Living As We Can - A Year in Fukushima #11

The narrow passageway inside the front door showed a familiar scene. On the table, a miniature camel from Morocco and my son’s last paper and crayon pre-school project. On the opposite wall, pictures from Vietnam in the Spring and Christmas in New Jersey. The recycling still sat in plastic bags over in the corner under the stairs. That dirty soccer ball was still there too.

Only the staleness of the air was new. That and the fact that this was now where we used to live.

Exactly three months had passed since we locked up and left. It was cloudier then, drops of rain poetic in foretelling the heavier storms to come. Today the sky bore bright patches of blue, with nary a rain cloud in sight. Yet it seemed a blanket now lay draped over the town, a dank invisible veil that fell over the streets and houses and floated right through the walls, not settling on our material world so much as invading our learned concept of existence.

To the west the mountains had donned their thick spring greens; the Matsukawa and Arakawa rivers ran from them, clear and visibly cold. Late morning mists, not yet dissipated, hung over the verdant fields. The sun played hide and seek, casting shadows before the clouds moved in to steal them away once more. The air felt warm and cool in turns.

Fukushima really is a beautiful place. I’d always known this. Perceptions sharpen, though, in certain times. Times of fear, and times of wonder. Times of loss.

Upstairs a jumble of moments-turned-memories sat in disarray. Sheet and blanket lay crumpled on the futon where our younger boy had been taking his nap. My clothes were all over the floor, dumped from their plastic drawers when I needed them on my wife’s fortieth birthday, to fetch water from a neighbor’s well. The rooms were all littered with toys – plastic and wood of a thousand shapes and colors. Under the kitchen table and lining the walls were breakables of every kind, set there in uneasy anticipation of even stronger aftershocks. And everywhere, on top of it all, the palatable sense of a dusting of cesium-137.

I was alone, as I wanted it to be. As I prefer it when there’s nothing to say and everything to do. Or when I don’t know what to say because I don’t know what to do.

‘Before you walk around wipe the floors and everything with a wet rag,’ my wife told me. ‘And don’t open the windows, the air is dirty.’ But if the radiation penetrates the walls what good is keeping the windows closed? Are the clothes in the closet any less contaminated than my t-shirts on the floor? You can take precautions, but what will it really amount to? What good is a wet rag in the face of a nuclear meltdown? I’d do my best anyway. My boys wanted to come home.

But they wouldn’t, save for an hour the next day. We were fifty miles and a minor mountain range away from the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, yet different areas of Fukushima City were reporting differing levels of radiation one meter above the ground. On June 15th, the day of our return, the front page of the Fukushima Minyu reported on the new radioactive ‘hotspots’ – the area around Shinobuyama, the natural centerpiece of the city, was one of them. Our apartment was less than a mile from this. To the southeast, Matsukawa and Tsukidate would be barely habitable if things got much worse. The farms and fields a few miles to the west weren't paradise either, but the air was measurably cleaner there, and staying with my wife's parents up on the peach farm was the safe and prudent thing to do - for the kids - while we closed out our Eastern existence and made our escape once again.

In and around town there were no more lines at the gas stations. Store shelves were fully stocked. People smoked as they drove down Nishi-doro with their arms out the windows; they left their cars running in the 7-11 parking lot as they ducked inside for whatever. Some things indeed hadn’t changed. In complimentary fashion was a new daily column in the paper, a full-page spread called ‘Fukushima Makenai’ – words that defy translation almost as much as the contextual sentiment itself but there doesn’t seem much else to do. The stories in the June 7th issue included the village of Onuma putting out their first newsletter since the earthquake, a group of college students in Koriyama starting a ‘Sunflower Project’ to learn whether planting sunflowers can help reduce the effects of radiation, a small but well-known art gallery in downtown Fukushima opening a new exhibition in a temporary space, and a collection of uplifting anecdotes from people living in shelters across the region.

There is a patch of new blacktop in the middle of the intersection in front of our old building, leveling out a dip that had appeared. Along another street, on the other side of the Iizaka tracks, manholes sit six to sixteen inches above the broken road, pushed out of the ground in a mysterious process that took not a few seconds but days and weeks. The grass and weeds at deserted Inaba Park are overtaking the swings and benches. Homes everywhere bear sheets of blue plastic where the roof tiles have fallen off. My wife’s parents’ house is one of them. Next door it is the same. At the sprawling Azuma Sports Park, six thousand acres of athletics and aesthetics in the relatively cleaner air of the higher western end of town, five hundred people still live in a gymnasium. Their homes are in splinters now, unidentifiable among the rubble bulldozed into massive piles along the coast.

