Authors: Gretel Ehrlich
* * *
Breakfast. “A long curry.” That’s what I call it, because the hot red curry Abyss-san made lasts all week and is our breakfast as well as our dinner. He announced to us when we arrived that he would no longer eat out at restaurants because they bought food from the cheapest sources, food grown in the highly radiated Fukushima Prefecture. At his mountain hideaway we drink hot tea made with Evian water and eat only vegetables and fruit grown in Hokkaido.
On January first, Wakamizu (
wake
= young;
mizu
= water),
the first water drawn is said to have magical powers to maintain health and prolong life. But what of the waters of Fukushima, Miyagi, or Iwate? Will anyone drink it? In a bumptious effort to show how safe the new decontamination process at Daiichi is, a politician, Yasushiro Sonoda, drank a glass of water collected from the puddles under one of the damaged reactors at Daiichi.
Abyss-san lays the dosimeter on the ground by his stream. It reads 2.01 microseiverts. Not too bad, but not great. He looks up: “It’s important that radiation readings continue and are publicized so that people know what to eat and drink and where to live.”
In his unheated kitchen he cooks on a single gas burner. Every night we arrive back in the mountains exhausted and hungry. He heats up the huge pot of curry and we’re grateful. The big
donburi
bowls in which it’s served are frigid. We crouch together on the floor by the small woodstove; we use the outhouse, the toilet seat now wrapped with blue cloth to keep our bums warm. From that perch we track Orion’s belt rising. Snow falls. Red curry heats us from the inside out. Burning logs warm our skin.
Sauté cloves, bay leaves, fenugreek, chili peppers, cardamom, curry leaf, and garlic in mustard oil.
Add sliced onion, turmeric, coriander, and cumin.
Add chopped potatoes and carrots, then tomatoes.
Rinse China beans and lentils, then add in with salt.
Add enough water to cover. Cover and cook for one hour or more, or until beans are soft.
Make an equally large pot of rice with wheat berries.
Fry Aju hing seeds and add to the curry at the end. Serve.
Eat with gratitude.
Today the government and TEPCO announce that they have achieved “cold shutdown,” meaning that the coolant water must remain under 100 degrees. For now, the “decay heat” has decreased enough to be considered stable. But it takes over two years for the water in a spent fuel pool to cool enough for transfer to storage.
Despite the “stable” temperatures, 11,870 gallons of highly radioactive water leaked from a crack in the desalination unit at Fukushima Daiichi through a gutter into the ocean. The water contained cesium-134 and-137, exceeding the government limits by 267 and 322 times, respectively. Asahi News reported that the water may have contained one million times as much radioactive strontium as the government limit. Dosimeters are now available at DVD rental stores.
Koyu Abe, a Zen Buddhist priest, continues to invite people to dump contaminated soil from their gardens onto the hill behind his temple near Fukushima City. The autumn rice crop may have to be abandoned. Young people are leaving family farms and moving to the city. Thirty-three football fields’ worth of contaminated dirt from the no/go zone is looking for a home.
There are only eight nuclear power plants in Japan now operating at the time of this writing. Antinuclear protestors who man the three tents outside the ministry buildings in Tokyo, where we were plied with tea and cookies on a very cold day, say they won’t leave until every nuclear power plant has been shut down.
In the United States, the debate over whether to proceed with
new nuclear power plants continues. Germany is phasing out all nuclear power, but buying coal from Czechoslovakia, thereby pushing the burden of carbon and methylmercury contamination onto a poorer country.
The Japanese government has passed a law setting age limits on the remaining nuclear power plants. The Institute of Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety in France estimated that between March and mid-July, 27.1 petabecquerels of cesium-137 leaked into the Pacific Ocean, the greatest amount known to have been released from a single episode. (A petabecquerel is a million billion becquerels.)
The decontamination of towns like Iitate and Minamisoma just outside the exclusion zone gets under way. The cleanup contracts are big business: 40 billion yen is being allocated to Minamisoma alone. Such contracts are deemed a scam, part of the cozy ties between government and the nuclear industry. The workers are uneducated about radiation, questioning as they work whether to remove five or ten centimeters of contaminated soil.
