, a hotel, and a sample apartment where one can live for a week to try out the town’s amenities, Okuma has the forlorn feeling of someplace yet to recover from a great disaster. In a town that once had 11,000 people, the population is currently nudging over 1,000, with half of them newcomers. It is still unsafe to enter the woods or walk through the town’s weed-filled lots, many holding abandoned houses.
Some of Japan’s efforts to revive the area have been successful. Other measures have created injustices and stigma. The lived experience of people resettling the evacuation zone reveals an ongoing disaster at Fukushima—a disaster that is not well known in Japan or the rest of the world.
The 160,000 atomic refugees from Fukushima, known officially as internally displaced persons or IDPs, fled to other parts of Japan or were housed nearby in temporary shelters, measured by the size of tatami sleeping mats (roughly three by six feet). An eight-mat structure was deemed big enough for a family. IDPs received housing subsidies until 2017, when the government declared parts of Fukushima’s nuclear exclusion zone open for resettlement. This attempt to force displaced people back into the exclusion zone was criticized by UN rapporteurs on human rights, and the hardest hit of Fukushima’s towns still have only a handful of people living in them. The government claims that the current number of IDPs is 30,000. The United Nations says the actual number might be twice as large.
The push to resettle Fukushima’s red zone began in April 2011, when the allowable radiation dose was raised twentyfold, from 1 millisievert per year to 20. One millisievert per year remains the allowable dose for the rest of Japan, whereas 20 millisieverts per year was formerly the dose allowed for workers in nuclear power plants. The difference explains why women, particularly women with young children, have resisted returning to Fukushima, regardless of the new schools and subsidies for everything from eating out in local restaurants to gym membership.
Massive seawalls were built along Japan’s eastern coast. Fukushima was dotted with incinerators that burned up the debris left behind by the wave that washed up to 20 miles inland. Decontaminating the area included a pharaonic project to remove and bag all the topsoil contaminated with cesium 137. About 100,000 workers in protective suits and masks swarmed over Fukushima’s farms and fields, scraping up five centimeters of soil and piling it into great pyramids of black plastic garbage bags.
Radiation levels in town centers and school yards were lowered, but a short walk into neighboring patches of grass will spike the needle on a dosimeter. So, too, do the winter storms that wash radioactive material down from the mountains. In the forested hills that ring the coast, there is no way to lessen Fukushima’s radioactivity other than to wait out the half-life of cesium 137, which is 30 years. So how long does one have to wait? In about 300 years, or 10 times the half-life, the quantity of this radioactive isotope will have dropped to a thousandth of what it was.
Other strategies for decontaminating the area have had mixed results. Big gashes on the hillsides show where sand has been quarried and dumped into Fukushima’s rice paddies. With their intricate drainage systems destroyed by heavy equipment, deprived of topsoil, and covered in sand and gravel, many of Fukushima’s rice paddies have been abandoned, and the crop is barely more than half of what it was before 2011.
Many of Fukushima’s fields are covered with solar arrays. Others hold state-sponsored projects for building hydrogen fuel cells or drones. This is part of the government’s effort to turn Fukushima into what it calls the “innovation coast,” beginning with demonstration projects that the government hopes will develop into businesses. Another stretch of abandoned farmland is filled with the multimillion-dollar Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum. Opened in 2020, the museum is currently being expanded to include a hotel, a convention center, and even possibly a golf course.
The government seems to be ignoring Japan’s history and geology as it pushes to restart reactors on an archipelago that every year is struck by over 1,000 earthquakes.
A town in Fukushima, such as Iitate, might be considered decontaminated when as little as 15 percent of the radioactive soil is removed. This creates a kind of lily pad effect; people can safely hop from one clean spot to another or walk along narrow paths between radioactive hot spots. A law passed in November 2011 mandates that all of Fukushima’s radioactive soil, roughly 15 million cubic meters, will be removed from the prefecture by 2045. With no place having volunteered to take any of the soil, the government has decided to spread it across Japan.
