Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip Through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan

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Soldiers in Ishinomaki. Photo by William T. Vollmann

I WON’T DENY MY SELFISH RELIEF at leaving the stinking ugliness of Kesennuma and Oshima, not to mention my anticipation of getting safely home where such things never happen (Sacramento, my home city, is second only to New Orleans for flood risk in America). As well as I could determine from my dosimeter, the radiation in Kesennuma and Oshima seemed to be double that of Tokyo: a millirem every twelve hours. Now it had come time to return to Koriyama, and from there to make a foray or two into the evacuation zone.

At five-thirty in the morning in Oshima, the meter read 2.2 millirems, having turned over once since dusk. At nine-thirty on the Tohoku Expressway, after two hours of moderate rain and just north of the Ohira exit, it reached 2.3. Shortly before one in the afternoon, just as we came into Koriyama, it showed 2.4. By eight that night, thanks no doubt to a certain pleasure drive which I will shortly recount, it was at 2.5, and before six the following morning it had achieved a glorious 2.6 millirems: four times the Tokyo baseline, in short. According to the newspaper, the actual level was closer to forty-four times Tokyo’s,³⁰but, optimist that I am, I’ll keep faith with the toy Bob sold me. Here is an appropriate place to say that my dosimeter’s figure for Koriyama, the highest reading of any twenty-four-hour interval excepting the days of my two international flights, is not bad at all: it works out to 146 millirems per year. One American dosimetrist opined that as much as half of this might be predisaster “natural” background radiation.³¹To reach my danger threshold of 5 rems, I would have had to hang around Koriyama for more than thirty-four years. All the same, if I were young, I might not want to marry and raise children in Koriyama.³²

THE WIND THAT COMES FROM THE SEA

REGARDING THAT DAY’S PLEASURE DRIVE, I will tell you that shortly after five in the evening, once the nasty and potentially hazardous rain had ceased, the interpreter and I hired a taxi to convey us to the Komatsu Shrine, of which none of us, including the driver, had ever heard; the interpreter and I had chosen it after a glance at her map. The driver was a bald old man who insisted on his financial rights. His stubbornness had nothing to do with the danger; the question was whether to pay by the hour, the meter, or the job. Finally we compromised on all three. The driver then said that this journey might not even be allowed, because it seemed as if Komatsu Shrine might lie — what a coincidence! — within the forced evacuation ring. He radioed his boss, who gave us his blessing, and off we went. Needless to say, I watched the dosimeter, expecting radiation to rise in proportion to the inverse-square law, but anyhow I have already spoiled the suspense of that business.

The driver had picked up only two fares that day, both of them insurance company operatives who were verifying earthquake damage. Now the highway was open, he continued, so that made it smooth. He was a good talker, and I had already begun to like him. The dosimeter remained at 2.4 and the evening was clear, the bare trees on the verge of appearing springlike. Here came more lovely silver-white plum blossoms in the dusk. The driver said that he used to party in Kesennuma; he was an angler; the fish were so good there. I did not have the heart to tell him what the fisherman in the orange windbreaker had told me in Oshima — that all the fishing was ruined there for years to come.³³

He said that Koriyama was very quiet at night now.

Rolling up the ever emptier road into the grassier hills, we saw here and there a long straight line of cabbages in the grass, or jade-colored onions growing high. We were all wearing masks for the dust. The taxi was hot; my mask made me a trifle nauseous; but I thought it best not to roll down the window. Did the driver worry about the contamination? (Contamination was once again the word they all used; oh, it sounded so much better than radioactivity!) Not at all, he chuckled. “My wife,” he laughed, “she told me since it was raining not to go out, but I don’t care at all! The government always says: no immediate effect on your health! Ha, ha, ha! Every day they announce the level of radiation within the prefecture. Compared with an X-ray check, which is 600 sieverts,³⁴ that doesn’t sound scary at all!”

“Was that sieverts or millisieverts?” I inquired.

“I thought it was six hundred,” he said vaguely, “but however strong the contamination is, it’s not comparable. We have never thought about these things.”