“The Japanese nuclear industry is run so that the more you fail, the more money you receive,” said Kiyoshi Sakurai, a nuclear power researcher.
December 18
Each temporary house group here has a meeting room and social area. Ours is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Today there were two kids playing. There are kids’ books and toys there. It will be Christmas next week. Sometimes we have gatherings and talk in the evenings. The Quilt Club in America offered to send blankets to Kuwagasaki and somebody from the local quilting group gratefully accepted. We received these quilts, filled with hearts and thoughts. Thank you so much! They were shared and given to people in the temp houses and everyone was thrilled. I didn’t know blankets could be this warm.
The local quilter’s daughter studies music in Paris right now, and she translates my blog into English to share with a Parisian aid organization. She sponsored a charity concert to donate the proceedings to an aid group in Japan. The bond of music spreads from all corners of the world to our region.
On the 13th, Gretel-san, an American writer, came to visit us once again in Kuwagasaki. We first met in June when we were unloading our catch at the Miyako fish market, and this time she came back to talk to us at our newly built prefab shed on the other side of the bay. Thank you for coming all this way and I hope we meet again.
The ties between people. The bonds we share.
I would like to continue spreading information through my blog to show how Tohoku will rebuild itself. We are grateful to all those who have helped.
December 19
Today was the last day of abalone fishing. Freezing morning! The wooden plank on the boat had frozen over with a thick layer of ice. The sea temperature is warmer, so sticking your hand into the water actually warms you up, but once you take your hand out, your body temperature drops again.
Some waves today, and only small abalone. We were able to get the necessary 130, but weight-wise they were not what we had hoped for. Once the abalone are taken to market they are separated between 1st and 2nd class, and the skinny ones get sent back to the sea.
This year’s abalone season was over in three hunts.
Urchins were cancelled this year. We thought abalone season might be stopped too, but it wasn’t. Next year, between May and August, I hope we’ll be able to get urchins again.
December 20
Snow today.
Sea cucumber season has ended and we won’t be using the small boats anymore. Tomorrow it may be −5 degrees C—23°F—a cold morning. The waves may get rough too.
December 28
Today all temporary houses in Iwate Prefecture received oil heaters for the winter, plus a
kotatsu
table, an electric carpet, an oil stove, and a fan heater.
It’s been 292 days since the disaster. Many things have happened to us since then, but somehow we have made it this far with the help of others.
Thank you so much. We will keep working hard toward rebuilding.
The ocean is heavy. As the planet took shape, water came from inside the earth. Our litany of natural disasters is nothing compared with the eruptions and earthquakes of the early earth, when the temperature fell to 212 degrees below zero and spewing water vapor condensed into oceans as we know them today.
Ocean bites and butts. Oceans were made from water squeezed out of primordial earth. Later in the making of Earth, water-rich protoplanets crashed here, spilling more liquid.
Morning star—evening star. We live between them, rocking. A rag of cloud keeps wiping away the “I.” Drowning, a tiny eye surfaces to take a last look at the ruined earth, at human excesses and defects, and its genius. An ear lifts and hears music.
Water slap, then,
down
. Even underwater I try to see:
Is the abyss dark or fed by fire?
I hold a cracked tea bowl in my mind. It is lopsided, beautiful, spilling. The chilled depths into which I slide break open like doors. Abyss-san says, “
You have to be alive to die
.”
Every day we head down the mountain and ply the ruined coast, trying to understand “the void.” Our
mikan
—tangerines, in season at this time of year—roll around in the back of the van like little suns.
Snow falls on sun. Steep mountains shoulder clouds, but the storm passes and the winged rafts pull apart and head out to sea. We have the winter solstice on our minds, having gotten past the lunar eclipse, continual earthquakes, and the typhoon; then it will be a new year.
If only the
void
was a shape we could hold in our hands and inspect, turning it over and over until we understood that it is anything but an abandoned warehouse of a world. Quite the opposite: it includes everything that is here. Under us and inside are stochastic events we don’t even see: the basaltic lava that flows continuously from undersea rifts; the Kuroshio—Japan’s “black current”—warm and northward-flowing, slamming into the cold Bering Sea and spinning counterclockwise; the heaving mantle material pushing the old seafloor aside; the recycling of the lithosphere’s slabs into Earth’s molten mantle; and the heaving up again.