Most of Fukushima’s bagged soil has been re-deposited into a dump built on the cliff behind the destroyed reactors. This facility separates the most radioactive elements from the soil and sequesters them in concrete bunkers. Soil containing less than 8,000 becquerels per kilo of radioactivity, which the Ministry of the Environment calls “Happy Soil,” is readied for shipment across the country, to be used in landfills and construction. (A becquerel is a unit of radioactivity, corresponding to one nuclear disintegration per second.) A load of Happy Soil, described as “revitalized and strong,” was recently dumped into the flower beds in front of the Prime Minister’s office in Tokyo.
“This is a dangerous level of radioactivity,” says Yukio Shirahige, who worked for 36 years as a cleaner mopping up spills at Fukushima Daiichi. “At these levels, you have to wear gloves and protective gear. If you had any cuts or open wounds, you were taken off the job.” At up to 8,000 becquerels per kilogram, one would not want to use this soil for growing food. (The maximum radioactivity concentration allowed for food in Japan is 100 becquerels per kilo.)
Japan has adopted this strategy to reduce the heavy burden on Fukushima and accelerate the area’s recovery. But Shirahige suspects another motive: “If all of Japan is contaminated, then Fukushima will appear to have recovered because it looks just like the rest of the country.”
In fact, the rest of Japan is already contaminated. Radiation detectors along highways measure gamma radiation, resulting from the presence of cesium 137. Recent research has found that highly concentrated cesium-bearing microparticles, formed during the reactor core melt-downs and scattered widely across Japan, might be far more dangerous if inhaled than external exposure to cesium.
“I debate this with my friends,” says Shirahige. “Those of us who worked at Fukushima believed that inhaling the dust or ingesting radioactive particles, where they do long-term damage to your lungs and other parts of your body, is more dangerous than external radiation.” Shirahige regularly scrubs down his house, trying to remove the dust, and he measures the radioactivity in every room. “The windows leak when the wind blows, and I can never get it down to zero,” he says.
The official investigation into the Fukushima disaster called it a “made in Japan” failure by a nuclear industry that suffered from regulatory capture, inbred leadership, defective engineering, and ruinous cost-saving decisions, such as not building an adequate seawall or waterproofed generators and pumps. The disaster at Three Mile Island could be dismissed as human error. The disaster at Chernobyl (as it was then spelled) could be dismissed as the product of human error and inferior Soviet technology.
“The government wants people to think that everything is improving, that there is nothing to worry about, but this is not true. “
Fukushima was different. The world’s worst industrial accident took place in an advanced industrial country with 54 nuclear reactors, supplying a third of Japan’s electricity. The final bill for containing the destroyed reactors, storing the waste, and rebuilding parts of the nuclear exclusion zone could cost over $1 trillion. This is one quarter of Japan’s annual economy. Yet, the government seems to be ignoring Japan’s history and geology as it pushes to restart reactors on an archipelago that every year is struck by over 1,000 earthquakes.
Every year in January, Coming of Age Day, a national holiday in Japan, honors teenagers turning 20 and assuming full citizenship. This year, Okuma held its ceremony on a Saturday afternoon. The event resembled a high school graduation, only more serious. The girls wore formal furisode kimonos with elaborate bows. Even the boys in Japan sometimes dress in traditional hakama skirts and half-coats. In Okuma, the boys wore black suits and neckties. Ten young people were coming of age, five boys and five girls. The ceremony took place in an auditorium flanked by long rows of seated politicians and town officials. It involved a great deal of bowing and many speeches, none by the young people coming of age.
The national news was covering the event, and the stage was sometimes more crowded with photographers than participants. This was a big day for Okuma. It represented coming of age after a nuclear disaster, a ceremonial rebirth for the town. These young people were five years old when they fled the area. So what did it mean to have them back in Okuma, transitioning from teenagers to adults?
