Everything We Don't Know

by Aaron Gilbreath

  In their 2008 song “Fish Heaven,” the Japanese band Gyoko—meaning “Fishing Port”—sings: “Fish. Fish. Fish. You get smart when you eat fish. Smart Smart Smart. Fish Fish Fish. You get healthy when you eat fish. Healthy. Healthy. Healthy.”

  All the Fukushima books and articles I’ve been reading—not the conspiratorial blogs, but credible outlets like The New York Times, Atlantic, and Scientific American—have helped me sort out some of what’s happening in the Pacific Ocean, but I’m still not confident that science knows enough to predict what’s still going to happen to Japan and America’s seafood supply over time. There’s so much information, so little understanding. All these conflicting sources—I can’t make sense of them, can’t synthesize.

  Although we know that oceans are large and dynamic enough to dilute many poisonous materials, all that we don’t know could fill thousands of oceans. In the meantime, I keep reading more sources, and cans of sanma stack up in our basement. Nearly every week, I serve the little fish over rice. When it’s cold out, I crave their flavor. The weeks I resist feel emptier without them, but I resist because I can’t decide if I need to stop.

  In 2013, South Korean banned all imports of fish from eight Japanese prefectures: Fukushima, Iwate, Miyagi, Aomori, Ibaraki, Gunma, Chiba, and Tochigi. South Korea found the Japanese government’s response to the disaster too weak to instill confidence in its seafood. Japan didn’t have a clear enough plan about how to contain the radioactive water that the Daiichi plant was leaking into the ocean. They still don’t. Japan contested the ban with the World Trade Organization, claiming a lack of scientific evidence. Korea hasn’t lifted the ban.

  The phrase “Made in Japan” used to signify high quality. After WWII, the nation built itself into one of the most innovative, technologically advanced, and wealthy nations in history. By the 1980s, Japan’s prosperity and industrial efficiency was the envy of the developed world. Consumers trusted Japanese products. Japanese automobile manufacturing systems were so sophisticated and efficient that American car companies tried to replicate them. Decimated by the War, Japan had something to prove. It labored for decades to claim its place in the world economy, and to repair its pride. It succeeded. Nuclear energy helped power its ascent.

  Since China’s rise into a world power, the phrase “Made in China” started to make Americans worry about the quality of Chinese exports: was this dog food laced with melamine? Was there lead in this plastic toy’s paint that would poison my kid? Ours became an era of counterfeit Chinese mutton and honey products that contained no pollen, and “Made in China” became shorthand for cheap and questionable. As time passed after Fukushima and the sad Pacific swirled, some people started seeing the phrase “Made in Japan” the same way, casting its famed white rice and green tea into doubt, and left some of us wondering if Fukushima’s radiation would ever reach American shores.

  On a remote beach on Graham Island, British Columbia in 2012, a Canadian man found Ikuo Yokoyama’s rusty Harley Davidson motorcycle. Yokoyama had stored his bike in a white cube container in his backyard in Miyagi Prefecture. The tsunami swept it away and killed three members of the twenty-nine-year-old’s family.

  In Washington’s Olympia National Park, another Misawa dock landed on a rugged stretch of coast between the Hoh River and the town of La Push.

  In the Gulf of Alaska, radar technician David Baxter found a soccer ball near the FAA’s radar station on Middleton Island. The teenage owner, Misaki Murakami, had written his name on it, so Baxter and his wife shipped Murakami’s ball back to him in Iwate Prefecture.

  Throughout coastal Alaska, spray cans, building insulation, plastic bottles, Styrofoam, and oyster farm buoys were washing ashore and worrying locals. “Whatever happens in the ground or air or sea,” Tlingit Tribal President Victoria Demmert told CNN, “will end up in our bodies.” Wildlife eat the plastic, and people eat the wildlife—not just subsistence hunters like the Tlingit, but anyone who buys Alaskan salmon, which is a lot of people. Alaska produces approximately 80 percent of North America’s commercial wild salmon.