Each morning I drive down to the place we used to live, to clean a little more, to haul another load of boxes and bags back for us to go through – mail this to New Jersey, bring this with us, keep this here for later, give these clothes to Kumi up the road, get rid of that, store this in the shed for now, I’d rather hang onto this but God look at all this stuff.

Moving across town burns hours and days. Moving across the ocean can define an entire chapter of life’s story. We shake our heads when the people at the post office tell us what it will cost to get the first six of our boxes onto a ship in Tokyo Bay. The second-hand store offers close to nothing for the furniture we don’t need; it’s not even worth the half-minute trip from the old apartment down to the corner. But as with our old television and older fridge (‘unsellable’ they told us), we’d have to pay out of our own pockets to drop them off at the recycling center. I remind myself of the silver lining in all of it: for years we held off on replacing these things, thinking we’d be moving eventually, maybe soon. Maybe when the time was finally right. Now we only have old stuff to get rid of.

My mother-in-law tends to the peaches every day, in the rising humidity of the season. My wife takes the boys to a pre-school that bathes in the shade of maple and cedar, up in the fair air of Niwasaka. Sometimes they see their friends there, or meet them after for lunch and ice-cream. I’m glad they have good places to be as I pull apart and pack up rooms and closets and cabinets. They may even be able to spend some time further away from here, in Niigata or Yamagata, maybe even Nagano, before we can head for new hemispheres. If not, we’ll stay here in the cleaner air west of town, just for a while longer. From the outside I don’t know how that looks, but from here there’s not much else we can do for the moment.

Watashitachi makenai.

We will be okay.

Adversity

A buddy of mine was relating to me recently the story of his friend, a girl born in Southeast Asia. ‘Thirty-something years ago her family had to take off,’ he said. ‘There was all sorts of fighting going on, people being killed, and they had to sneak through the woods for days to get away, basically with nothing to their name.’ Eventually they made it all the way to America and managed, in circumstances I couldn’t imagine, to create a new life for themselves. ‘She was really young at the time, I don’t know how well she even remembers it all. But I’ll tell you what, she is one tough girl. We go running, biking, whatever, and she refuses to not keep up with me. And she’s only like this big.’ He stuck his hand sideways against my arm, just below my shoulder. ‘Dude, she’s amazing.’

I told my friend that I envied her in a way. It wasn’t that I wished I’d had her childhood instead of mine. And yet, part of me wished I did. ‘We grow up in a nice, safe place, all comfortable and fortunate,’ I said. My friend listened, staring back at me, eyes brimming with his own brand of intensity. ‘And we have no concept of what it means to be tough, you know? That idea, that understanding of what it is to have to survive…literally.’

I couldn’t find the right words then, and I still can’t today. Being tough…may be a choice. ‘World, listen up, I am going to be tough.’ But this means nothing outside of an environment that demands toughness, a set of circumstances that evokes what fortitudinous spirit exists, forges in us that mentality of nothing can fucking beat me, ever.

I wanted to have lived through what she lived through for two reasons I can comprehend. One, she knows that she can walk through the woods for several days while there is a war going on around her and survive. Two, so what could she possibly think she couldn’t do?

On a snowy day many years ago I decided to bike across Alaska, or at least part of it. To qualify, this was not going to be at all dangerous or risky; I’d be in a large group with an even larger logistical support caravan following along. The worst I had to fear was crashing my bike – from idiocy or exhaustion, and either way I’d be taken care of. This was, however, going to be a chance to find out how far I could go on a bicycle. From there maybe I’d find out more.

Since then I’ve biked thousands of miles through a dozen different countries, which while not any great feat is more than I might have ever thought possible if I’d never joined that ride in Alaska. More than this though is the world all that bike-riding has shown me – a world of adversity…of people…of a kind of beauty my relatively comfy childhood, however blessed, never showed me.

No one chooses where to be born. Those whose childhoods are marked by poverty, by illness, by the ravages of war would probably have chosen different lives if they could. I probably wouldn’t choose these things either. Who of us chooses any of our hardships? But life happens – bringing with it the opportunity to be tough. We’ve all had those moments. We all deal somehow. And on the other side we find out who we really are.

So if fate drops us in the middle of the woods somewhere, so be it. Maybe then we’ll find out just how far we can walk.

Home No More - A Year in Fukushima #10

Last October I decided to document some of the facets of a year of life in my adopted home of Fukushima. Three months ago that life as it was ended, replaced by something I am only beginning to come to grips with.

My mother in law was there waiting for us last night, hazards blinking, fuel-efficient car parked neatly along the curb of the mostly empty street. Fukushima City seemed unusually dark and desolate for 8:30 on a Monday night. As our bus lurched to a stop I wondered if maybe it had always looked this way.

