Into the Forbidden Zone (9 page)
Read Into the Forbidden Zone Online
Authors: William T. Vollmann
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Ethnic & National, #Japanese, #Memoirs, #Travelers & Explorers, #Travel, #Asia, #Japan, #General, #Two Hours or More (65-100 Pages), #Page-Turning Narratives
“What makes you the most uneasy?”
“I see the cars but no people.”
Taking pity on him, I told him to commence our return, driving very slowly down the smooth pavement to the fork of highways 399 and 36, and then as the road began to rise back up into the hills, but long before we reached Mr. Sato’s home, I made the driver stop again, for I now perceived one more chance to accomplish my journalistic vulture-swoop, for here again was human life—namely, a middle-aged couple wearing those nearly useless paper masks over their mouths and striding out of their house and down the gravel driveway to their separate cars. I rushed to halt them, and the interpreter bowed with her best politeness, requesting the favor of five minutes, just five minutes, but the wife said, “We don’t have time. This is the first occasion that we have checked our home since we evacuated to Tochigi.” “How long ago was that?” Shedding all remnants of that celebrated Tohoku patience and politeness, she cried, “We don’t have time; we don’t have time!”—at which they ran into their cars without bowing goodbye, the man sweating around his mask, and drove off at nearly reckless speed, up Highway 399 toward Koriyama and then Tochigi.
The driver remarked that they seemed afraid.
Reascending Highway 399, terraces and plum blossoms, my wrists stinging strangely, no doubt simply from sunburn or that potassium iodide, we proceeded toward Koriyama; now we descended the mountainside, a brown stream glinting white in the sun, at which time the dosimeter reading increased to 2.8 millirems. I said nothing. Looking into the rearview mirror, I saw the sad bewildered fear in the driver’s eyes.
“My eyes have been pretty watery for the last two or three days,” he said. “Is it related to the radiation?”
This gentle, stolid rule-follower, who had been born in a traditional thatched-roof house and who was proud of his eighty-six-year-old mother’s health, who had prepared the receipt for me in advance and therefore firmly refused payment for the extra two hours that my loitering had required—never mind the hazardous-duty bonus I tried to give him (he did take a fraction of it)—he struck me as one of those innocents so useful to authority everywhere. I asked him whether he knew what radiation was, and he said, “I don’t know. Does it evaporate? Is it a liquid?”
“Should Tepco be punished?” I inquired.
“It was the government’s policy,” he said loyally. “They did it for the nation.”
Kawauchi police guarding the entrance to the inner ring. Photo by William T. Vollmann.
ON THE DAY I ARRIVED IN HIROSHIMA, the Ministry of Energy classified the reactor accident as a Level Seven, as bad as Chernobyl. One agency said 370,000 terrabecquerels had been released so far. Another said 630,000 terrabecquerels.
40
I figured that nobody knew and everybody lied.
I asked the wide-faced taxi driver who was taking me to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum which he considered worse, the reactor accident or the detonation of the atom bomb over his city. He replied, “Of course, the nuclear bomb! It instantly killed more than two hundred thousand people!”
(A wall display at the museum stated that 140,000 died by the end of 1945.)
I mentioned that the Tohoku people appeared to know or care little about what happened at Hiroshima, to which he replied in his reedy voice, “Of course. More foreigners visit the museum than Japanese. At that time, I was three years old. One day before, we were ordered to evacuate because Hiroshima was a military capital and in danger.” He laughed, quite cynically and bitterly, I thought. His mother took him to the countryside, but on the day after Little Boy was dropped she returned to Hiroshima to look after relatives, which was why she—lucky woman!—became eligible for atomic victim status. “She showed no symptoms, but when I was fourteen she got recognition. Myself, if you have that
hibakusha
health book, if you’re a victim, that means that no one wants to marry you, so I didn’t want to get one.”
He went on: “Those who used to live close to the dome”—the hypocenter of the explosion—“they hide it, since they are discriminated against.”
“How many years did it take for the radioactivity to go away?”