The driver’s bald head was as pale yellow as the bamboo leaves at sunset, and he seemed rather happy, the local road winding us under bluish-purple clouds, ostensibly toward Funehiki, and then as the driver mentioned a fine cherry-blossom-viewing spot (although the season was still too early), we turned onto National Highway 288.

Since he had been born in 1941, I asked him how he compared the dropping of the two atom bombs with the reactor accident, and he said, “There was a movie I saw as a child, a black-and-white movie, so vividly showing the ruins of Hiroshima and Bikini Island. Now, Koriyama is farther than the thirty-kilometer ring; in fact, it’s sixty; but if there’s a hydrogen explosion, I’m afraid that Koriyama may be in the forced evacuation zone. Having reached the age of seventy, if we’re told to evacuate, I said to my wife, where should we go, Sado or where? When I see the situation of evacuees, I don’t seem to be in a good condition! In Koriyama there are three evacuation centers, mainly from the forced evacuation ring around the reactor. Most people are in a hall called Big Palette, which can accommodate three thousand people. There’s also a baseball stadium which holds three or four hundred, and. .”

Night globes glowed in a roadside restaurant, and then at a gas station. We rolled across the Inasokamatsi River, then down through a cut tasseled with golden grass, a gray-green volcanic-shaped mountain projecting itself ahead upon the pale cloudy sky. An old man in a russet robe toiled slowly uphill toward his house, swaying from side to side. Presently we entered the municipality of Funehiki. The driver said, “You know Chernobyl? I watched on the news; there was a ninety-year-old woman who grows her own vegetables, lives alone, and gets sick occasionally but is basically fine.” How inspiring, I thought.

Turning away from the route that led to the famous limestone caves, he said, “Where we are going is about forty kilometers from the plant. If you stay on this road, you will go straight there,” at which the back of my neck prickled slightly. “If you pass that point up there, you approach the mountain and then you go down again.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“Once. It was a tour. At that time we never thought this could happen.”

That afternoon while we waited for the rain to stop, the interpreter and I had swallowed our Cold War — era potassium iodide tablets, courtesy of my friend Dave, who had purchased a bottle at some gun show. The bright yellow-green, crumbling pills were to be taken only in the event of fallout, said the label. (My tongue tingled for days and I got a rash; the interpreter remained unaffected.) In retrospect I am ashamed that we did not think to bring one along for our driver. Fortunately, the meter remained at 2.4.

We entered the town of Tokiwa and stopped at the shrine. The mask had fogged up my glasses so badly that I pulled it off, gratefully inhaling the chilly air. The interpreter and I ascended the stone stairs. Above the wooden-slatted offering box, the immense corn-hued tassel, the size and proportions of a girl-child’s skirt, barely swayed in the breeze, ferruled (if that is the word) by a tall hexagon engraved with the name of the person who had dedicated it. Climbing the last wooden steps in stockinged feet as tradition requires, I peered into the windows of the place and, as usual, saw mostly darkness, interrupted by the reflection of that tassel behind me and by indistinct golden gleamings deep within. My heart revolted at slipping the mask back on, but I did, descending toward the pines and clouds and down to the steep edge of this high place, down the decrepit stone steps, which might have been damaged by the earthquake. I could smell the pines.

Informing the driver that the dosimeter still indicated a safe amount of radiation, I asked whether he would be willing to take us farther.

“Sure,” he laughed. “I’ll take you to the point where you can’t go anymore.”

“The radio announces it every day,” he remarked. “For the past few days, this area has had a very low level.”

So we drove up the road toward Futaba, the pallid roofs of houses fading into the low oaks. “This area is close to the plant, but they say it is not just distance but also geography,” he explained. Suddenly we reached a yellow signboard, no more impressive than any sidewalk restaurant’s, whose red letters warned: DANGER: ENTRY IS RESTRICTED 10 KILOMETERS FROM HERE. We had entered the voluntary evacuation zone. From here on, the road was quite empty. The next village was virtually lightless, except for the yellow windows of three sidewalk vending machines from which no one had yet pulled the plugs. Another sign for Futaba and an indication that we were still on Highway 288 separated us from the following village. Now it had become nearly pitch dark, although I could infrequently make out the silhouettes of forest ridges.

