Viruses and Radioactivity
Like most everybody else, I’m staying home today, avoiding my fellow humans like the plague.
Meanwhile, many working journalists continue their daily run into the fray to cover the Covid-19 story.
I’m a journalist as well, but I’m taking a backseat on this one.
As trained news hounds, we’ve been bred to instinctively barrel inside the flames to cover the latest hotel-lobby fire.
This time, I’m standing out on the sidewalk, along with all the other lookie-loos, munching on popcorn, watching the entire structure burn to the ground.
It wasn’t always this way.
Years ago, while working a foreign correspondent covering Japan, I was jettisoned into Ground Zero of another major environmental disaster and its resulting public panic.
In 2011, a tsunami ravaged the western shores of the island nation, causing a major meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The government was evacuating everyone within an 20-mile area.
They called it the “No Go” Zone.
Some 50,000 residents quickly fled, looking like the Dust-Bowlers of Steinbeck’s novel, their cars and trucks loaded with possessions.
This was Landscape Distancing.
Social-distancing squared.
I was in Tokyo at the time, holed up inside my hotel room, staring into my computer screen 18 hours a day.
I remember a call to editors back home, those brave decision-makers thousands of miles from any danger.
“So, Glionna,” one said. “How soon do you think you can get inside the No Go Zone?”
I looked at my phone and thought, “What part of no go don’t you understand?”
“I’m working on it,” I said.
A day later, I headed north to the city of Sendai, just outside the toxic evacuation area, where I met up with friend and journalism colleague Steve Herman from my home-base of Seoul.
We agreed to team up and split expenses. Steve was a radio reporter for Voice of America. I was a print guy. We could stay out of each other’s way.
Our driver was named Hiro, a quiet lad who didn’t speak much English, our translator a perky 22-year-old college student named Shiho.
One morning, we all headed into The Zone, four members of this new un-captained ship of fools, embarking on a misguided tour of some of Japan’s nuclear ghost towns.
In the village of Minamisoma, just down the road from the damaged plant, we met Hoshi Jyunichu, a 46-year-old father of two who was among a few stubborn holdouts.
“I was born here; I don’t want to give up this town,” he insisted. “And so I’m staying.”
In the nearby town of Nami, Shiho and I danced in the middle of the desolate town square. I felt like a Martian explorer.
We drove out of the zone and filed our stories. My piece ran in Page One.
The next morning, I walked into Steve’s hotel room to see if he had any ideas for the day’s coverage.
“Well,” he said, “we’re certainly poised to do some good reporting today.”
Indeed we were.
Then an idea hit me like a brick that had tumbled from a third-floor balcony.
“Let’s drive toward the reactor,” I said. “Just see how close we get.”
In the weeks since the tsunami had destroyed much of Fukushima’s emergency cooling system, people as far away as California had fretted over full nuclear meltdown at the plant 155 miles north of Tokyo.
Explosions in four of Fukushima’s six reactors spewed dangerous radioactive isotopes of iodine, cesium and strontium, which can cause bone cancer and leukemia.
On this fine day, I proposed, we’d enter a post-apocalyptic landscape in search of a decades-old plant that was now sick and dying. And we’d report the hell out if it.
Steve is a veteran journalist who knows a good story.
“Let’s do it.”
Shiho wasn’t so sure.
“I don’t want to go,” she said. “I want to protect my ovaries. I want kids some day.”
We decided to leave her behind.
In a pinch, Hiro could be pressed into translating, if we found anyone to interview. He had spunk. On one trip to the zone he’d worn a shirt that read, “It is a good day to die.”
I called a source, a nuclear physicist who wrote the book on exposure danger.
He said the only way we’d be hurt or killed was if there was “an incident” (read meltdown) while we were in the area. Otherwise, we’d only absorb the amount of radiation we’d get from taking a transatlantic flight.
To be safe, he loaned me a dosimeter which, once set at zero, would calculate our accumulated radiation exposure. “When it hits 15,” he said, “turn around and drive like hell.”
Then Shiho changed her mind.