  At the time of the Ryou-Un Maru, some experts predicted that the mass of debris would hit the US coastline in either March 2013 or March 2014. Eight months after the tsunami, one conspiracy-minded website warned, “The largest pieces of radioactive tsunami debris could arrive on [the] West Coast of US and Canada ‘within days.’” No mass ever hit. The material that hadn’t sunk had dispersed across a 4,500 mile long area so that, five weeks after the tsunami, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could no longer see the debris fields by satellite. But it wasn’t just visible debris that concerned people.

  According to one color-coded map that went viral online, the imperceptible menace that author William Vollmann calls “invisible and insidious” in his 2015 Harper’s article was still out there, swirling and churning and making its radioactive way closer to Hawaii and America, and presumably moving up the trophic ladders from plankton to tuna and salmon.

  Scientists had a good grasp of the impact of Fukushima radiation on land. In the ocean, the scale of the disaster was too great for even experts to fully decode, its location too complex. Oceans are mysterious. We only understand a fraction of what occurs in them. We understand very little about where and what salmon do when they leave rivers to feed in the ocean. We don’t know much about young Pacific albacore tuna’s migration routes before age three, only that they swim back and forth across the Pacific to feed and spawn. In fact, as Oregon State University research assistant Delvan Neville said, the small safe traces of the “Fukushima fingerprint” isotope cesium-134 that his team found in Oregon albacore between 2008 and 2012 provided additional details into the fish’s migration route between Japan and the West Coast that science didn’t previously have. The cesium levels in those tuna were safe, but the concern was about what would happen in coming years.

  A few months after Fukushima, Ken Buesseler, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, assembled a research team of seventeen scientists to sample the seawater, plankton, and fish near the Fukushima Daiichi facility. Buesseler knew someone had to measure the disaster’s marine impact in order to establish a baseline for coming changes. So in 2011, for fourteen days and nights, his team labored out on the ocean collecting samples, which were later tested by sixteen different international laboratories.

  Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. Strontium-90 has a half-life around 29.1 years. Cesium-137’s half-life is 30.17 years, cesium-134’s is two years, and tritium’s is 12.3 years. That means that ten half lives must pass—about 123 years—before tritium’s radiation levels fall to something close to pre-contamination level. In that time, nucleotides like cesium and strontium accumulate in your bones and decimate your thyroid.

  At the end of the research trip, Ken Buesseler wrote in his web journal:

  “We’ve been out here 24/7 on a specialized research ship for almost two weeks with millions of dollars in equipment gathering more than 1,500 samples and thousands of gallons of seawater and the only thing we can say for certain is that, yes, there is radiation in the water and some of it came from Fukushima. Not exactly a stop-the-presses story. That will come later, but will anyone care at that point?

  ...It’s easy to see how the public could become frustrated with science and the scientific process. People want to know if it’s safe to eat the fish or drink the milk. Decision-makers want to know what they should decide. Everyone wants the truth.

  Scientists, though, cannot always arrive at definitive answers. There are error bars on data points and uncertainty clouding answers to even the most basic questions. There’s a reason for that. We live in a complex world that does not always lend itself to simple answers or definitive yes-or-no responses. Science is not about the pithy sound bite—it’s about reasoned responses and careful analysis of hard-won data.”

  Meaning: we had to get used to not knowing everything so quickly.

  As
I sat outside in the shade on my lunch break recently, a man walked up and started talking. “You’re sitting outside in this heat,” he said, “working on your computer. I should buy you dinner for not sitting in your car running the air conditioning. I mean, come on! This is Portland. Do something.” He stared at me expectantly, waiting for agreement, affirmation, a response, anything, but I only gave him a glance before looking back down at my computer.

  I only had six minutes left on my break. I was working on this essay when he approached, editing this sentence: “But the truth is as true as it was when the Native People fished the Northwest Coast, and when John Muir articulated it in his journals: everything is connected. If you thought you were safe, you were wrong.”

  The man kept talking. “I mean, do something. Right? Everyone’s in their cars on their computers, staring at their computers and talking.”

