Chernobyl got a 25-year head start on Fukushima, but living with nuclear disasters and their long-term effects is still a work in progress. “What we learned from Chernobyl is that you have to measure everything and keep measuring,” Takenori says. With money raised on a TV telethon and donated labor and equipment, his laboratory welcomes anyone who comes in with soil samples or foraged mushrooms or even potentially contaminated food from the grocery store. While his wife Tomoko had been bustling around her inn, Takenori opened a radiation testing lab in the nearby town of Minamisoma. The Kobayashi family brought another important lesson back from Chernobyl. The idea of replacing the area’s traditional rice-growing with rape seed was borrowed from Chernobyl-a place which the Kobayashis and many of their friends have visited, in an effort to learn how to live in a nuclear exclusion zone. (Due to COVID, non-citizens, even long-term visa holders, are not allowed into Japan.) They had come for the yearly festival that marks the fall planting of rape seed, a member of the mustard family that has the dual benefit of leeching cesium from the soil while producing uncontaminated canola oil, because cesium is not soluble in oil. This past September, the inn was full again with visitors such as my research assistant, Ms. Kobayashi’s stable shows the brand put on radioactive livestock in Fukushima prefecture. Owner of a small ryokan-a traditional Japanese hotel with common baths and a dining room holding a long table for family and guests-she invited volunteers to help her scrub down the inn, plant flowers along the roadside, open a gift shop, and rescue some of the area’s famous “samurai horses,” which are now branded with the white mark that labels radioactive livestock.Ī hostler at Mrs. Kobayashi were allowed to return to their former home in Odaka, a village on the edge of Fukushima’s 20-kilometer exclusion zone, where Tomoko is a third-generation innkeeper. Takenori and Tomoko Kobayashi lived in an eight-tatami-mat house for the next five years-nuclear refugees inhabiting 132 square feet of living space. These metal structures were measured by the size of Japan’s traditional tatami sleeping mats, typically about 36 by 71 inches. After the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, evacuees were put in what was supposed to be temporary housing built in parking lots and fields on the outskirts of inland towns.
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