I told the driver that this excursion was very interesting. He chuckled: “I am ready to cooperate as much as possible, because anyway I don’t have much longer to live.”

There came another winding stretch. Soon we would arrive at Miyako Oji (twenty kilometers from the reactor), beyond which rose a mountain that would, I hoped, protect us from beta particles and gamma rays. I inquired whether there might be any legend relative to Miyako Oji; the driver replied that there was not. “What’s popular in this vicinity is beetles for the kids. They produce them here.” As a matter of fact, the interpreter had once purchased a pet beetle for her sons (although whether or not it came from Miyako Oji she did not know); it failed to thrive, I am sorry to say. When we turned right at the junction for Inaki, it was quite dark. “Most of them are gone, I guess,” said the driver.

And so we came to the inner ring, where tall signs with black and red letters interrupted the road, the prefecture proclaiming that further travel was forbidden while the police merely announced that it was restricted. In the darkness beyond lurked a police riot bus, empty or not. Since there was nothing to see and the hazards (including perhaps arrest) were unknown, I could not in good conscience ask the driver and the interpreter to go any farther that night, brave though they were. We did take a spin through Miyako Oji, whose houses seemed intact but dark. A lonely white dog trotted up to the taxi, looking up at us hopefully; as we continued on our way it darted crazily back and forth. The driver remarked that the evacuation centers such as Big Palette did not allow any pets, which therefore had to be left behind. Should I have tried to take it to some animal shelter in Koriyama, if there were such a place? Who knew how contaminated the creature was?

“It’s the first time that I’ve seen this here,” said the driver. “It’s like a ghost town. About twenty years ago in Koriyama, on Christmas Eve a cable fell, and there was a blackout, so black! And this is the first time since then.”

As we began to drive away from the reactor I pulled my mask off and instantly tasted dust in my throat, which made me anxious, because what if the dosimeter were lying? It was all I had to go on, really.

The old driver said, “What’s the most scary around here is the wind that comes from the sea. That’s when the radiation comes. In summer, that’s when it comes.”

A quarter-hour later, at eight o’clock, the dosimeter clocked 2.5 millirems.

THEY DID IT FOR THE NATION

ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, a Sunday, which began chilly and breezy while the dosimeter displayed its predicted 2.6 millirems and the hotel television explained that the overflow trench for the contaminated reactor would soon itself overflow, we set out for the danger zone once more. As before, I wore my ball cap (a convenient resting place for airborne beta particles), my house-paint-spotted old raincoat (quite inappropriate for appearance-conscious Japan) whose virtues were its hood and its expendability — this magnificent accessory was intended to go over a disposable poncho whose sleeveless armholes I would seal with masking tape around the raincoat’s sleeves; beneath this was an optional sweater of polyester fleece, for the tsunami zone had been chilly; then came my fifteen-year-old long-sleeved shirt (just broken in; a shame to lose it, but anyhow I had worn it before for chemical experiments), and in the breast pocket of this lived my dosimeter; beneath this shirt I wore another lighter one. The idea was to pull on my yellow kitchen gloves at the last moment, taping them around the cuffs with masking tape; then came my old blue jeans and underpants, my grubby socks still soggy with tsunami scum, my late father’s old shoes, disposable shoe covers at the ready — and, of course, my respirator, guaranteed to filter out 99.97 percent of all particulate matter, although, since I had bought it at an American hardware store, the label advised me that misuse might cause injury or death.

I had brought a second set of all the exotic items for the interpreter (who in due course would inherit the dosimeter). Needless to say, the poncho, gloves, masking tape, and shoe covers had not graced my person so far on this adventure; all the other clothes I had been wearing unstintingly, day after day, since I had to suppose that everything I did not store in Tokyo might become contaminated, so why throw away more than I had to? Although I succeeded in showering every day except in Oshima, I doubt that I made a very professional show. The notebook I carried, a scarlet-spined yellow affair emblazoned with a pink-tutued ballerina who curtseyed from beneath a cloud of multicolored butterflies, might have been what tipped the scales, causing policemen to snicker softly the instant my back was turned. Never mind; even in former years, when I had been younger and slimmer and needed to dress up for interviews in my one and only business suit, my best achievement was a look of mild surprise on the interpreter’s face, accompanied by this encomium: “You look almost handsome!”

