Deciding What Matters

Making It Home

My recent decision to move my family back to Japanhas been met with tons of positive support and good wishes. For this, my wife and I are extremely grateful. The decision at the time was not an easy one.

There have also been those who, albeit with the best of intentions, have questioned the wisdom of our return, particularly with three young children. I don’t resent the questions; I’m not offended by the concerns, necessarily based on information that is debatable. We don’t know ourselves just what the present situation is, what needs to be done or what the future holds. No one does. Even the so-called experts disagree.

We saw in Fukushima the radiation meters – microsieverts per hour, displayed digitally on machines posted in parks, on school grounds and throughout the center of town. We read updates in the newspaper, day after day. We stared at the spectrum of opinion offered up in cyberspace, mostly from people thousands of miles removed from the reality those they are supposedly educating are living with every day.

Amid all this, we saw the people of Fukushima going about the business of living.

This is, simply, what my wife and I have decided to do.

For the first time in our married life (not counting our 6-month European dream in 2007) we have decided, with no external demands, where to be. For her job as a teacher with the Fukushima Board of Education, through the uncertainty following the quake, for an opportunity that didn’t quite play out as we’d hoped, we’ve always deferred to circumstance in the esoteric yet very real matter of choosing who or what would steer our ship as we sailed an ocean with countless ports we might like to see.

We got knocked around a bit.

Now there is no one on deck but us.

It would be wrong to claim nothing influenced our decision to move here. But the determinants, the deciding factors, came from within. First and foremost, we wanted our kids to spend a few formative years in Japan. The practical path from a financial point of view would have been to go back to Fukushima where, after seven years of continuous maternity leave, my wife could go right back to work. We both have friends who never left town, certain (perhaps with a dash of hope mixed in) that there was never any measurable threat to their families’ well-being. According to some sources they are correct. Still, in our hearts my wife and I didn’t feel moving back to Fukushima Citywas the right decision for us.

So we find ourselves among the mountains of Nagano Prefecture– in the ‘belly button of Japan’ as some like to say. I lived here in Matsumoto once before, during a three-month teaching assignment with my first Japanese employer. I always told myself I wanted to return.

With a little bit of digging we found a house, on the eastern fringes of town, among picture-perfect rice fields, welcoming neighbors and the gently permeating aroma of the surrounding vineyards. I catch up with old friends, still around from eleven years ago, and see in them a sign that this is indeed a good place. My wife has made many new friends already. Some have themselves come from Fukushima.

I think of all the things I’d like to accomplish in the four years we plan to live here. Some are grounded in practical reality; others are entirely self-indulgent. Between these two extremes await the children we are here for, and the things that would mean most to them.

Within the constraints of time must we make our decisions.

In these times, ours is exactly what they will be.

 

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.

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.

Moving, Still Moving...

It started back in mid-March. Many of you know the story. My family and I left our apartment, then our hometown, and soon our country – my wife’s own, my adopted. We landed in New Jersey and tried to relax.

For a while it seemed to work.

I was home – yet I wasn’t. As with every other place I’d occupied for the last twenty years, this wasn’t where I lived, it was only where I was staying. For my wife…a place she felt eminently welcome. A place she could feel her kids were safe and loved, a place they could thrive…for a while, until it was time to move again.

We visited people. Family, friends. We stayed over, told to make ourselves at home. We were blessed, for this was a time to take time and relish our good fortune in having so many people, in so many places, who cared enough to invite us in and see, though we already knew, that we were loved. And we stayed for a time, watching, remembering what it was like to go about the business of being a family living at home.

Days slip by, and it seems impossible that for all the freedom and free time there are so many things we have yet to accomplish. We mean to meet up with people living right down the road. We think of friends we’ve left behind and tell ourselves to drop them a line. But the kids need to play outside, and we’ve got boxes of clothes that need to be sorted. We watch the news that keeps us guessing what is really happening back home: we need to go back, but when? We talk about the air in Fukushima, the water, the ground and grandma and grandpa, and our son says he wants to go to school and play with Natsuki and Kaede-chan and Minato-kun. Some of them - I have to believe though I don’t want to - he will never see again.

How long before he understands this?

We fly to the far side of the country, trying to see reality in our hopes and dreams. We can see ourselves being here, or maybe there. We can find a place, a neighborhood. We’ll go in with little and make it work. People we meet here take us in too; strangers are friends we just haven’t met yet. Faith in humanity bolsters our own belief in ourselves and we discuss things as if they are within reach. Our boys take it well. We do our best to keep toys and music and playgrounds and love in their days while we see this town and then drive however many miles to the next. My wife and I remind each other how beautiful our sons are. They remind us without having to try. But they are young and very young and can only handle so much novelty. And we find ourselves losing our patience, more often than either of us would like.

Tonight we are on opposite ends of the country. My wife and my boys will continue to love and be loved by their American family while I throw myself into a journey that is just beginning to unfold. My wife will have the time and space to give Yamato and Seiji all her love and attention – plus enough, perhaps, for me in my absence. And I will be injecting my passions into a project that the events of March have brought me to; a collaboration of sorts with a friend who is with this furthering his dreams; an opportunity to move a little closer to mine; a chance that in the most twisted of circumstances may help turn our ideas – mine, my wife’s, even our little boys’ - into the reality and the life we have been searching for.

For now…today…we will continue to live on the move, my family even as they relax again in loving company, and me as I make my way across the country, trying to make something of the moment while thinking of home.