  He held a nice leather attaché in his right hand. His blue and white Hawaiian shirt and tan cargo shorts were as clean and unwrinkled as the clothes of the other business people who walked by on lunch. He seemed manic, but he arrived like a prophet of doom.

  “Here we are now,” he said, “and everyone’s just sitting in their car running the air conditioning, looking at Facebook, like everything’s going to be fine tomorrow.”

  I wanted him to leave.

  He stood there and stared.

  I didn’t engage. With my head down I said, “Have a good day, man.”

  He waved his hands as he walked off, saying, “There is not going to be a tomorrow.”

  At room temperature, cesium-137 occurs as a liquid. When it bonds with chlorides, it forms a powder. Besides nuclear reactors, the isotope is used in Geiger counters and medical and industrial devices.

  In 1989, in apartment number 85, Building 7, on Gvardeytsiv Kantemirovtsiv Street in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, authorities found a small capsule containing cesium-137 embedded inside the concrete wall. The radioactive capsule probably originated in an industrial instrument, somehow ended up mixed with the cement before or during construction, possibly when the instrument was improperly disposed of, and scrappers resold the scavenged material. Nobody knows. Two separate families lived in the apartment during the nine years between the building’s construction and the radiation’s discovery. Leukemia killed six of them. Seventeen got sick and survived. The incident is known as the Kramatorsk radiological accident.

  Two scrap metal collectors in Goiânia, Brazil broke into an abandoned hospital in 1985 and found a teletherapy unit. The private Institute Goiano de Radioterapia performed radiotherapy, a medical treatment that uses beams of radiation to kill localized cancer cells. When the hospital relocated, it partially demolished its former building and took its cobalt-60 teletherapy unit, but it failed to properly dispose of its caesium-137 unit. The scrappers heard that the site might contain valuables. In one of the derelict treatment rooms, the men found a 1950s model Cesapan F-3000 designed by Italy’s Barazetti and Company. The sealed radioactive capsule was encased inside a heavy, rotating stainless steel and lead wheel. Assuming they could sell the metal, they carried the teletherapy unit’s rotating assembly home in a wheelbarrow, laid it under a mango tree in one of their yards, and disassembled it, releasing the cesium. Over the course of days, the men vomited, felt dizzy, and had diarrhea. When one of the men’s hands swelled up, he visited a doctor; the doctor attributed his symptoms to food allergies. It was the hand he’d gripped the machinery with. By then, they sold the parts to a neighboring junkyard. Exposed to the air in his garage, the junkyard owner noticed that the rice-sized particles glowed blue at night. The material mystified the man’s friends and family, so he gave them some. Five days later, many came down with gastrointestinal issues, including his wife. After his wife linked the symptoms to the material, she took it in a bag on a bus to a doctor, and authorities later secured the compromised sites and treated twenty infirmed people in the hospital. Four weeks later, the junkyard owner’s wife and three other people died. The remaining sixteen survived. The International Atomic Energy Agency called the incident “one of the most serious radiological accidents ever to have occurred.” The house with the mango tree, and its topsoil, were destroyed.

  The 1983 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster released huge amounts of cesium-137 into the Russian air and countryside. Winds carried it throughout Europe, with the greatest levels detected in Belarus, Austria, Ukraine, Sweden, and Finland. Domestic animals suffered mutations. Radiation appeared in alpine plants, and some European countries temporarily banned Russian imports.

  The study of human knowledge is called Epistemology. This branch of philosophy addresses the nature of knowledge, its dispersal, acquisition, and reliability. This includes the ways information spreads throughout the human population. Sometimes information stays were it begins. Most times it travels from its source, morphing and accruing or diluting as its radius expands. Epistemologists want to know how much we can trust information, and how we can know what we know.

  During the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, the US military tested nuclear weapons at sites throughout the Marshall Islands in the North Pacific, in what’s called the Pacific Proving Grounds. These sub-surface detonations released cesium-137 and strontium-90 into the ocean, air, and soil, and small quantities of both radioisotopes still circulate in the Pacific.