Death, birth, and renewal are part of Japan’s geologic history as well as its cultural sensibility. Every twenty years, the Shinto temples at Ise are torn down completely and rebuilt, exactly as they were. But the pain of loss is excruciatingly real. Who doesn’t struggle to come to terms with life’s brevity?
A dream resurfaces: the house where I’m sleeping is shaken
hard by a quake, and falls from a cliff. I’m inside. My last view out the window is of a tornado whirling toward me. (Why just one natural disaster per dream, when you can have two?) Hitting bottom, my mind is alert, but I know I’m a ghost, walking with no legs.
Then the van rolls down toward the coast. It lurches and leans. Ahead, winter sun shines on torn water; on crumpled water gates; on remnants—razed houses, grieving households, homeless dogs.
Sun shines on the lonely.
There’s sun on red pine islets, on wrecked squid boats whose attractor lights hang like bells with no clappers. Sun on the unlit tunnels through which we hurdle, mountain after mountain, the hooded light at the end saying, “Come, come.”
Sun on tangled fishing gear, on the eclipsed moons of black buoys fallen upward from sea to earth.
Sun on snow on sun. On collapsed waves. On bare seafloor. On seawater warmer than air. Faint warmth.
Limpid water-light too thin to hold anything.
* * *
One last swing up a quake-roughened road that hugs the coast, some parts barely navigable. A skiff of snow frosts the high-chambered forest of cedars, and waves shatter on cliffs. Earlier, Kikuchi-san, “the Swimmer,” called. We find him on the spot where his family house stood near the water, its footings still marking the layout of rooms. He waves us to a stop and speaks excitedly:
“We just found out that the government will subsidize us for 90 percent of the cost of a fishing boat to replace the ones we lost. I’ve already picked one out. It’s not new, and it needs repairs. I’m going to name it
Rokufukumaru
, a name passed
down through three generations. From my grandfather to me. It means Six Happiness, or happiness
times
six. You asked before about hope. There’s no such thing as hope … At least until we get back on our feet again. But I have a boat coming in the spring …”
Traveling south, we enter a blizzard, then the lid of snow lifts as we come into broadening valleys. Thirty hawks descend in a field, fifty snow geese in another. In the samurai town of Tono, Isamu Tatsuno, the founder of the outdoor gear company Montbell, has bought land and built a school in what he says will be “a completely green compound, with gardens, wind and solar energy.”
Abyss-san says, “One person can do so much good, but the government lies to its people. They are now selling toxic rice from Fukushima Prefecture to developing countries. It’s shameful.” We keep rolling.
The dosimeter on the console between us reads 0.12.
Millions of dollars of tsunami relief money have been used to support Japan’s whaling industry instead of going to refugees. The government is accused by a journalist of “skimming over troublesome truths.” The mandate to kill all the animals left behind in the no/go zone is rescinded, but the paperwork to gain entry for the rescues is so complex, one wonders if anyone will wade through it in time to save lives.
The Nuclear Commission says Fukushima Daiichi was unprepared for an emergency of any kind. People who were evacuated from the area around the power plant are calling themselves the “new
hibakusha
.” Rice straw stands in mowed fields like small men in skirts. Rain squalls skip across fields. In Matsuo Bashō’s time, a straw cape shielded wandering poet/priests from rain. The itinerant priests I saw in June have ended their peregrinations.
Then the rounded head of the Kitakami River shows itself, where it makes a hard bend and goes east to Ishinomaki. Lumberyards line the narrow lane to Shounji Temple. Alone, I go up on the bank where children died, where ghosts clung to Masumi’s back, where the water is aquamarine, and the reeds on both banks are brown stalks clacking together in the breeze.
Two men in a tiny rubber raft ply the reeds, poking the mud with a long stick. Even now, there are thousands of people still missing. Snow geese litter rice fields. A yellow police car creeps slowly down the road, searching for the dead.