There were nine people on our bus, four of them me and my family. Three had gotten off at Koriyama. The Tokyo-Fukushima Highway Line, I was sure, had never been this empty. The recorded messages – We are now arriving in Fukushima, Thank you for riding with us, Please make sure you don’t leave anything behind – were the same as always, which somehow made them sound odd.
In the cargo hold there were three bags, two of them ours. I stepped up, my deadweight son asleep in one arm, my backpack and his Thomas the Tank Engine bag hanging from my other. Can I see your claim tickets please? asked the bus driver, polite and breezy and blinded by protocol.

For the first night or two (at least) we would be staying at my wife’s parents’ place in Arai where, ten miles from our apartment, the detected radiation levels were lower. On the way my wife asked how things were on the farm – Has it been cold, Are you busy with the peaches, Is the water okay to drink? Have you been keeping all the windows closed? My mother in law, I believe, wouldn’t have brought any of it up on her own. At the house my wife told my older son to jump over the dandelions and tufts of weeds growing out of the dirt at the edge of the carport. She then showed him how to step lightly and quickly across the spotty lawn to the cement porch, since in the dirt and on the foliage is where the "bad gas" collects. ‘I want to ride my scooter,’ my son said. ‘Tomorrow, not tonight, because it’s dark out now so we should go inside, right Daddy?’ After twenty-five hours of traveling I wanted to tell my son, so good the whole trip from New Jersey through Houston and on to the other side of the world, that he could go ahead and do every god damn thing his little heart desired. ‘We shouldn’t play outside,’ my wife told him. ‘It’s dangerous.’ Inside and shoes off, she led him directly to the bathroom for a shower. His and all our contaminated clothes would be tied up in a plastic bag until laundry time.

I was up at five this morning, pretty good for my first jet-lagged day back. My mother in law was already out in the orchard, putting little paper bags on the peaches just as she has done for the past forty-two years. Her vegetable garden is already heavy with leafy greens. In the dirt and foliage is where the bad gas collects. Overhead the sky was a clear icy blue; the only visible clouds were the ones hanging onto the mountain peaks a couple miles to the west. Flowers, mainly perennials, were blooming all along the driveway and outside the many sliding glass doors on the front of the house. Next door the neighbor was again growing his chrysanthemums; the flowers are used as garnish for convenience store bento lunches. The nearby cement factory, an eyesore despite being painted green, seemed in the process of being subsumed by the forested hillside.

My mother in law isn’t the only one persisting out in the fields of Fukushima. It is June, and the rice fields are once again verdant and thick. The apples and Japanese pears are beginning, if ever so slightly, to pull down on their branches. The cherries are ready to be picked. And this year, as with every year, those working the land are of the older generation. For them the seasons bring labor and rest in turns, and now is no different. But one question has, perhaps, entered their heads: Who will buy our harvest? The speculative answer echoes with ambitious pride and denial. This is home, this is life, and home and life exist here. Belong here. There is no changing this now. We will keep doing what we are doing.

Their weathered skin and hardy souls are not immune to the unseen dangers in the air, but in an ironic twist time is now on their side. The young ones bear the brunt of the unhealthy future. Their greatest blessing and curse is that they are largely unaware. They go to school, where the topsoil has been removed to make their environment less hazardous, in practicality or in mind. They can play outside, but only for a little while. They too go straight home and take off their clothes and put everything in plastic bags and get right in the shower.

Up the street a three year old girl stomps through the puddles in the dirt outside the house her parents began building before the quake...a brand new home, bright with new wood and dreams...a house where the future is now centered...a house that will only depreciate over time. There has to be a balance between keeping your daughter safe and letting her be a kid. Just nobody knows where it lies. Her house sits on land that was once part of one of several sprawling farms. Over the last decade this area has been taken over by developers; only a few rectangular plots of rice remain, swaths of green among the forest of homes and apartment buildings, a river of shops flowing down the middle. One family still lives in their old farm house, now so out of place among the progress covering the land that was once theirs. Bit by bit they sold it off. Now they are the only ones with a feasible means of quickly up and leaving.

Japan’s miraculous resurrection after World War II was due largely to the sacrificial diligence of the workforce – the shakaijin. These are the people now at the twisted mercy of the economy their predecessors built. Those with jobs are lucky to still have them, though this means they must stay put. Those left without their livelihood are free to go, but to where? And to what? Last year I worked with several men whose companies were moving them overseas, to work five year stints in Ho Chi Min and Bangkok and Singapore. At the time none of them wanted to go; some had children in school, and they had to decide whether to leave them behind with their mothers or uproot the entire family's existence and replace it with who knew what. If I had to guess, I’d say they’ve all moved their wives and children overseas by now. Suddenly, they are the fortunate ones.