On last night’s drive to Miyako Oji we had brought with us our yellow kitchen gloves, respirators, et cetera, but the dosimeter persuaded us not to use them. Moreover, we both would have felt ashamed to protect ourselves so ostentatiously without doing likewise for the driver. In my American imaginings of this final visit to the hot zone I had envisioned a walk of some sort, probably on my own; any taxi driver would have stayed inside the vehicle, with the windows cranked up against beta particles. Just in case someone accompanied me, I brought double everything.

Now of course this does not excuse me from having forgotten the safety of any hypothetical third party; never mind the fact that a sane person might well decline to drive anywhere that such accoutrements were advisable; in short, last-minute logic (and decency) prohibited the interpreter and me from setting forth in any such dress, although we did bring them with us just in case.

And so we each wore a medium-quality surgical mask, purchased at a nursing supply store in San Francisco; we offered our new driver, whom I will introduce in a moment, a fresh mask of his own, but he was satisfied with the one he had. I wore my hat, raincoat (unzipped as long as we were in the car), heavy shirt, light shirt, underwear, jeans, socks, and shoes. Upon our return to Koriyama the yellow gloves would go on, the shoes would get wiped down with a damp cloth before permanent removal to a plastic bag, and then pretty much the rest of that day’s clothing, as well as the gloves, also got disposed of in a suitable place — contaminated presents for a contaminated town. The fancy respirators, the backpacks, and all the other usable items we gave away to an evacuee at Big Palette that night, before proceeding to the gymnasium for our radiation screening.

As it turned out, this day’s accrued dose would be no higher than the previous two Koriyama days: 0.4 millirems in twenty-four hours.³⁵ I flatter myself that prudence played a part in this result; I paid attention to wind direction as well as distance, and consulted the dosimeter every few minutes; still, we seem to have had two very lucky days (a statement I intend to retract should I come down with some cesium-characteristic cancer within the next few years). The interpreter later informed me that in the newspapers she had read that the maximum recorded radioactivity suffered by any inhabited place fell forty-odd kilometers north of the reactor: 16,020 microsieverts over twenty-one days, which worked out to seven millirems a day; at that rate it would have taken only sixty-six days to achieve my ceiling of five rems.³⁶

First we went to Big Palette. I hoped to find an evacuee who knew how to enter the inner ring without police interference. En route, the driver explained that Koriyama was “the Oriental Vienna,” an appellation I never would have imagined. My tongue was still tingling and stinging from the potassium iodide. The driver said, “Well, we have no direct impact from the reactor, but I don’t like the rumors.”

As soon as we stepped out of the taxi we spied people passing in and out of Big Palette. I stopped a youngish-looking woman who was carrying her granddaughter against her chest. The child and her mother were from Ohkuma, five kilometers from the reactor; the grandmother hailed from Kawauchi Village, right on the edge of the twenty-kilometer inner ring. It was to Kawauchi that we would go today.

The grandmother said, “We had been helping the victims since the twelfth,” the day after the earthquake and tsunami. “On the sixteenth, we ourselves were made to evacuate. It’s like I’m seeing a dream. The life is hard. My daughters are all living very close to the reactor, so they lost everything.”

She did not want to visit Kawauchi just then, and a man who was going there today preferred to organize his things first, so we hired the driver at the head of the long line of taxis that waited there; the driver said we must visit his company’s office first. I spoke against this, expecting as usual to be quashed by some higher-up, but there was nothing to it; his boss came out and inspected us, after which he and the driver worked out a price. I said that the journey might possibly take longer than our agreement arranged for, in which case I could pay more. The driver, unassuming to the point of shyness, appeared uninterested in these details.

