Everything We Don't Know

by Aaron Gilbreath

  “Alright,” he said, “I’m off to breakfast.” He grabbed his cell phone and car keys from the counter and, as always, I wondered whether to tell him to stay away from the hash browns and biscuits, to only eat the ham and not drown it in gravy. But I said nothing. I leaned against the kitchen counter, watching Dad collect his things. He patted my shoulder as he walked by and I thought: Like believers to their religion, let Dad heed his own call. Go home, I now think, go to the place where your mother calls to you when it’s suppertime, go to her in your mind the way I can still go to you now.

  EVERYTHING WE DON’T KNOW

  On Friday March 23, 2012, a year after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, a Canadian patrol aircraft spotted a rusty vessel floating toward the British Columbia coast. It was the Ryou-Un Maru, a Hokkaido shrimping ship, and it was unmanned.

  The 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake that struck Japan’s east coast killed nearly 16,000 people and unleashed a tsunami that decimated towns and washed between four and eight million tons of debris into the Pacific Ocean. A splintered, foaming mess containing cars and cables, houses, lumber, and human beings surged as far as six miles inland before spilling into the sea. About 70 percent of the debris sank, but a year later, 1.5 million tons, what the Los Angeles Times said amounted to “roughly 100,000 garbage trucks’ worth,” were still floating on the open ocean.

  The Ryou-Un Maru was the first large piece of tsunami debris to cross the Pacific. The press called it a “ghost ship.” The Canadian transport ministry monitored to make sure it didn’t leak fuel or block commercial passage. After a month drifting north, the US Coast Guard blasted the ship with cannon fire 180 miles off the Alaskan coast and let it sink 6,000 feet.

  Three months later, a sixty-six foot long cement dock beached itself in a scenic cove north of Newport, Oregon. People climbed atop it, posed, and took photos. The dock had floated 4,700 miles from the town of Misawa on northern Honshu, Japan’s main island. The seven foot tall structure’s Styrofoam filling kept it afloat, and a metal plaque identified its origins. As Hirofumi Murabayashi of the Japanese Consulate in Portland told the news, “The owner of this dock is Aomori Prefecture, and they told us that they do not wish to have it returned.” Authorities sawed off a section to display in a tsunami awareness exhibit at Newport’s Hatfield Marine Science Visitor Center, and Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber created a hotline to report tsunami debris.

  People on the Oregon coast are used to picking up trash. Everything from lighters and plastic bags to huge swollen logs wash ashore, but this trans-oceanic debris was different. Debris hunters came to photograph and collect it. Some sold their finds on eBay. Tsunami treasure hunting became sport, and the town of Seaside, Oregon even used it to attract tourists. But coastal trash is neither fun nor attractive. It strangles birds, poisons fish, and damages fisheries, and it can carry invasive species. After Fukushima, debris provided powerful evidence of decreasing oceanic health, and it served as an undeniable symbol of ecological connectivity. If the trash made it this far, people reasoned, what about the radiation?

  The massive tsunami that pounded Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in 2011 caused a triple meltdown, multiple reactor explosions, and released large but still unknown amounts of radioactive cesium-137, cesium-134, strontium-90, neptunium-237, uranium-236, plutonium-239 and -240, iodine-131 and -129, ruthenium, tritium, and radium into the air, groundwater, and ocean. The French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety’s report called the plant’s initial breakdown “the largest single contribution of radionuclides to the marine environment ever observed.” People named the radioactive material “the plume” and watched as it dispersed on various Pacific currents. With all the debris hitting the West Coast, the distance between Japan and the US no longer felt so vast.

  As the California naturalist John Muir famously said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Americans wanted to think of Fukushima as Japan’s problem. We were here and Japan was there. So we sent our condolences and donated to relief efforts and got back to watering our gardens and eating sushi—myself included. The question many scientists were asking on everyone’s behalf was whether Japan’s problem was poisoning the plankton that larger fish ate. If so, it would poison us.

  Scientists didn’t initially know how the radiation was moving through the marine ecosystem, or what it would do to marine life over time, but a few, like oceanographer Ken Buesseler, immediately started studying it, and many activists and conspiratorial bloggers knew they had to cut through the governmental rhetoric and Tokyo Electric Power Company cover-ups to find the truth. One truth was as clear as it had always been: everything is connected. If you thought you were safe, you were wrong.

