The Best American Travel Writing 2016

by Bill Bryson

  During my visit, Kida promised me an excursion with a scintillation counter, and so the next day his deputy, Kanari Takahiro, came to collect me. This young man might have been a little cynical, since he referred to nuclear-mitigation efforts as “casual countermeasures.” I liked him for that.

  In Iwaki, “we have never felt the imminent desperate situation,” he said. “In fact, my parents returned home in only two weeks. I myself couldn’t flee since I am a civil servant.”

  “Around here, do people tell any jokes about radiation?” I asked.

  “The radiation level is not high enough to create any jokes.”

  “Are you sad not to eat the local fish?”

  “I don’t care. Whatever fish, anywhere it comes from . . .”

  The scintillation counter (which is to say an Aloka TCS-172B gamma-survey meter) cost about 100,000 yen. As the technical name implied, it measured only gamma waves, like my dosimeter. Kanari said that its operation was “not difficult.” The decontamination procedure he described was this: measure radiation; scrape up surface soil and cut tree branches as needed; place the dirt and wood in a bag.

  In Iwaki we met a manager and a construction boss. They wore hardhats, work jackets with white belts, and baggy pants tucked into calf-length rubber boots. When I asked whether it was a union job, they curtly replied that it was not. I told them they were heroes. Reducing radioactivity by half, as they were doing, was better than nothing, and anyhow they were endangering themselves. The work was all paid for by the central government, they told me.

  They said the decontamination workers in Iwaki were exposed to about 4.5 microsieverts a day, which works out to 1.64 millisieverts a year, while the poor souls who were trying to ice away No. 1 were getting up to 40 millisieverts a year. The manager and the boss had to think about their own dose; though they both wore dosimeters, they never checked them. “The radiation level is so low here that we are not worried,” one said.

  I traveled with them to Hisanohama, about 16 kilometers north of the Iwaki city center, where a traditional Japanese-style house was being decontaminated. I asked Kanari to test things. In the yard, a bag of waste that a worker was filling emitted 0.3 microsieverts per hour. Another bag registered 0.26.

  “What happens to these bags?” I asked.

  “We remove them and put them in temporary storage for three years,” the manager answered.

  “Temporary storage” turned out to mean, for instance, those fields all around Iwaki with the black bags.

  “Then what?” I asked.

  He smiled, laughed, shrugged. Then he explained: “Unlike the United States, where there are rules, here we make up the rules.”

  I had Kanari test a potted houseplant: 0.14 microsieverts; the construction boss’s boot: 0.11; a dirt berm behind the house: 0.33; a rain channel in the sloping concrete driveway: a surprisingly low 0.16; the drainpipe: 0.49. That last reading was not so good; it meant 4.29 millisieverts per year.

  I pointed to the pipe and asked him: “How can you decontaminate it?”

  “Structurally speaking, unless you break it, it’s rather difficult. We must see what the property owner says.” The two decontamination men agreed that cesium generally went about five centimeters into the ground. We measured two black bags side by side: 0.35 and 0.38 microsieverts. Across the highway was a field of vegetables. I asked Kanari to read the crops for me, but he said: “The scintillation meter measures only the air, not the thing.” All the same, he did as I requested: 0.13 microsieverts away from the ground, 0.18 close to the ground, near a napa cabbage.

  We drove to a nearby town called Ohisa. There were some heavy blackish-green tarps decorated by a DO NOT ENTER sign. The air read 0.17 about two meters from the sign. This was about four times more radioactive than downtown Iwaki. There was a forest, but Kanari was reluctant to measure it, since the municipality’s only concern was to decontaminate places where people actually lived. I finally coaxed him into a snowy bamboo grove behind a field at the edge of a mountain. We all listened to the sounds of that lovely bamboo, which resembled birdsongs or windy hollow gurglings. The forest read 0.43 microsieverts per hour, nearly four times the goal of 1 millisievert per year. (Kida of course had said that 0.5 microsieverts per hour would be acceptable to him, so he might not have minded this place.) If all went perfectly from here on out, it would take at least 60 years to get the radiation from cesium-137 in the forest to the target level. But the government would do nothing about this, since, as Kanari told me sadly, the forest is “endless.” Besides, he said, “This is not the place where people often go.”

