Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (17 page)

Taniyama laughed often about the situation in Fukushima. “What else can I do?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders as he sat slightly slouched in a chair while we drank coffee in a café near the apartment he rented with his wife. “Is this disaster not the most absurd thing you have ever seen? Come to my temple. I’ll show you just how crazy the world has become.”

Now we were driving north. Aside from the exposed foundations
of homes that had been washed away by the tsunami, the scenery on our drive up the T
hoku coast looked fairly normal. Two years after the catastrophe, most of the debris in the disaster plain had been removed, and any house that could be salvaged had been restored. People were out buying gas, delivering packages, and coming home from work. There were a few newly opened convenience stores, called
combini
in Japanese, that are recognizable across T
hoku for their squat, rectangular prefab shape. “See,” Taniyama said. “The fact that someone put a store there means that people have returned to this neighborhood. Someone is going to make a lot of money with that shop,” he chuckled.

We passed the J-Village sports complex, built in 1997 as the training facility for the national Japanese soccer team and used to house soccer camps for children as part of an effort to raise the popularity of the sport in Japan. All of a sudden, every vehicle coming toward us from the opposite direction contained exhausted-looking men wearing pale-blue decontamination suits. Many rode in chauffeured buses, with their heads tilted back and eyes closed; they were too tired to drive their own cars after a day of work. I turned around and watched as the vehicles filed into the driveway of the J-Village sports arena, then disappeared, swallowed up by high fences and shrubbery.

“That’s where they all stay,” Taniyama said to me in a quiet voice. “No camera crews are allowed. Don’t you think that’s
strange
? Don’t you think the government should show us
something
?” He laughed again, and I realized he was referring to the three thousand or so men who worked around the clock trying to stabilize the damaged nuclear power facility.

As we continued north on the coastal road, the scenery changed dramatically. The houses along the road were still damaged as though the earthquake had happened just days ago. The spines of tile-covered roofs were jagged and cracked, holes hastily covered
over with heavy blue plastic tarp anchored in place with bricks. One two-story house on a hillside had been cleaved nearly in two, its halves clinging to each other by shards of wood in the floor and ceiling panels. We drove past house after house whose tattered, shoji rice-paper screens looked as though they had been violently slashed with scissors. Taniyama explained to me that rice paper is easily damaged when it is exposed to direct sunlight for extensive periods. The people in this part of T
hoku had fled their homes in such a hurry, they had not closed the protective metal shutters used at night and in the early morning on the outside of their windows.

Taniyama carried a Geiger counter with him at all times. He delighted in how the numbers changed as we went up and down hills, or opened the car door or window. He couldn’t see the radiation, but he had come to know its behavior the same way a hunter stalking an invisible prey has learned to read the snapping of branches and the rustle of feet on the forest floor. In Iwaki, the reading was respectably low at .1 millisievert. The farther north we went, the higher the number climbed. When the car went over a hill, taking us closer to Tomioka, it climbed to .3 millisievert, then settled back down to .2 millisievert. These numbers would rise higher and higher the farther north we went.

Taniyama no longer wore a radiation suit when he went to see his home. He explained to me that radiation now lingered only in the topsoil and had long ago fallen out of the air. He had one pair of shoes that he wore when walking around the grounds of his house. These were his exclusion-zone shoes. About forty minutes outside of Iwaki, Taniyama parked by an unassuming one-story building off to the left side of the road. He changed his shoes and asked me to follow him.

Inside the building were two middle-aged men behind a rectangular, collapsible table. Taniyama handed them his permit, which stated that he was a resident of Tomioka. While the men filled out
some paper work, Taniyama gossiped with them about friends they had in common and about the weeds growing in his garden. He continued to laugh lightly as he spoke, while one of the men solemnly handed me a hazmat suit.

The suit was made of light white fabric and was not the spacesuit I had come to expect from seeing disaster movies; one didn’t just step into a second skin and zip it shut. My suit consisted of many parts, requiring proper assembly and tying. In its intricacy, the suit made me think of old Japanese armor.

First, I slid on a pair of white pants over my jeans. Then I pulled on a couple of what I can only describe as gauze leg-warmers elasticized at the top, around my shins, and at the ankle. I put blue booties over my feet and tied a pair of spatlike coverings over my ankles. Next, I put on a large white zip-up top, then rubber gloves and a shower cap. Finally, I put on a face mask. There was no mirror in the building. Taniyama took a picture of me with my iPhone so I could see what I looked like. Though tidy, the hazmat suit had turned me into the Michelin man. I said this out loud, and no one laughed.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s an American habit to joke when we are nervous.”

The men who had processed our paper work still did not laugh.

“I assure you this is
much
better than the Western suits they originally gave us,” Taniyama said. “Those things were terrible.” Then he laughed.

The men behind the desk shook their heads in agreement. “I never could get the hang of those things,” one man said.

We got back in the car and continued to drive.

The town of Tomioka was largely unchanged since the disaster; windows were broken, roofs collapsed, toys abandoned. Only encroaching weeds and overgrown trees hinted at the passage of time. There was also a speaker, which repeatedly blared that all visitors
had to have permission to enter the town and that they had to leave by three o’clock. The voice—a woman—reminded us not to light any matches or turn on the gas, as there was no water to put out any fires. Police cars drove up and down the main road to discourage looters. I had the out-of-body feeling that I was not visiting a town once inhabited by families, but was instead at a theme park riding a nightmare version of, say, the Disney boat ride It’s a Small World, where overseers had the right to interrupt visitors when they reached out to touch the dolls on display in the artificial world.

There were also plenty of street signs that repeated the warning about radiation and the lack of water and electricity. Then I saw a few unusual signs, which read, “If you are here to see the cherry blossoms, please remain in your car. Look at the blossoms through the window.”

I asked Taniyama for an explanation.

“Oh, that,” he laughed. “There is a famous cherry-blossom tunnel in Tomioka. We used to drive through it every year. Some people still come.”

The cherry blossom “tunnel” is created when a road is lined on both sides by trees in full bloom. One drives through this tunnel and marvels at the way the sunlight filters through the blossoms, as though the trees are some kind of pink-paper cathedral. On the right day, when the blossoms are in full bloom and the sun is bright, the effect is breathtaking.

“Will you go see the blossoms?” I asked.

“No,” Taniyama said. “It’s not the same if you can’t open your window.”

A
H, THE CHERRY
blossoms of Japan. In all the talk about the nuclear power plant, radiation, and evacuation, I had forgotten
about something as simple as trees. How the Japanese love their trees, the cherry tree in particular.

For years I didn’t really understand the fuss over cherry blossoms. I knew that
sakura
, the cherry blossom, was on the back of the one-hundred-yen coin, and that Zeami, the famed Noh theater playwright and critic, had compared the perfection of his craft to the beauty of the flower. But I honestly didn’t understand why the
sakura
, above all other flowers, got such hype. Then, in April of 2006, my boyfriend and I spent three days with my friends Isao and Nono in Ky
t
. They’d been tracking the impending cherry-blossom explosion on the Internet, plotting itineraries and prime flower-viewing contingency plans with a fervor that initially bordered on fanaticism. Right before we arrived in Ky
t
, Isao sent me a text message: “
Mankai
[full bloom] expected this weekend. Perfect timing!” When they met us at the airport, Nono had a photo on his cell phone of the first blossoms opening up by their apartment complex.