  When sanma migrate from the tropics to Russia’s cold coastal waters, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese fisherman lay out their nets. Around Japan’s north island of Hokkaido, commercial saury season starts on August 15, and at the end of September for the other islands, but the meat is richest in fall. Between September and October, when the southbound fish pass back by Japan’s west coast, fat from their Russian feeding, they contain the highest oil content—up to 20 percent. During this peak period, the sauries caught along Japan’s Sanriku Coast, on the northwest corner of the main island of Honshu, are the most prized off all.

  Sanriku lies on the opposite side of the island from Fukushima, but it’s also high on the north side, and its proximity to Fukushima makes me wonder if the ocean currents might somehow spread the poison in the fish’s direction. I haven’t researched the currents on nautical maps, so I shouldn’t draw paranoid conclusions. But sometimes I picture the sanma swimming through blue toxic water on their way up the Japanese coast, and I wonder if I have a death wish.

  Beyond currents, what if the migrating sanma enter the plume as they travel between the south and the north to feed, consuming nucleotides as they head toward the warmer waters of Southeast Asia? Maybe it doesn’t work that way. I’ve searched the web and books and can’t find details. Together, all this information doesn’t necessarily add up to anything, but the severity and weight of the information somehow feels conclusive. I still haven’t quit.

  This summer, we bought a grill. Sanma was the second thing I cooked on it. I bought two frozen fish from a Japanese grocer and dusted them with salt. That night, the air filled with the thick marine scent of charred flesh. Fat crackled as it dripped into the flames. Our dog came sniffing around for scraps. This is how people have cooked sanma for hundreds of years.

  At the kitchen table, I pinned the fish’s head with my finger, sliced off the tail and ran my chopsticks along the length of its belly, creating two fillets. With the fish splayed open, I picked out as many of the tiny, numerous ribs as I could and used my chopsticks to pluck nice thick bites right off the spine. Bones, heads, spines, fins—to me, the flavor and nutrition far outweigh the effort. I also ate the guts. I’d been wondering about their bitterness. How bitter was bitter? The sharp, mineraly bite of the dark organs filled my mouth, and I quickly washed it down with water.

  The Japanese are an island nation defined by their relationship with the ocean. If I have to stop eating sanma, I only lose one dish and the idea of a healthy meal. If the Japanese have to stop eating it, they not only lose their food, they lose one connection to their history, and part of their identity with it.

  On February 19, 2015,
trace amounts of radioactive cesium-134 and cesium-137 were found in samples gathered from a dock in Ucluelet, a small town in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, on Vancouver Island, BC. The levels registered below Canada’s safe legal limit. A seawater sample taken about 745 miles west of Vancouver had already tested positive for cesium-134 in October, but this February sample was the first time Fukushima radiation had been identified on North America’s western shore. Ken Buesseler tested it.

  Irritated that the US government had steadily reduced, rather than increased, its Fukushima monitoring and research efforts, Buesseler crowd-founded his own citizen-science monitoring agency in 2014, called the Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity (CMER). He installed four monitoring stations off the Oregon coast, and he began analyzing seawater samples that researchers and volunteers sent to his Massachusetts laboratory. In conjunction with a Canadian-funded program called InFORM, led by University of Victoria scientist Jay Cullen, CMER planned to add a dozen more stations along coastal British Columbia, with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography adding another ten. Anyone concerned about Fukushima and public safety knows that only fools trust the government, and Buesseler’s work provided qualitative evidence of the government’s disregard: an independent researcher was the first to discover Fukushima radiation on the West Coast, not a government agency.

  The sample contained 1.4 becquerels of cesium-134 per cubic meter (Bq/m3), and around 5 Bq/m3 of cesium-137. A becquerel is a unit of radioactivity. For comparison, Japanese waters contained 50 million Bq/m3 following the meltdown, and they contain 1,000 Bq/m3 now. Canada considers 10,000 Bq/m3 of cesium-137 the safe legal limit. “Even if the levels were twice as high [as 1.4 Bq/m3], you could still swim in the ocean for six hours every day for a year and receive a dose more than a thousand times less than a single dental X-ray,” Buesseler wrote. “While that’s not zero, that’s a very low risk.”