  As we came closer to the restricted zone, we began to see black bags; it was disgusting how they went on and on. “Temporary storage,” Kanari remarked. “Once the intermediate disposal site is ready, they’ll move there.”

  “Where will that be?” I asked.

  “Well, we hope there will be such a place, but none of us wants it near us,” he replied.

  We cruised up Highway 6 and came to Tomioka. I had to give Kanari directions. From his expression, it seemed he might have been having second thoughts. At the border of the exclusion zone was a checkpoint where the police stood watch over a double lane of traffic cones. When I asked him to pull over near an abandoned pachinko parlor, he kept the engine running. Was he anxious, or did he simply wish to get back to work?

  Right by the pachinko parlor his scintillation counter read 4.2 microsieverts per hour—about 10 times the level of that mildly dangerous drainpipe in Hisanohama. At a nearby house with yellow DANGER tape around it, the base of a drainpipe registered 22.1 microsieverts per hour. The daily dose would be 530.4 microsieverts; the yearly dose, 193.6 millisieverts. A little perilous, I’d say. The grassy field was a cool 7.5 microsieverts per hour—65.7 millisieverts per year—while the main highway on which the decontamination trucks kept raising dust was only 3.72 per hour, which still comes to 32 times the recommended annual dose. After 15 minutes, my dosimeter had gained its own microsievert, which it normally did only once a day, and Kanari wanted to get out of there. So we sped back, to the place where we eat whatever is put in front of us.

  For me, Tomioka, whose pre-accident population had been between 10,000 and 16,000, resembled the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, in that each time I returned to it I felt less safe, because each time I knew more and saw more.

  There was plentiful vehicle traffic, to be sure—TEPCO workers, mostly, who queued up at the police checkpoint where the exclusion zone began, or dug with shovels, paused, then dragged picks and rakes across gravel, decontaminating. But the rest was quiet enough. I often tasted metal in my mouth there; I don’t know why. The first time I visited, days before my excursion with Kanari, I walked past closed garages, a shuttered sliding door, forsaken shells of buildings. On one trip, I entered a garment store where some of the forms lay cast down. The rest were still standing, eerie silhouettes of headless, legless, armless women; a vacuum cleaner had fallen over on its side. All around were dead weeds, tall and half-frozen, outspreading lace-tipped finger stalks, projecting complex and lovely shadows on the white walls of silent houses whose curtains were neatly drawn. Grass rose up on the sides of the buildings, and golden weeds bent before crumpled blinds. Behind a fence, metal banged on metal. The banging went on and on like a telegraph.

  In the city center, the streetlights glowed even in the middle of the day, probably to deter theft, of which there was, apparently, a great deal. Over the whole of Tomioka rang an amplified recorded voice, evidently a young woman’s, but distorted and metallic. She reminded the workers not to spread radioactivity; they should dispose of their protective gear at the screening place on their way home. She said, “If you incinerate something or use incense, be careful not to start a fire,” and she warned the former inhabitants, crackling, “For temporary-housing people, make sure to kill the breaker before you leave, and lock the door to prevent thieves.”

  The forbidden zone’s current boundary was marked by large, narrow
signboards, which said, as rendered in my interpreter’s rather beautiful English:

  TRANSPORTATION IS NOW BEING RESTRICTED.

  AHEAD OF HERE IS A “DIFFICULT TO RETURN ZONE.”

  SO ROAD CLOSED.

  The signs were flanked by traffic cones, with knee-high metal railings behind, which were low enough that a scofflaw such as I might step over them to enter the forbidden zone. That is what I did, I confess, but only for a moment or two on that occasion.

  On that first visit I thought that Tomioka appeared only a little shabby—not really, as my interpreter opined, abandoned; weeds could have done much worse in three years. But after an hour I checked the dosimeter and saw that it had already registered another microsievert. Within a single hour I had received three times as much radiation as I had in the previous 24 hours. The dosage in Tomioka, in other words, was potentially 72 times greater than in Iwaki.