Unfortunately, the event was not what it seemed. The town would have had 135 young adults coming of age this year, were it not for the nuclear disaster. Instead, 10 students returned for the ceremony, and they traveled long distances to get to the auditorium, as none of them live in Okuma. “I am sorry to say that I don’t know any of these people. I have never seen them before,” says Takumi Sakamoto, a slender young man who is studying sociology at Hosei University in Tokyo. The same is true for the other participants. Their official family registry is in Okuma, but these young people are returning to a town they no longer know. At least Takumi has a good reason for being here. He plans to write his thesis on Fukushima’s nuclear trauma and how people are coping with the ongoing disaster.
With remarkable ingenuity and self-reliance, people in Fukushima are living with high levels of radioactivity. These Argonauts of the Anthropocene are learning how to decontaminate their towns and fields. They are building citizen-science laboratories to check their food and monitor radiation levels. They compile archives and organize trips to Chornobyl (as it is now spelled) to learn from those who live in other nuclear exclusion zones.
Ai Kimura, a director and lead researcher at Tarachine, the Mothers’ Radiation Laboratory in Iwaki, with a yearly budget of a million dollars, primarily from donations, is as busy as ever. She runs a clinic for children and a laboratory outfitted with sophisticated equipment, including new machines for monitoring the tritium, strontium, and cesium in the cooling water that Tepco began releasing into the Pacific Ocean in 2023. (Tepco, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, owns the Fukushima nuclear power plant and other reactors in Japan.)
“The government wasn’t giving us the information we wanted, or they were giving it to us weeks or months too late,” Kimura says. “We are mothers. There are things we need to know now to take care of our children and families. It is not as if the crisis is over. There is no end in sight. The government wants people to think that everything is improving, that there is nothing to worry about, but this is not true. We have seen radiation levels rise in certain instances. We have seen parks and schools recontaminated. We have to monitor constantly and never forget. The need to test the water and soil and food and people’s health in Fukushima is ongoing, and even more dangers, from the delayed effects of radiation, lie ahead.”
“We can’t sell our fish as we used to. We get less money for our fish than other prefectures.”
Tepco plans to dump 22 trillion becquerels of tritium per year into the Pacific Ocean over the next 20 to 30 years. This is less than the tritium released from Canada’s nuclear reactors, which dump more than 3,000 trillion becquerels per year into the Saint Lawrence River. But cooling water from functioning reactors is not the same as water contaminated by melted fuel rods, which contain a brew of other radionuclides.
On several occasions, Tepco has been caught faking its safety data and covering up incidents. In 2018, the company was forced to admit that its treated water was still contaminated with plutonium, strontium, and cesium—62 radionuclides altogether—at levels, in some cases, thousands of times above regulatory limits. Tepco acknowledges that as much as two-thirds of the cooling water in its storage tanks remains contaminated. Strapped for cash, the company announced in January that it would cut $26 billion in expenses. This will slow even further the decommissioning effort at the melted reactors.
“We feel betrayed,” says Tadaaki Sawada, spokesperson for the Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Associations in Iwaki. “The government promised to consult us. They had other options besides dumping the water in the ocean, but they went ahead and did it anyway.”
A sturdy man in a blue work jacket, Sawada was visibly upset when I last saw him in 2022. At the time, Japan was reporting that a radioactive rockfish, glowing with 18,000 becquerels per kilogram of cesium 137, 180 times the legal limit, had been caught out of Shinchi harbor, 35 miles north of Fukushima Daiichi. The rockfish joined the list of 44 species that, at one time or another, have been banned from sale in Japan. The freshwater fish from Fukushima’s rivers are still banned because of high levels of radioactivity, but the rockfish and another 200 ocean species are back in the clear, at least for now.