  I first visited the Oregon coast as a tourist in 1995. My parents and I came on vacation. We’d visited Seattle the previous summer, and western Oregon looked like an equally beautiful destination. By the time I graduated from college in Arizona, return trips had left me so in love with the Northwest that I moved to Portland in 2000, intent on sustaining myself on its moist air, clean tap water, and abundant local food. I was a co-op person. I ate ancient grains, organic produce, and lots and lots of seafood. I still do.

  Most of the protein in my diet comes from Pacific fish. I prefer the small silver oily species: sardines, anchovies, saury, and herring. Small fish are rich sources of calcium, phosphorus, vitamins A and D, and omega-3 fatty acids. Protein sustains your energy. Certain omega-3s, like DHA and EPA, may reduce the growth of breast, colon, and prostate cancer, lower blood pressure, prevent hardening of the arteries and heart disease, and possibly lessen the cognitive degeneration associated with Alzheimer’s. Americans take supplemental cod liver oil for omega-3, but my beloved little fish are naturally loaded with it. The general wisdom is that eating fish a few times a week is part of a healthy diet. It’s one explanation why so many Okinawans live to be centenarians. Seaweed, tofu, and tea are other reasons. I consume those foods every week.

  We Jews eat lots of fish. I eat it for breakfast, for lunch and for dinner—it doesn’t matter what season. After high school I vowed not to suffer my father’s health problems. I loved country food, but I refused to suffer health problems caused by diet. So I went vegetarian for a while, later vegan. Now, I eat a more balanced healthy diet.

  To cut down on our water and carbon footprints, my wife Rebekah and I became weekday vegetarians: no beef, chicken, or pork Monday through Friday. At a time when the overfished Pacific bluefin tuna faces extinction, and farm-raised salmon’s nutritional and environmental costs are hotly debated, shifting my eating habits from livestock and large fish to durable “bait” fish felt like smart environmental stewardship. It’s called eating lower on the food chain. Many of those small fish sit low enough on the trophic ladder, and live short enough lives, that they aren’t as polluted with mercury and PCBs as higher order, top predators like tuna, sea bass, and swordfish. Many reproduce quickly, so they’ve rebounded from past overfishing and can be responsibly managed as a sustainable, healthy food.

  To further lower my footprint, I usually buy Pacific fish, rather than fish imported from the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. The Pacific is less than 100 miles west of our home in Portland. It’s the world’s largest ocean, and one of the most productive. But after Fukushima, I no longer feel safe eating from it. When I buy my monthly stash of Japanese, South Korean, and Thai canned fish, I wonder whether I should buy sardines and anchovies from Spain, Portugal, or North Africa instead.

  Since moving to Oregon, I’ve visited the coast countless times. I’ve swam. I’ve boogie-boarded. I’ve been sprayed by waves crashing at the base of tall lighthouses, and I plan to hike and camp on the coast for the rest of my life. Rebekah and I just bought a house and want to raise a child. The blue water looks as true as it always has. But now when I visit places like Seaside and Newport, I look out over the ocean and wonder what’s coming for us next.

>   In March 2013, a fourteen foot long, black and red wooden beam was found on the beach near Oceanside, Oregon. It was a kasagi, the horizontal crossbeam that connects the two side beams on a Japanese torii temple gate. The following month, another kasagi beached itself near the Siuslaw River in Florence, a hundred twenty miles to the south. Locals rightly wondered if the kasagi were radioactive.

  Cesium-137 can burn or sicken you on contact. When ingested, it accumulates in your muscles and other soft tissues, where it gives off the gamma and beta radiation that can cause cancer. Other Fukushima and Chernobyl nucleotides, like strontium-90, are easily ingested when they get in food and water. “Once in the body,” says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Sr-90 acts like calcium and is readily incorporated into bones and teeth, where it can cause cancers of the bone, bone marrow, and soft tissues around the bone.” As coastal Oregonians photographed and sold debris on eBay, others questioned the wisdom of handling trash from the world’s second worst nuclear disaster. Fortunately, authorities concluded that the kasagi were not radioactive.

