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

ENDNOTES

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.

The author getting radiation screening in Koriyama following his second visit to the hot zone.