Fukushima’s fishing fleet is half the size it used to be, and the catch is one quarter as large. The number of days allowed for fishing is limited. “We can’t sell our fish as we used to,” Sawada says. “We get less money for our fish than other prefectures.” The list of countries banning food imported from Fukushima includes Russia and China. “As long as the damage continues, we want to be compensated,” Sawada says. The criteria are complicated, and the subsidies could end soon, but at least for the moment, Fukushima’s fishers are paid for the days they don’t fish and for the fish they are forced to sell at a discount. “The money is paid by Tepco,” Sawada says, “but really it comes from the government.” (Tepco was effectively nationalized after the company was bailed out by a capital infusion of 1 trillion yen, or $12.5 billion, in 2012.)
Tomoko Kobayashi is showing me around the kindergarten she attended as a child. With a stopped clock and children’s desks exactly as they were on March 11, 2011, the kindergarten has been preserved as a memorial to the Tohoku earthquake. It is one of several memorials built in Odaka, a town that once had 13,000 residents and now has a third of that number. “We have to do this for ourselves,” Tomoko says. “We need to remember what happened. We need to know what life was like and how people survived the disaster. This archive will help us restore the town.”
Odaka is the most self-sufficient and creative town in Fukushima, in good part because of Tomoko. She owns the 13-room inn down the street from her former kindergarten. This is a traditional ryokan with warm water baths for men and women, but not much heat anywhere else, except in a central room with a long table that is piled with books, pamphlets, maps, drawings, and plans for the dozens of projects that Tomoko has helped to launch with the guests who gather every night for her common meal. In order to reopen her ryokan, Tomoko and Takenori, her husband, before his death in 2024, gathered volunteers from across Japan. They scrubbed everything and filtered the air. They opened a radiation laboratory for testing their food, and then the lab began testing food for everyone in Fukushima.
Every year, they gathered more volunteers to walk through Fukushima’s farms and fields, mapping radioactive hot spots. They organized four trips to Chornobyl to study life in another radioactive red zone. Tomoko published three volumes of interviews with Fukushima survivors. She filmed her travels and events as she revived the town’s traditional festivals and nurtured new businesses and restaurants. With unfailing cheerfulness, she worked as a sort of benevolent spider, weaving connections between everyone who came to sit at her table. The latest venture she helped to launch is the Oretachino Denshokan (commonly shortened to Oreden). Meaning “our memorial museum,” Oreden is a sculpture gallery, art space, museum, pottery studio, and library installed in a former warehouse that was decontaminated and rebuilt by a crew of 250 volunteers from around the world.
Ryoichi Sato, a ninth-generation rice farmer in a valley near Fukushima Daiichi, had a very good year in 2025. Rice paddies in his valley were not heavily hit with cesium. After deep plowing and the application of zeolite, potassium, and lots of organic material, Sato returned to growing rice again and selling it commercially in 2017. A lean, distinguished-looking man whose farm includes drones for surveying his fields, automated tractors, and a large conference room with a TV monitor and several whiteboards, Sato estimates that the rice crop in Fukushima is only 60 percent of what it used to be.
At first, the government demanded that he check radiation levels in every bag of rice, even the small ones that he sold for marked-down prices. Now he checks one bag out of every 50. Last year, Japan faced a serious rice shortage. Prices spiked by 50 percent, and Sato had a bumper crop. Since then, he has doubled his land holdings and now runs Fukushima’s largest cooperative farm, with 15 employees. He is experimenting with growing other crops such as corn and soybeans. In the meantime, a steady stream of officials from Japan’s Ministry of the Economy and other visitors parade through his conference room, consulting Sato for advice on how to improve Fukushima’s economy.
Haruo Ono also had a good year. He has a new fishing boat captained by one of his three sons. They run a 50-foot, near-shore trawler out of Shinchi harbor, Fukushima’s northernmost port. The catch was good last year, and no more radioactive rockfish have turned up. But Ono is still angry about the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. He speaks bitterly, almost yelling with frustration, about Tepco dumping radioactive water into the ocean. “They are treating it like a sewer,” he says.