  Shinto temple arches are sacred, but no one knew where these originated until Sadafumi Uchiyama, curator of the Portland Japanese Garden, saw the beams in the news and tracked down the eighty-five-year-old man who’d dedicated the shrine in the town of Hachinohe. Uchiyama flew to Japan, met the man—who cried at the meeting—and helped ship the beams back for free.

  Following the Daiichi nuclear meltdown, the Japanese government evacuated some 160,000 people from the contaminated area that officials deemed the “Fukushima exclusion zone.” Residents, utility, and emergency workers and US sailors onboard the USS Reagan suffered radiation sickness while securing the reactors, offering humanitarian support, and cleaning up after the tsunami. Many Fukushima residents left their homes wondering what illness they would later contract; over four years later, only a fraction have returned home.

  Home to 330,000 people, the city of Koriyama sits in central Fukushima Prefecture, about thirty-five miles away from the Daiichi nuclear facility; this places it fifteen miles beyond the shifting boundaries of the exclusion zone, at most. Fukushima Prefecture once produced peaches, tomatoes, rice, and beef. After the accident, farmers let irradiated crops rot in the fields, animals had to fend for themselves, and the city of Koriyama recommended that children between ages three and five play outside for no more than thirty minutes a day. Children up to age two were not supposed to spend more than fifteen minutes outside. In one Reuters article I read, the reporter overheard a mother at an indoor playground tell her kid, “Try to avoid touching the outside air.” I read a lot of articles.

  Articles say that in Koriyama, three year olds know the word “radiation.” Before eating, they ask adults if their food is safe. According to Reuters, the city’s radiation levels have dropped since 2011, but its children continue to play indoors, and fear of exposure dictates many peoples’ behavior. At first, parents preferred strong preventative measures. Staying inside seemed wise. Over time, many started to worry about the long-term effects of an indoor life. Surveys found that Koriyama children were noticeably sluggish, had increased stress responses, and decreased grip strength and physical coordination. Many have never learned to ride a bike. The threat of radiation on land is real, but another disturbing health risk is psychological.

  Since the nuclear accident, blogs have been filling with predictions. Websites with names like Freedom Outpost and The Truth expose what they consider the real Fukushima story beneath the bureaucratic cover ups. They run color-coded maps showing the plume’s dispersal. They claim that “The west coast of the United States is being absolutely fried by radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster” and declare “Dangerous levels of cesium-137 have been discovered in mushrooms and berries grown along the west coast.” Many of these sites dabble in other topics, such as voting fraud, IRS scams and how the film Noah, in one post’s words, “Promotes The Luciferian Gnostic Belief That The Creator Of This World Is Evil.”

  Scientists counter such claims, dismissing them as pseudoscience, and pointing out how their authors misinterpreted the data or took it out of context. Not every bluefin tuna tested in California waters is contaminated with radiation, said the voices of reason. Every one of the fifteen bluefin that one study examined contained Fukushima radiation. But never mind the facts. Conspiracy theorists have banner ads to sell and self-published books to promote. Other people in positions of influence swung the opposite direction, away from apocalyptic end-times declarations, and made wild claims about safety that were just as irresponsible.

  In March 2015, Forbes magazine ran an article claiming that, “Contrary to all the hype and fear, Fukushima is basically a large Superfund site. No one will die from Fukushima radiation, there will be no increased cancer rates, the food supply is not contaminated, the ocean nearby is not contaminated, most of the people can move back into their homes, and most of the other nuclear plants in Japan can start up just fine.” When I read that I thought, Just fine? Not contaminated? The author’s flippant dismissal was as devoid of sympathy as it was of evidence.

  The conspiracy theorists respond to such claims with their own weapons of fantasy. Why do you think sea lions are dying by the thousands in Alaska and California, they say? Why do you think the polar bears are losing their hair? They cite newspaper reports that show sardines bleeding from their eyes and gills, and they describe the California coast as a dead zone. “Have you seen as many seagulls as you did fifteen years ago?” one blog said. The rocks at California beaches are “unnaturally CLEAN,” warned Planet Infowars, “there’s hardly any kelp, barnacles, sea urchins, etc. anymore and the tide pools are similarly eerily devoid of crabs, snails and other scurrying signs of life . . .” The cause wasn’t warming waters or oceanic cycles, the bloggers assured us. It was radiation. And the worst was yet to come.