  I cannot tell you all that I wish to about the quiet horror of the place, much less of its sadness, but I ask you to imagine yourself looking at a certain weed-grown wooden residence with unswept snow on the front porch as the interpreter points and says: “This must have been a very nice house. The owner must have been very proud.”

  “I’m not worried about any thieves,” Endo Kazuhiro said as we drove to his old house, “since my home is not gorgeous.” This former resident of Tomioka was now the head of a residents’ association in an Iwaki suburb. Both of his parents had been born in Iwaki. About his house, he said: “I wish the thieves would clean it up! I was born there. I’m the fourth generation—more than a hundred years, almost two hundred.”

  “When did you last visit?”

  “I was there last year, in summer. I only went to visit my ancestors’ tombs.”

  In his childhood, he said, the kids played kick the can and hide-and-seek. “We waded in the river. There were wild boars and foxes—also raccoons, although we didn’t see them so often. Now most of the humans are gone, so the animals might be more rampant.”

  “You don’t think they die from radiation?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So they’re stronger in that way than humans?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know. There are some abandoned pets . . .”

  “Based on your experience in the field, is decontamination effective?”

  “Not at all! It’s the most wasteful, useless activity.”

  “Who’s making the money?”

  “General contractors from Tokyo City and this prefecture.”

  “What do you think about nuclear power nowadays?”

  “At this stage, I’m against it, because the response to the accident has been so poor. If the government cares to restart any of these nuclear plants, they’d better do a much better job.”

  Endo took me to his house. “But it’s overgrown now,” he warned, “not really presentable.” Over the snow-covered road, the brassy female voice roared about protective gear. He showed me his garden, saying, “The bamboo grew! It’s a forest! Three years ago there wasn’t any.” Within the dankness of his former home, rat droppings speckled shoes, boots, a fan, a vacuum cleaner, shelves, and chairs. Everything had been tipped and tilted by the earthquake into a waist-high jumble. He did not invite me in, and anyhow I saw no point in further trawling through that melancholy disorder, so I took a photograph or two, and then he closed the door.

  “When we were told to evacuate, everyone thought we could come back in a few days, so we didn’t take so many things. Residents are allowed to visit for six hours, and only during the daytime.” The Endos had taken their bank book and family portraits. His wife had been back only once. As he put it, “she prefers not to see this.”

  Endo was now 62. The accident had occurred when he was 60. “I wanted to be a subsistence rice farmer in my retirement,” he said. “Right here by the road, this was my field, three hundred tsubo. Elsewhere I had two other rice fields; one of them was near a pond. Well, that was my dream. The house is contaminated with radioactivity. Once the location for the waste site has been established, we will demolish the house. Owners are compensated in proportion to tsunami and earthquake damage. My house is less than half collapsed, so I must take care of the demolition myself. It would have been better if it had collapsed.”

  There he stood with his cap tilted upward on his forehead, staring at the wisteria whose creepers aimed at him, bullwhips frozen mid-crack. I wondered whether he felt any impulse to fight them. The amplified woman’s voice roared and echoed. He looked at his house. “Soon the wisteria will crush it,” he said, almost smiling.

  One Sunday afternoon in Iwaki, an orator in dark clothes stood, raising his voice, fanning and chopping the air, leaning on the podium, waving, circling, nodding. About 300 people listened to him in the auditorium of the sixth floor of a department-store tower (which also contained the Iwaki city library). There were far more men than women. Few wore suits, for this event had been organized by a national railway union. There was loud applause, and a few listeners raised cameras over their heads to record each speech. One man clambered up a small painter’s ladder for a better angle.

  A farmer from near Koriyama was speaking. “There is no place for Fukushima people to throw their anger against,” he said. “We feel the administration has abandoned us. In my dairy farm I cannot feed my cows with my own grass. It is forbidden. The grass, the hay, and the compost are contaminated with cesium. They are just sitting there. Finally the city of Iwaki claimed to clean them but just moved them from one place to another. The cows are having more difficult births.”

  A lady in black said, “In the temporary housing where I used to live, in Namie, in two years, out of twenty residents, three died.” Another woman added, “Those who make the decisions are not affected by radiation because they live in Tokyo.”