We were still in central Koriyama when the meter went to 2.7. “Ehh!” cried the interpreter anxiously. Feeling a trifle nervous myself, I put on my second-best mask, the surgical one I had worn last night; so that now in that department I approximately resembled my two companions as we took Highway 95 toward Ono.

We twisted up through the yellow-green hills, the bamboos shining in the sun, a man working the soil; that wasn’t yet prohibited here, as it already was in Iitate Village, which lay forty kilometers northwest of the plant and hence outside both evacuation zones; it was said that the inhabitants of Iitate would soon have to evacuate.

I found myself checking the dosimeter more often than usual. The driver was silent. My upper lip sweated within the mask. Coming down into Ono, we saw some broken stone along the road edge which might have had nothing to do with the earthquake, and a few specks of snow on the mountainside. It seemed like such a beautiful place to go hill-wandering. The driver pointed out some nara trees (good for growing mushrooms, he said; a few days later, the news screen on the bullet train from Hiroshima to Tokyo announced that mushrooms in a certain zone near the reactor could no longer be harvested, having exceeded the legal radiation limit). Nearly everywhere I looked in Ono there were small, square garden plots where vegetables were coming in, in neat rows, young and green; were they poisonous? The sun was strangely warm on my wrists, or perhaps they were tingling from the potassium iodide. “They are farmers,” the driver remarked with satisfaction; and I knew that he too must have had rural origins.

We swung onto Highway 349, then left onto 36, toward Tomioka, which had been subject to forced evacuation. In the center of Tamura City (a valley paved with tiled houses) there were many lovingly manicured pines, and behind people’s hedges sometimes rose the irregularly phallic boulders so beloved of Japanese gardeners. The convenience stores had not closed. We left Tamura, which was, the driver informed us, a new conglomeration of small villages regathered for certain administrative benefits; I wondered whether the place would remain inhabited. A police car slowly rolled up the hill ahead of us on the quake-cracked road, the cruiser’s lights flashing. Then it turned around. “Maybe he’s too close to the radiation!” laughed the driver, and who can say he was not correct? For this is a story about things we can scarcely believe, let alone understand.

We stopped to chat with an old man in boots and waders and a fishing cap; across his shoulders he bore one of those long poles from which harvested rice is hung to dry. “Sorry,” said the interpreter, “I cannot understand his dialect.” She made out that the rice fields across the road were his; he owned a largish acreage of four tang, or, if you like, 1,200 tsubo. He said that the farmers could not sell their products now.

“Is it safe here?” I inquired.

“They don’t tell us that it’s safe.”

Bowing and thanking him, we returned to the taxi.

Here came a vehicle on the otherwise empty road; our driver asked the old lady at the wheel if we could get to Kawauchi. Politely covering her mouth all the while, she said, “You can go.” The meter remained at 2.7 millirems.

Now we paralleled the river, beyond whose far edge grew many slender-trunked nara trees; apparently they were Japanese oaks. I asked the driver to stop. Greenness was welling up in what had been until not long ago a winter forest. I had a strange, not quite eerie feeling. So beautiful, the green lichens on the boulders! In the cool shade of the cedar trees the ground was so thick with needle-leaves that my steps grew soundless. Sunlight came in low and green on the sides of the trees. An unknown bird whistled its two-toned call over and over. I would have liked to picnic sitting on one of these low fat boulders. Delighting in the cool wind at my back, whose degree of particulate contamination was of course unknown, I strolled across a little bridge toward the pinkish-gray nara trees, beyond which rose another wall of cedars. A stand of young green bamboos was growing beside me. Looking down into the jade stream with its white fans and ribbons of foam emerging from each mossy boulder-islet, I forgot where I was and for a moment removed my mask, which might have been useless anyhow.

We rolled along, and at the side of the road, not long after we had seen some wooden boxes which the driver said were employed for the collection of wild bees, a sandwich-board-type sign unimpressively announced: ENTRY RESTRICTED BY POLICE. And so we came into Kawauchi Village, ten kilometers from the inner ring. The houses were silent. The driver said, “They may have evacuated. This is no good.”