With close-cropped black hair on top of a wind-weathered face, Ono is still restricted to fishing no more than 12 days per month. “Tepco plans to end its subsidies by the end of the year,” he says. “I am going to oppose it because they have yet to finish the decommissioning. They don’t even tell us when they are releasing the contaminated water. Most of us fishermen are calm now and don’t complain, but even if we spoke up, our voices wouldn’t reach all the way to Tokyo. The government never loses. They never apologize. They never take responsibility for what they have done. No one outside is talking about Fukushima, but we have not recovered.”
Another enterprising person trying to jumpstart the local economy is Yuji Onuma. Onuma, a big, bold character, worked for eight years as a professional actor in Tokyo playing Jean Valjean, the hero in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Onuma currently runs a solar power company in Ibaraki Prefecture, northeast of Tokyo. The price for the electricity that he sells to Tepco is being reduced now that the government is pushing to restart Japan’s mothballed reactors. Onuma often makes the four-hour drive to his hometown of Futaba, where he cleans his family’s graves and rents out four apartments. Futaba, which once had 7,000 residents, is the poor cousin to neighboring Okuma. The town held two of Fukushima Daiichi’s six nuclear reactors and was trying to build two more when the plant blew up. Fukushima’s expensive new memorial museum is located in Futaba, but on the coast, outside of town. “Look over there,” Onuma says as we walk in front of the abandoned houses that line what was once the main street. “They built an elevated bypass. Now people headed to the museum can turn off the highway and fly straight over Futaba.”
I meet Plaintiff #8 one morning at breakfast in our hotel. Plaintiff #8 is a young woman with thyroid cancer who has joined a lawsuit against Tepco, claiming damages for radiation exposure when she was a child. Plaintiff #8 is how she is identified in this case and by lawyers and the press. She has to remain unnamed because of the threats directed against people from Fukushima, particularly women with cancer, who are considered personally dangerous and politically injurious to the reputation of Japan. Thyroid cancer used to be rare in Fukushima Prefecture, with one case in a million. After five rounds of screening, the incidence rate is now 400 cases out of 380,000 people—1,000 times higher than before the disaster.
Plaintiff #8 had her thyroid removed when she was 17. “I was anesthetized but had my eyes open and cried throughout the surgery. Even today, recounting the experience makes my legs shake. I have suffered less than other people, but I still sometimes find myself weeping uncontrollably.” Plaintiff #8 is officially registered as handicapped after a nervous breakdown. At the trial, she was given five minutes to describe her experience.
The young woman and I walk to Odaka’s new heritage museum, where she shows me a photo of herself kneeling in front of one of the museum’s displays. Mariko Gelman, an artist from Chernobyl, had come to Fukushima and installed a sculpture called “Transparency Japan.” The sculpture is a wall of lighted bricks, each one containing a box of medicine for the pills that thyroid cancer victims in Chernobyl and Fukushima have to take for the rest of their lives.
Ruiko Muto, co-founder of the 3.11 Fund for Children with Thyroid Cancer, is helping to organize the thyroid trial. A longtime opponent of nuclear power in Japan, Muto is known for having addressed a large antinuclear rally in 2011, during which she compared Fukushima’s atomic refugees to hibakusha, the “bomb-affected people” of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. (Japanese Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe later declared that Fukushima was a third atomic bomb dropped on Japan, only this time Japan dropped the bomb on itself.)
Muto was the plaintiff’s representative in a criminal trial claiming that Tepco’s top three executives were criminally liable for placing corporate profits over public safety. After a 13-year trial, Japan’s Supreme Court found the executives not guilty. “Our courts in Japan are not politically independent,” Muto says. “They cleared the way for the next nuclear disaster.”
The government is fighting the thyroid case, claiming overdiagnosis and a lack of proof that Fukushima Daiichi is the radiogenic cause of cancer. “No matter how the case is decided, it is important for us to establish the facts and allow the plaintiffs to make a claim for justice,” Muto says.