  After the speeches, the protesters went out to the street for a parade. There were whistles, drums, chants, banners of pink and yellow and blue and crimson. Some of the marchers were almost ecstatic as they banged their drums or raised their clenched fists; others shyly or listlessly touched their hands together.

  A banner said: STOP ALL NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS. A banner said: 3–11 ANTINUCLEAR FUKUSHIMA ACTION. There was a musical chant about poison rain and children being guinea pigs. I saw hardly any spectators. In a travel agency, a young couple turned and frowned over their shoulders and through the glass. A restaurant proprietor stood unsmiling in his doorway. Three pretty women peered out of a second-story window. Two little girls were walking by; the younger wished to join the protest but the elder was against it.

  A man was shouting: “You guys did it, you large corporations and TEPCO! Why should we have to suffer? Solidarity, everyone! Work together!” The sentiment was underscored by furious drumming. The marchers went to an unmarked TEPCO building and delivered demands to a man waiting on the sidewalk. He bowed slightly when he received their document. I felt a little sorry for him. Behind the glass doors, two other men in suits stood watching.

  My visit to Tomioka with Endo was the least radioactive of the eight trips I have taken to that place; during our two hours there, the dosimeter registered only one additional microsievert. Over the course of our conversation, he remarked that what he missed most about Tomioka was the shrine at the mountain. I asked whether we could stop by, and he kindly drove me there. The characters on the gate read HAYAMA SHRINE. Here, the young men of the town had climbed bearing torches during the festival to pray for a good harvest; if you saw the flames at the top of the mountain from your house, the harvest would be fruitful. The festival took place every August 15. Endo had carried the torch every year from age 16 to 40.

  At the shrine, one of the two stone guardian dogs had fallen; not far from his cracked corpse rose the wide stone steps, across which a heavy branch had lately collapsed. Together, we climbed up and looked at the forested hill above the shrine, the place of dead leaves and lovely tall pines. We turned and looked down from the torus at the landscape. Then, fi
nally, we descended to the car and drove away, across that plain of black bags and brown grass, with crows flying up everywhere.

  THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS

  In Another Country

  FROM Smithsonian Journeys

  My father, a bookish black man old enough to be my grandfather, grew up in Texas while it was still a segregated state. As soon as he could, he got himself far enough away from there to cover the walls of his study with photographs of his travels to destinations as exotic as Poland and Mali. As far back as I can remember, he was insistent that the one place in the world truly worth going was Paris. Being a child, I accepted the assertion at face value—mostly because of the way his eyes lit up when he spoke of this city that was nothing but two syllables for me—I assumed he must have lived there once or been very close to someone who had. But it turned out this wasn’t the case. Later, when I was older, and when he was finished teaching for the day, he would often throw on a loose gray Université de Paris Sorbonne sweatshirt with dark blue lettering, a gift from his dearest student, who had studied abroad there. From my father, then, I grew up with the sense that the capital of France was less a physical place than an invigorating idea that stood for many things, not least of which were wonder, sophistication, and even freedom. “Son, you have to go to Paris,” he used to tell me, out of nowhere, a smile rising at the thought of it, and I would roll my eyes because I had aspirations of my own then, which seldom ventured beyond our small New Jersey town. “You’ll see,” he’d say, and chuckle.

  And he was right. My wife, a second-generation Parisian from Montparnasse, and I moved from Brooklyn to a gently sloping neighborhood in the 9th arrondissement, just below the neon glare of Pigalle, in 2011. It was my second time living in France, and by then I was fully aware of the pull this city had exercised throughout the years, not just on my father but also on the hearts and minds of so many black Americans. One of the first things I noticed in our apartment was that, from the east-facing living room, if I threw open the windows and stared out over the Place Gustave Toudouze, I could see 3 Rue Clauzel, where Chez Haynes, a soul food institution and until recently the oldest American restaurant in Paris, served New Orleans shrimp gumbo, fatback, and collard greens to six decades of luminous visitors, black expats, and curious locals. It fills me with pangs of nostalgia to imagine that not so long ago, if I’d squinted hard enough, I would have spotted Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, or even a young James Baldwin—perhaps with the manuscript for Another Country under his arm—slipping through Haynes’s odd log cabin exterior to fortify themselves with familiar chatter and the larded taste of home.