Change Is Normal

After a week in Fukushima I had finally gotten back out on my bike. Her tubes still held air, despite sitting in a shed since last September. Her front derailleur was still stuck; I’d meant to work on loosening her up last summer but, as often happens with things, I never got around to it. The worn back tire was a different matter; if I was going to get any riding in during my time here I couldn’t ignore it much longer. I always let my tires wear down further than I should before I replace them. So far I’ve avoided major catastrophe.

Ishida-san was manning his bike shop alone, of course. His look when I walked in was one of delayed confusion. Wasn’t I supposed to be gone by now? Had I left and come back? Misunderstandings are the common by-product of my middling Japanese. I picked out a new tire (‘That’s a good one, lasts a long time,’ Ishida-san said, just like every other time I’ve ever bought a tire from him) and I rode across town to find a present for my niece and her fiancee. I wouldn’t be able to make their wedding in Florida; this would be a sort of first for me, since I usually take any opportunity to travel.

Further toward the north side of town I found, after ten minutes and twenty-two side streets, the hair salon where I was to meet my wife. I was late. My wife would be later. I rolled to the convenience store at the end of the block to pick up drinks for my sons. On the magazine rack I saw the faces of the same celebrities so popular a year ago – in typical fashion, Japan loves new things brought to them by the same old people.

The woman at the hair salon – a personal friend of my wife’s, who I had met once before – asked about the new baby and living in the States and how long we’d be in Fukushima. I asked her mainly about her salon, as I couldn’t remember anything else about her, if I had ever known. Business was good, she said. Better now than it was in her first year, before the earthquake. ‘So people are…around? Like before?’ And still getting haircuts?

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Life is back to normal.’

And, I guess, on the surface it is.

Here in Fukushima City at least (unlike over on the coast, where too many people will never know normal again), the effects of the last year have to a degree been erased. Cracks and dips and sinkholes in the roads have been filled in and smoothed over. Tile rooftops have been repaired. In the earlier meantime disruptions in routine were mitigated then managed away: the electricity, then the water came back. Lines at the gas stations disappeared. Store shelves returned to capacity. Before long the kids went back to school – though they were forced to spend the sweltering summer months behind closed classroom windows until the radioactive dust settled and the tainted topsoil could be removed from the playground.

Three months after escaping a perceived litany of horrors stemming from the explosions at the nuclear power plants last March, my family and I returned to Fukushima – and the unavoidable sense that, despite having at our disposal all the things we’d enjoyed before, life had indeed changed in this town. On the news, weather forecasts now came with expected fluctuations in radiation levels. On the radio the latest readings in specific spots around the city were recited as gentle instrumentals played in the background. Millisievert became a household word – though few seemed to know exactly what a millisievert was.

A year later these subtle reminders of March 11, 2011 remain.

I took my sons to a school festival today, a typical display of kids’ games and paper cut-out decorations and snow cones. The kids were dressed up in their matsuri garb – the girls in bright-colored yukata, the boys in jimbei of more subdued tones. They fished for water balloons and spilled their popcorn on the ground while the parents hung in there, begging the sun to hurry up and fall toward that cooling mountain horizon.

This evening there were fireworks down where the Abukumagawa and the Matsukawa Rivers converge. On the wide sandy banks the concomitant summer festival went on as it has every year for the past twenty-eight. People in cars inched through the heavy traffic. Mostly teenagers wound between and past them on bicycles. The sidewalks were crawling with a broad community trying to be just that. On the nearby grounds of one of Fukushima’s many high schools, a solar-powered, pole-mounted device showed in crimson digits the present radiation levels on that spot.

Perhaps things have returned to normal here.

Just now, a constant awareness of the things on the ground and in the air, and the appropriate precautions they demand, are a part of normal here in Fukushima City.

We'll Be All Right.

'We'll be all right.'
My mantra for the year.
My worn and used-up incantation.

After the earthquake in March we hitched a ride out of Fukushima - a few hours, it turned out, before the first plume of radiation blew up from the coast and over the city. 'We'll be all right,' I told my son, who had just thirty minutes before been told to leave his toys on the floor and pack his Thomas the Tank Engine bag with whatever he wanted, and was then ushered out the door and into our neighbor's car. I didn't know where we would end up that night or the next day or the day after that, but what else could I say to him? 'We're just going on a little trip.'

A trip-turned-odyssey; a bus into snowy Akita, a commuter plane to Tokyo and another plane across the Pacific Ocean. For the circumstances, this seemed as good as any possible outcome.



