One by one, they cracked. One European journalist abandoned his fuel-empty
rental car in Fukushima, panicking at the prospect of staying a minute
longer in the capital of the prefecture where the damaged Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear power plant was leaking radiation into the air. Another swathed
himself in a raincoat and duct tape before fleeing the area a few hours
later. Still another just started hurtling West in a car, even as the other
journalists in the vehicle pleaded for him to stop and let them off so they
could continue reporting. A couple hours later, he finally halted the car;
by then, they were in another prefecture. Earlier that morning, woken by a
loud siren, the skittish journalist had woken up yelling “air raid, air
raid,” startling the other members of the media squeezed into the hotel room with him.
“I thought, wait, who’s attacking Japan?” recalls a colleague. “It wasn’t
the Americans. Was it the Chinese? I was completely confused.”
The noise turned out to be a passing fire truck.
Many of the foreign reporters covering the March 11 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami had
seen plenty of death and destruction before coming to Japan. But what has so
unnerved many journalists this time is an enemy that is odorless, colorless
and tasteless. The sounds of mortar fire or precautions needed to avoid
being kidnapped are things that some of us have been trained to understand.
But radiation was an unknown threat to most of us, just as it was to many
locals — even if Japan is the only country in the world that has suffered a
nuclear attack. What exactly did a microsievert measure? What did a
dosimeter do? How was it that we were supposed to take iodide pills but be
worried about radioactive iodine? Could seaweed really counteract the
effects of radiation, as one Japanese radio announcer had alleged? I had to
supplement my Japanese with words that were not part of my normal
vocabulary: radiation exposure, nuclear fuel rod, core cooling system. We made a
pact never to allow the car’s gas meter to dip below half, the amount of
fuel needed to make an escape to a transportation hub four hours away, in
case radiation levels spiked. One day, we veered out of our way to rescue a
fellow reporter stranded in a city that had become a ghost town because of
radiation fears.
To further protect ourselves, we traveled the decimated region with a jerry
can filled with petrol squeezed in between the two front seats. The car air
smelled like gas, but given that we were heading to an area not far from the
Fukushima Daiichi plant, inhaling gas fumes seemed a better option than
sucking in potentially irradiated air. As it turned out, when we got to one
town flattened by the tsunami, a firefighter’s Geiger counter showed the
radiation level at 0.0. The firefighter, military and police squads were
busy pulling bodies out of the tsunami wreckage. The threat of radiation was
the last thing on most locals’ minds. We cracked the car windows after that.
When I eventually arrived in Tokyo, a city usually bathed in neon, the
streets were eerily dark at night. But even though some residents, both
local and foreign, have begun to flee Japan’s capital because of radiation
worries, many seem resigned to sticking it out. Over the weekend, news that
small amounts of radiation had been found in spinach, milk and tap water
largely elicited shrugs. “We have to drink water to survive, and the
government says it’s safe, so I’ll keep drinking,” says Tokyo lawyer Michi
Hidano. “Maybe in 30 years’ time there will be an increase in certain
illnesses caused by radiation. But that’s something we can’t worry about
now.” Life must go on. See TIME’s best pictures of 2010.
See TIME’s complete coverage of the Japan earthquake.