“For that I’m not sure, but in 1945 they said that for fifty years no plants would grow, and soon weeds came.”
“Do you think that the reactor accident at Fukushima could affect people here?”
“I think it’s rather irrelevant to me. I won’t be affected. You’re going to the museum, and you’ll see that the atomic bomb gives you burns and hair loss,” he explained wisely, and so we pulled up there, on the edge of the Hongkawa River, among the pinkish-white clouds of cherry blossoms.
Visiting the museum, my heart grew as brown-gray as a salinized rice field. The torn, stained rags of the summer uniform and chemise that the thirteen-year-old schoolgirl Oshita Nobuko had sewn herself, oh, yes, these flattened, faded, bloody tokens, weren’t those enough to see? Just as one can find on display at that museum a lightbulb painted black except for a neat ring of transparency at the base, in order to decrease, however slightly, the probability that the Allied bombers could locate nighttime targets, so I could see of various radioactive issues, matters, and agendas what little there was to see. And I have told you what I saw. What did I see? What did I know?
At Hiroshima my dosimeter registered 0.2 millirems per twenty-four hours—twice Tokyo’s background. At first I thought I had found some artifact of the bomb, but an American dosimetrist later remarked that this reading probably fell within the preatomic norm for that area.
On the bench across from the ruined Fuel Hall with its atomic dome within, a pigtailed child sat upon her young mother’s lap, giggling and rubbing noses with her, the blue sky glaring through the blank window holes in the brick.
Then the petals began to rain down, losing themselves upon the whiteness of the granite flagstones, floating down onto the long dark hair of two young women who sat drinking coffee together, turning their faces toward each other.
1
Jill Meryl Levy,
The First Responder’s Guide to Radiation Incidents
(Campbell, California: Firebelle Productions, 2006), 120.
2
Farrington Daniels and Robert A. Alberty,
Physical Chemistry, 3rd ed.
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966) 695.
3
Ibid., 719. “According to AEC regulations, no worker should be exposed to more than 5 roentgens per year.”
4
Levy, 153, 46-48, 93-96. In the text the normal background exposure is expressed in mR (milliroentgens). For our purposes, a rem ("roentgen exposure man," a measure of biological damage) equals a roentgen.
5
Levy.
6
A chest X-ray is 0.0001 sievert. One sievert is 100 rems, or 100,000 millirems.
7
The Daily Yomiuri,
no. 21,742 (April 5, 2011, edition T), 1.
8
The Japan Times,
March 27, 2011, 2 (map: “Maximum radiation levels in eastern Japan: Data from 5 p.m. Friday to 5 p.m. Saturday”).
9
The Japan Times,
March 27, 2011, 2 (“Radioactive water stymies crews”).
10
The Japan Times,
April 3, 2011, 1 (Masami Ito and Minoru Matsutani, “Sea contamination traced to cracked storage pit connected to reactor: Tepco dumps concrete to plug radiation leak at No. 2”).
11
All distances given in the text are to the poisonous Plant Number One. Tokyo distance is measured somewhat randomly from the large and central Setagawa Ward. The (spuriously) exact distances are 232 kilometers to Plant Number One and 222 kilometers to Plant Number Two.
12
Following Japanese convention, in this essay I give people’s family names first.
13
In other words, the ground moved not up and down but from side to side—perfect conditions for a tsunami.
14
It was actually farther away.
15
In Chiba Prefecture, near Tokyo.
16
“Additionally, in open air bath, we set a rule saying that is mixed bathing and strictly refuse you from wrapping bath towel around yourself.”
17
The Daily Yomiuri,
no. 21,742 (April 5, 2011, edition T), 1.
18
The Teachings of Buddha,
1029th rev. ed. (Tokyo: Bukkyo Dendo Kyoki [Society for the Promotion of Buddhism], 2000), 198 (Defilements, 6).
19
1869–1912.
20
At the time of the interview, this would have amounted to about U.S. $625.