In June, after three months of blessings in the US, we had to go back to Japan. I moved our things out of our apartment, shipping some boxes overseas and storing the rest at my wife's parents' farm where my wife and kids were staying; where the air and the water and the ground were ostensibly cleaner.

'They should be all right here,' I told my wife.
At least for a little while.
As long as they stayed inside.

I returned to the US in July, to finish a project involving hauling a fourteen-foot steel cross from L.A. to New York City. My wife, in my absence, would take the kids to Nagano, where they could swim in the pool and play at the playground and be like regular kids again.

'We'll be all right,' my wife said, smiling as she watched me get on a bus back to Tokyo and America. 'See you next month.'

I returned to see they had been well-taken care of. Still, they wanted to go home - 'to Grandma's house' my older boy said. And so we did. And back in Fukushima we saw thousands of people were still dealing with displacement; families were still living apart, moms and kids moved away while dads held onto their jobs; schoolchildren were still going to school, in new towns or in the place they'd always gone - a place that had changed.

We were doing all right, my wife and I knew. Because we could leave.
And this is what we had already decided - to leave Japan for good. News of another baby on the way only put us on a plane back to New Jersey that much more quickly.

Our plan was to move to Oregon and get our new life started there. The weeks passed by with no prospects for either work or adequate health care, and so we sought help locally, wherever we could think to look. It came as a shock, really, to find that, for a while at least, the New Jersey Medicaid system would cover my boys completely and my wife for all things related to her pregnancy. While not the road we would have liked to take, my wife and I could only be thankful for room to breathe and health care for little whats-his-face. Supported at the clinic by some wonderfully caring people, my wife - for the first time in a long time - felt that in an imperfect set of circumstances, we all would indeed be all right.

Two days ago, after a long and convoluted process drawn out even longer by the unsure future - Could we stay in the US if we couldn't get health coverage for junior? Would we have to go back to Japan to have the baby? If we get the immigration process going and then leave will we be breaking laws and killing my wife's chances of ever getting her greencard? - we finalized my wife's permanent residence paperwork and wrote a fat check so we could settle here for good. Finally.
Until the phone rang yesterday.

The New Jersey Medicaid system has apparently run out of funds. We were covered, we found out today, through the end of October. All services rendered since then would have to be settled out of pocket, as would all future checkups and ultrasounds and whatever other adventures our quickly developing unborn child might bring our way. Labor and delivery, we were assured, would be covered - as long as the delivery went along with no complications.
If it does, we'll be okay.
If not...

Morristown Hospital offers something called Charity Care, a back-up system for when state Medicaid runs out of money - as it usually does, which we also found out today. But having a certain amount of money in your bank account - which we do - means you don't qualify.
Which we don't.

If all goes well and we have a healthy baby we will still incur some appreciable costs. But with what we have been able to save over the years we'll survive. It is the possibility of running into problems that could cost us many tens of thousands of dollars that drives me tonight.

We can go back to Japan, to Fukushima, where my wife can have her baby in comfort and relief in knowing that everything is being taken care of, in words that won't keep her wondering if her needs are being
understood and met. But concerns about contamination - of the water, the food, the snow, even the baby formula - bring us right back to the false security of our own hopeful consolations.
If we have to go, we will. I mean, really, we'd most likely be all right...
But we've moved the kids enough. I want to keep my family here.

But here, there's too much at stake. My new baby, my family, needs more than 'we'll be all right.'
I know I'm just one among millions who could use a little Christmas magic right about now. But I'm tossing this out tonight. I'm thankful for the care we've received, for the multitudes of people who have given of themselves since March. I feel immensely blessed, through all the craziness. And I want nothing I haven't earned. But what I haven't found on all the job search sites, maybe I will find among the good people I know out there in cyberworld.

Just an honest day's work, for as many days as it takes, in exchange for the peace of mind that would come with knowing that, however our child decides to enter this world, I can tell my wife with absolute certainty that yes, we will be all right.

I'm ready and willing to give everything I've got.
Maybe someone out there, through six degrees of social media, knows where I can.
Thank you.

** 1/8/12 - After a dozen unreturned phone calls and several affirmations by our hospital that we simply were not covered medically, on Friday we went down to the county human services department. Deciding that I was not leaving until we got some answers, then making sure everyone I dealt with knew I wasn't leaving until I got some answers, then very firmly suggesting our case director call Trenton because her 'I think you are fully covered' was not enough - after weeks of lost sleep due to the stress of constant unknowing - we know now that my wife is fully covered for all pregnancy-related health care. It was a simple matter, really - and a lesson in the value and power of communication.

I'd still much rather work for my family's health care, but in the interim I feel incredibly blessed.