On the hillside just off the road rose a pleasant wooden house. Seeing an old man in wading boots performing some chore, I asked the driver to stop again, and the interpreter and I went out to introduce ourselves to Mr. Sato Yoshimi, who said, “I went to Koriyama to evacuate, but just returned today.”

“Why did you return?”

“I’ve been there at Big Palette for about a month, and I just had to look at my house. I’ll go back to Big Palette today.”

“What made you choose to move there?”

“People here were told, If you’re within twenty kilometers, you have to evacuate. If you’re within thirty kilometers, you might want to. So, to be on the safe side, this village was specified for evacuation.”

I did not completely understand this; but who precisely had specified the evacuation, and how voluntary it was, might not be something the broken-toothed old man cared to spell out. His white mask hung down between chin and neck.

“How did you experience the earthquake?”

“I was at the site,” he answered. “I was working at the Number Four Turbine. I’ve been working at the reactor for more than thirty years.”

“Was it a good job?”

“Well, before the accident I enjoyed it. You never imagined. .”

“And then what happened?”

“It was about 2:30. Within the building the tremor was terrible, and the lights started to fall. Lots of sand and dust — you couldn’t see where you were going. I was within the controlled area, where you have to wear protective gear specified by Tepco, and you have your own dosimeter.”

“Do you still have it?”

“I left it in the reactor building.”

“Did you see the tsunami?”

“I immediately evacuated before it came. From the Number Four building I went on foot with my colleagues. There was lots of water leaking from pipes, since the ground had sunk. You work in a team — six people. All of us evacuated together. There is an office four kilometers from there. We checked in there. When everyone had arrived, we were told to go wherever on our own responsibility.”

His employer was a subcontractor of Tepco, called Nito Resin. They were still paying him, he said; he had received last month’s salary.

“How long do you suppose you’ll be living at Big Palette?”

“I don’t know. It depends on the radiation here. Unless the restriction is lifted, I don’t think I can come back. Here it’s pretty low, 0.5 or 0.6 millisieverts.³⁷ My daughter is within the twenty-kilometer limit. So she and her mother went to see their home.³⁸ I think they can enter for a short time.”

A brown creek flowed beneath the cypresses at the edge of his steep lot. Across the road lay his garden: daikons, green onions, cabbage, long beans. I wish I could tell you whether anyone ought to have eaten what he was growing.

Bowing our goodbyes to him, we continued on down the road, while he, bending painfully there in the driveway, slowly returned to watering a plant with his turquoise plastic pitcher, while a young child cried inside his house, my dosimeter still pleasantly at 2.7. When we reached the fork we took the right-hand turn as he had advised, while the driver said, “Normally, reactor workers die at an early age, so I’m surprised, frankly, that he’s still alive. One of my friends was working there, and he wanted to retire. He opened a noodle shop and died very soon.”

“How old was he?”

“Forty-something.”

“Was it cancer?”

“I don’t know the details.”

This anecdote said more about the driver than it did about the reactor, or nuclear power. Anyhow, one person is a small sample. Passing more dry rice fields, my forehead burning and itching, perhaps from an insect bite, we passed two dogs running loose outside the Kawauchi municipal office and reached the inner ring, where a line of police stood in their blue vests with reflective yellow stripes, their white masks covering from their chins to the bridges of their noses and their white hats firm and straight over their eyes, their white-gloved hands open at their sides and their boots shining. They prohibited us from going further, so I had the taxi driver turn right and park a block away, on a street where locals drove in and out of an unmanned checkpoint as they pleased, lifting the flimsy barrier aside. These people were always in a hurry. Whenever the interpreter and I waved them down, they would always say, in violation of their famous Tohoku politeness, “No time!” Invariably, they were headed for Big Palette.