21
His mother said that facilities permitted only twenty bodies per day to be burned in the entire city.
22
The interpreter said “accumulation,” but this must be the meaning.
23
See the “Jewels in the Darkness” chapter of my
Kissing the Mask
(New York: Ecco, 2010).
24
Another translation comment: In Japanese the pronouns may sometimes be left implied. The literal translation here was the sentence fragment “the fire so vividly seen from my hill.” Here and throughout I have emended the raw translations in such ways as this. My interpreter has seen and approved the final manuscript.
25
Shinichi Otsuka, gen. ed.,
Yamahata Yosuke
(Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, Nihon no Shashinka 6 [Japanese Photographers ser., vol. 6], 1998), plate 12.
26
A more exact term would be “ruined house foundations which now resembled broken-walled fields.”
27
Hiroshi Kitagawa and Bruce T. Tsuchida, trans.,
The Tale of the Heike
(Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1977 paperback reprint of 1975 ed.; author unknown, provenance 13th cent.), vol. 1, 5.
28
Onigiri.
29
Probably daikon.
30
The Yomiuri Shimbun,
April, 9, 2100, 1. The Koriyama figure at 6:00 p.m. (taken the previous day, obviously) was 1.98 microsieverts per hour, which works out to 47.52 microsieverts per day, or 4.75 millirems per day—eleven times higher than my reading. I cannot in good conscience match any of my recorded values against any corresponding newspaper value, because on none of my three Koriyama-related days did I spend a straight twenty-four hours in that city. The dosimeter’s minimum turnover of 0.1 is so high in relation to the thankfully moderate daily radiation doses I encountered that there remains a huge margin of error. My attempts to calculate some provisional constant for each place visited were accordingly frustrated (except Tokyo: 1/10 mrem per day x 1/24 day per hour = 1/240 mrem per hour). For instance, my approximate figure for Sendai of 0.012 millirems per hour, based on time averaging from April 6 to 7, is surely depressed by time spent at the hot springs up in the mountains. The calculation of 0.1127 millirems per hour for Kesennuma and Oshima, based on seventeen hours on April 8, cannot be verified on the morning of the 9th, since radiation there cannot really be differentiated from radiation between there and Ohira, and between Ohira and Koriyama. Had the situation lent itself to more precise measurements, our radiation exposure would have been, let’s say, an order of magnitude higher.
31
One source thought my 0.4 millirems per day “a very reasonable assumption.” He said that as much as 0.2 millirems might be normal background for that area. He did not say that he knew this to be a fact, and I would imagine, given his nuclear reactor background, that he might tend toward optimistic characterizations in this regard.
32
If the
Yomiuri Shimbun
's figure is correct and consistent, then about three years would suffice to reach that same nasty 5-rem dose.
33
The most common fish is (or was) flatfish.
34
Six hundred sieverts would be about a hundred times the lethal dose. A chest X-ray is 0.001 sievert.
35
In the short run, at least, Koriyama’s readings held consistent. Half of the following day was spent in reaching Tokyo; hence, as arithmetic might predict, that day gave me merely twice the Tokyo baseline, or 0.2 millirems.
36
This was Iitate Village, mentioned below. A different (one-time) statistic gave Iitate’s dose as 9.13 microsieverts per hour, which works out to 21.9 millirems per day, so that the five rems would be reached in 228 days. See
The Japan Times,
March 27, 2011, 2 (map: “Maximum radiation levels in eastern Japan: Data from 5 p.m. Friday to 5 p.m. Saturday”).
37
Per hour. This would be about 1.4 millirems per day, or about four times what my dosimeter was reporting for Koriyama. At this rate, a resident of Kawauchi would have accrued five rems in about nine years and nine months.
38
My interpolation. He actually said, “So they went to see.”
39
Per hour, presumably. This would be 0.91 millirems per day—a bit less than Mr. Sato’s figure. If this held stable over time, more than 15 years would be needed to accrue 5 rems.
40
Chogoku Shimbun,
April 11, 2011, front page.