She didn’t want to miss out on any adventure, even one as hopelessly and dangerously unhinged as this.
I promised her that I’d keep a close eye on the dosemeter, in the hope of helping preserve her family’s future generations.
She looked at me like I was proposing a leap off a precipice and into the Grand Canyon, which of course I was.
Inside the zone, the roads were empty. Along the way, we encountered two separate Japanese government roadblocks.
“What the hell did we think we were we doing?” the officials demanded, in a super-polite Japanese way.
But old Steve is a quick thinker.
As a Voice of America employee, he had a U.S. Government ID, which he waved out the window to the incredulous soldiers.
“We’re on our way to meet the U.S. Marines on the beach,” he lied.
Amazingly, on two occasions, the military men stepped aside and let us pass.
Finally, we neared our destination.
Here’s how I led my story:
“FUTABA, Japan — The radiation gauge beeped, signaling that isotopes were in the atmosphere.
As our SUV followed a line of electricity towers marching across deserted farmland, we made an agreement: If the dosimeter hit 15, we’d turn around. The device inched up to 12, its faint beep seeming more like a scream.
Each time, edgily, we called out the number.
Thirteen.
The ventilation was off and the windows were sealed tight, even though the afternoon was warm. With our heads covered and our mouths sheathed in breathing masks, the SUV became a sauna as we bumped along roads with cracks as wide as a man’s head.
The minutes ticked by.
Fourteen.
Miles past a police checkpoint, we finally saw it. In Japanese and English, a large blue sign. Fukushima, the place where no one else in the world wanted to be.
We — two journalists, an interpreter and a driver — wanted to see the villain at the center of Japan’s nuclear nightmare.”
We traveled into the hot zone with questions. What did it look like? Smell like? Feel like?
So far, the few pictures had come from aerial fly-bys that showed smoking reactors in a soulless industrial setting.
We mostly stayed inside the vehicle, but once in a while, we opened a window, or briefly jumped out to take a picture.
And we listened.
Silence.
They say that following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the birds stopped singing. At Fukushima, we didn’t hear birds, or anything else. No children shouting, no car horns honking, not even the waves on the too-distant shore. Just the wind.
Fukushima translates as “fortunate isle,” and it once signified purity, used to brand fruit and vegetables.
Now it carried the whiff of Paradise Lost.
Finally, we saw the rounded reactors on the near horizon.
Somewhere nearby countless workers were scrambling to bring the damaged reactors under control.
But For us those efforts were as invisible as the nuclear threat itself.
Suddenly, as we approached the main gate, security guards were upon us, two figures who’d seemingly stepped out of “Star Wars,” menacing in their dual-intake respirator masks and head-to-toe white hazmat gear.
Peering into the SUV, expressions obscured, they shook their heads as they waved us off, refusing to answer questions, repeating the dismissive circular hand motion for a U-turn.
They noted our license plate as we turned around and slowly embarked along a side road, briefly trailed by guards in another vehicle.
A hundred yards away, several mysterious towers shone white in the afternoon sunlight, hiding their secrets. It was difficult to get a bead on the place; trees seemed to have been placed strategically to prevent a full-on view of things.
To the side, we saw a sign posted by the nuclear plant’s safety committee. It carried an announcement, the irony of the century:
“This month’s safety slogan: Make sure to check everything and do the risk assessment. The goal is zero disasters for this year.”
After 15 minutes, the dosimeter dinged 15.
It was time to go.
In the end, we didn’t merely leave the plant; we fled.
On the rise of a hill, we looked back one last time, perhaps to capture the scene of what the end of the world might look like.
We saw nothing except the trees that sheltered the reactor's smoldering ruins from prying eyes like ours.
Today, from my wife’s condo in Northern California, I look out the window at trees as gorgeously green as the ones outside Fukushima.
Along with their grace and beauty, they shield my eyes from the Armageddon at large.
This time, it's not nuclear fallout, but the panicked virus-induced toilet paper hoarding and shotgun-buying going on all around me.
Yeah, I think I’ll sit this one out.
Popcorn anyone?