I strolled into the forbidden zone, just so I could say I had done it. The interpreter took a cautious step or two behind me, then stopped. The driver sat with the windows rolled up. Every time I looked at him, he anxiously started his engine. Should I have insisted that he continue into the involuntary evacuation zone? My dosimeter had not registered any recent increase; regarding gamma rays the situation seemed safe enough, and perhaps this story would have been more dramatic had I been pushier, but then again perhaps not, for what would we have seen but more empty houses, and then quake and tsunami damage, and then the reactor, which drone photographs in the newspaper made clear resembled any number of muddy construction sites? I think the driver would have done it if I had asked; as for my loyal, courageous interpreter, she said simply, “I will follow you.” Perhaps she and I should have suited up with respirators, yellow kitchen gloves, and all the rest of it, and then walked toward Plant Number One. Honestly, I lacked the ruthlessness to ask it of her. Or I could have set out by myself, leaving the two of them to wait for me there. Why didn’t I do that? Perhaps I was afraid and didn’t admit it to myself; but I believe I simply couldn’t see the point.

The birds were singing, the plants were growing, and the trees were coming into flower. It was very warm now. Moss grew on a wall, and in the deserted houses the curtains were all drawn. If you can, try to see those curtained houses and the shadows on their silver-ringed roof tiles, the blue flowers in someone’s backyard, which like the other lawns there still appeared decently trimmed, probably due to the coolness of the season. At the side of another house, a few potted houseplants had begun to wither, but the others still looked perfect. Perhaps more people had returned home from Big Palette than was generally imagined.

Behind an outer door, an inner sliding partition was wide open. We called and called, but no one answered. I informed the checkpoint police, since last night’s taxi driver had remarked that burglars had begun to take advantage of the evacuation.

In the shade of an old wooden house, several bicycles leaned neatly beside clean shovels. A line of sandbags, perhaps tsunami protection, followed the house around the corner.

What is there to say about this place, morning-shadowed and birdsonged, the meter at 2.7 millirems, the shadows of power wires gently dancing across the ribbed concrete facade of a workshop, a small black beetle crawling on a sandbag?

From the main checkpoint a bus emerged, then a truck, then three cars, the police waving them all through with their white-gloved hands before they reclosed the barrier and these vehicles all headed back in the direction of Koriyama. Then a man on a motorcycle approached them from our side.

“Unless your purpose is very strong I cannot allow you,” a policeman told him.

“But I have a brother inside. Can I go another way?”

“You may be able to advance and go a little farther,” said the policeman.

So the motorcyclist proceeded to the unmanned checkpoint that the interpreter and I had breached. Later the taxi driver, who had spoken with him, remarked that this fellow had complained of a burning, tingling sensation, which of course is one of the first symptoms of massive radiation exposure. Perhaps it was psychosomatic, or he had some sort of allergic reaction; nobody we asked in Koriyama, even at Big Palette, had heard of anybody getting radiation sickness.

Then the driver summoned us. He had discovered an actual inhabitant: bearded and graying, with a very red workingman’s face, in a blue slicker and cap; he must have been about fifty. He wore green gloves and a mask and green boots. The metal grating of the Showa Shell service station was only half raised. He stooped just outside, hosing down a patch of pavement. He worked unceasingly while he spoke with us. He would not allow us into his house next door, in whose second-story window the drapes parted for an instant and a lovely feminine hand flickered, folding a towel over the curtain rod; this wife or daughter must have been doing laundry indoors. The drapes closed again. The workingman said, “This is the stay-at-home area. This is my area. We’ll leave soon. There’s a cat we left to stay inside, and we felt so sad not to let it out. I’m the head of the fire department here, so I come back every day, and every day I check the radiation level at the village office. Today is 0.38 millisieverts. On the seventeenth, everyone evacuated. .”³⁹He worked on, never stopping until I made him a present of my best respirator, at which point he paused to bow deeply, then hurried back to work.

With the cool wind still at my back and the sound of the brook louder than almost anything else, I inspected a very young bird on the grass, rust on a guardrail, manicured pines, then gazed over blank empty pavement. I went up one more driveway and rang the bell. The chimes echoed on and on; the door was locked.

For some reason, what I remember most is the bicycles leaning neatly up against the empty houses that shaded them.

Every time I looked at him, the driver eagerly started the engine. He reminded me of the forlorn boy who must stand on the snowy sidewalk just outside the hot springs near Sendai, ready to bow if any guest comes in. Finally I asked how he was. “I’m not really concerned,” he said, “but somehow I feel uneasy.”

“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.”