  Saury are one of my favorite fish, and they only live in the Pacific. I keep stacks of canned Japanese saury in our basement so I can easily heat them in a skillet to serve over rice. This is one of my standard healthy breakfasts. None of the research I’ve found says saury are contaminated, but I still can’t decide whether to give them up. I’ve been debating for two years.

  Known to biologists as Cololabis saira, Pacific saury also go by the name “mackerel pike.” Koreans call it kongchi . Russians call it saira , the Chinese qiu dao yu . In Japan it’s called sanma .

  Translating as “fall swordfish,” sanma is one of Japan’s most popular fish, which is no small feat in an island nation whose citizens each consume over one hundred and twenty pounds of seafood per year. Not to be confused with the Japanese comedian Sanma Akashiya, saury is a serious-looking, long slender swimmer related to the needlefish, and its appearance in Japanese markets and on sushi menus marks the beginning of autumn. The fish is so abundant, beloved, and easy to prepare, that the Japanese throw annual festivals celebrating its arrival. In 2012, the Meguro Saury Festival in Tokyo attracted 35,000 people. Here in the US, few gaijin have heard of saury.

  The Edo Emperor ate saury pickled, raw, and salt-grilled. The most popular way to cook it now is sanma no shioyaki. ‘Shio’ means salt, and ‘yaki’ means grilled. This simple broiled preparation unleashes rather than masks the fish’s rich natural flavor—just fire and salt. Most Japanese homes have an electric, stovetop fish broiler, or one built into the oven; they’re like electric kettles in England, there by default. In Japan, restaurants usually serve sanma no shioyaki with grated daikon radish, sometimes a lemon or sudachi wedge. To bring out the flavor, you squeeze on the citrus, maybe drizzle on some shoyu, and place a bit of diakon on each bite. If the fish is longer than the grill, some cooks cut the fish in half. Most regular sanma cooks have a grill big enough to accommodate the fish whole—head on, guts in. The guts contain oil that keeps the fish moist, but they taste bitter. Some people eat the guts because they’re nutritious. Some people eat the guts to remind them of hardship, that life is a mixture of the bitter and sweet. />
  I discovered saury by accident. I was shopping at a Japanese grocery store in the suburbs, browsing aisles of seaweed and savory soup stocks in search of old favorites and new foods to try, when I found tall blue cans of a fish called mackerel pike. Mackerel pike, I thought, which is it: mackerel or pike? Could a fish be both? Was this a translation error? Unlike the straightforward cod, sole, snapper, shrimp, I didn’t know what flavor to expect. Since the label was written in Hangul, I didn’t understand what this fish was or how to prepare it, but lower on the shelves, I found a Japanese version in small orange tins for $2.69 labeled “Sanma kabayaki.”

  Unlike the first Korean cans, which were packed in salt water, this Japanese version was roasted and basted with a thick, savory, semi-sweet glaze made from soy sauce and sugar cane, a preparation called kabayaki. The seafood you’ll most frequently find kabayaki is freshwater eel, or unagi. Canned sanma kabayaki arrives similarly: filleted, headed, partially boned, broiled and basted, and to me, the flavor is even more delicious. Once I opened that first tin, I fell so hard that I now live off the stuff, buying ten to twenty tins at a time and stacking them in our basement.

  Cans are small and easy to store. I cook the tiny fillets on a skillet, letting the heat further char their soft edges and caramelize the sauce. Sometimes I put the heated sauries on a salad. Usually, I serve them over warm white rice and eat them with a bowl of miso soup. This is my take on a traditional Japanese breakfast. One 100 gram can of my go-to sanma kabayaki contains 17 grams of protein and 22 grams of unsaturated fat. Total calories: 340. Like saba mackerel, saury is oily and rich, but the meat is lighter, whiter, and cleaner tasting. The mix of salt, fat, and umami satisfies in a way that lasts long after breakfast. Something about the fish-rice combination flips off the crave switch in my brain and drastically reduces my snacking urge, letting me work a long time and concentrate deeply. Sauries have become an integral part of my idea of healthy living. I was born in a nation of hot dogs and sausage patties, but I learned to take a cue from the Japanese and Koreans: eat more fish, drink more tea, and start eating saury.