If the coastal plains of eastern Japan are coming back to life, the hill towns in the Abukuma mountains are another matter. Rushing to beat a January snowstorm, Junko Takahashi, the Japanese journalist with whom I am traveling, and I drive up the winding roads and push farther into the forested hills to find Yoichi Tao. A University of Tokyo-trained physicist and hibakusha survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, Tao was the founder of a large engineering company before he retired to Sasu, the most remote of Iitate’s 20 hamlets. Here, he started an organization called Saisei-no-kai, the “resurrection of Fukushima,” a group whose ambitions are as large as its name. Tao built a laboratory and a guest house. He developed new methods for decontaminating rice paddies. He designed handheld radiation detectors linked directly to the internet. He and his daughter, an architect, turned a former hardware store into a research center filled with projects.
Tao hands us a statement that he wrote about living in Iitate. It describes his philosophy about the need for self-sufficiency in local communities, before concluding, “The past two years have made it clear that such ideas have remained no more than grains of sand—largely ignored by global leaders, experts, and bureaucrats.”
“The trees are too contaminated to use in my wood-burning stove,” he says. “I also failed at growing shiitake mushrooms without elevated levels of cesium. The old people are dying. We see lots of ambulances on the road, and the young people have not come back. This is our most serious problem. I thought we could revive Fukushima, but now I believe the area is likely to return to the mountains out of which it came.”
Tao pulls no punches when criticizing Tepco’s engineers. “They take advice from nobody, not even the Nobel prize winners who want to help. If their soil is safe, why do they have to remove it? Dumping cooling water in the ocean is another bad idea. Years ago, I advised them to build a closed circulation system. There is no way they can decommission the reactors by 2051, their target date. They tell us they have 880 tons of melted fuel, and, so far, they have managed to remove a piece the size of a grain of rice. I estimate it will take 100 years or more. Future generations will be cleaning up Fukushima long after we’re dead.”
Junko and I drive up another narrow valley to find Nobuyoshi Ito, who is known locally as “the measuring fanatic.” Ito walks around Iitate and up in the hills wearing a vest filled with radiation detectors. The bedroom in his house holds two professional spectrometers imported from Ukraine. Ito publishes a blog and regularly tests all the wild fruits and berries that people used to forage here in abundance.
When I last saw him in 2022, Ito handed me an Inohana “boar’s nose” mushroom, considered one of the most delicious of Japan’s 200 edible species. Ito warned me that the mushroom was radioactive. Finding his measurements hard to believe, I took the mushroom to an independent laboratory. How radioactive was it? The mushroom contained 88,000 becquerels per kilogram. It was 900 times more radioactive than the legal limit for food in Japan.
Things are a bit better this year, but not by much. Ito pulls a bag of Inohana mushrooms from his refrigerator, measuring 55,000 becquerels per kilogram. He thinks that reopening Iitate to returnees and settlers was a mistake. Three hundred people came for the housing and other subsidies, but some of them have already left. A town of 6,500 people is shrinking to one-tenth of its former size.
Ito hands us another interesting item. It is a postcard he mailed to people at the end of the year explaining why he was not sending them New Year’s greetings. “My existence is inconvenient to the village of Iitate,” he says. “They are exploiting poor people, trying to draw them here. They list subsidies but don’t mention radiation.”
As I traveled around Fukushima, I often heard people describe themselves as inconvenient.
“I am an annoyance to the town officials,” Ito says. “My existence makes life difficult for them. They lied about obtaining the people’s consent. They said they would consult us before releasing the contaminated water. They never did.”
Ito is also angry about Tepco trying to restart its nuclear reactors on the west coast of Japan. “I hate the unluckiness that I was born in a country that can forget its history in only 80 years,” he says, referring to the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II.
Ito leaves the room again and returns with a small brass bell. “The town gave me this to ward off bears,” he says. “We have had five reports of bears in the village. But they have given us nothing to protect against radiation.”
