Quotes of the Day

It's a few minutes past 8 a.m., and Hiroshi Hasegawa has a lot of radioactive veggies to scan. He impatiently waves a man waiting in the muggy offices of the Citizens' Radioactivity Measuring Station over to his desk, on which Akihisa Takahashi, a high school teacher, deposits a bag of chopped eggplant. Hasegawa asks the teacher where the eggplant was grown and whether he had removed any contaminated dirt from the garden. Not yet, Takahashi answers. But he tested his peaches for radiation, and they seemed fine. "That's a good thing," Hasegawa says, entering the data into a laptop. "You can be happy about that."

Five months after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that killed as many as 22,000 people and displaced nearly 125,000 others, Fukushima prefecture is still struggling to clean up and move on. The slow pace of recovery raises the question: Which Japan will win out in the aftermath of the tragedy? Will it be the resilient nation that rose from the ashes of World War II or the country that has become better known over the past two decades for its economic and social torpor?

In large part, the answer may depend on men and women like Hasegawa. He is a local volunteer — he works as a civil engineer by day — who decided that by helping monitor food-safety levels, he could act in the face of federal inertia. And he's not alone. Increasingly, the people of Fukushima are taking the initiative and assuming responsibility for their recovery. "A month after [the nuclear disaster], we could see huge problems, but it was totally taboo to talk about it," says Jan van de Putte, a Greenpeace International nuclear campaigner who has been working in Japan since March 15. "Now there's this opening up. People are reacting. It's late, but it's not too late."

A Persistent Danger
Most of the samples that have passed across Hasegawa's desk have proved to be within the legal consumption limit of the radioactive isotopes cesium 134 and 137 and iodine 131. But not all have been under the threshold of 500 becquerels per kg. Last month, for instance, a batch of shiitake mushrooms measured 8,850 becquerels. The sample still sits on a bookshelf in the office, sealed with a strip of yellow tape. "I was very nervous when I had to grind it," Hasegawa says. "Don't touch it."

Hasegawa braves the risks because he, like other members of a growing citizens' movement in Fukushima City, is disillusioned with Tokyo's slow and distanced handling of the nuclear crisis. Even though it lies only about 50 km from the stricken plant, the city was not included in any of the government's evacuation plans — despite the fact that local radiation levels have been high since March, in some cases higher than in locations people were forced to leave. In April, three Fukushima residents started supplementing government monitoring by doing their own testing around the city. They found spots where radiation levels exceeded 100 microsieverts per hour, about the same dose as a chest X-ray. More distressing, they found that three-quarters of the schools they visited had levels that exceeded the yearly exposure limit for employees at Japan's nuclear plants. "Seventy-six percent of our children were working in the same conditions as nuclear workers," says Seiichi Nakate, one of the testers.

When Nakate posted his findings online, hundreds of concerned parents joined his fledgling organization, which became the Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation. (The food-monitoring group is an offshoot.) Since then, city and prefectural officials have picked up the pace of testing schools and agricultural products. The city has also initiated a decontamination program — and like the citizens' group, it is doing it on its own, with little outside support. Armed with shovels and high-pressure water guns, some 3,700 city employees and volunteers have started the long process of cleaning the city, scrubbing schools, parks and walkways frequented by children. "I personally feel that it's up to the country and TEPCO to undertake this work," says Tatsuo Miura, head of the city's crisis-management team. "But it's the city, the prefecture and the people who are going to have to do it." The central government has said it will set aside up to $300 million for decontaminating schools and playgrounds affected by the nuclear crisis but has yet to say when that money will appear.

Nor has Tokyo come up with any long-term solution for the radioactive waste that is quickly accumulating. Officials in Fukushima City have been disposing of some waste at an industrial dumping site, an option that residents in the area are understandably not happy about. As parks and school grounds are stripped of contaminated topsoil, the city is doing the only thing it can do: burying the waste under the sites from which it was removed. The contaminated soil is covered with a minimum of 50 cm of clean topsoil, a process that officials say has lowered ground radiation levels by 80%. "We have been asking the government for a better solution," says Miura. He reiterates that the city's tests have shown that burying the soil is safe, "but what is safe is not necessarily a relief to the public."

Even those who are part of the effort are unsure. In a small playground behind a public-housing unit, a construction worker, wearing a short-sleeve T-shirt and no gloves, shovels contaminated dirt that has been scraped off the grass into a square hole. Shuya Sato, the contractor hired to oversee the dig, lives in the neighborhood and says he feels it's his civic obligation to help clean up the radiation as quickly as possible. When asked whether it might be dangerous for the bare-armed worker to be handling the dirt, Sato stares down at his own naked forearms for a few silent moments. "I don't know," he finally answers, sounding exasperated. "Even the scientists on TV are split about the effects [of radiation]. So how can I know? I'm not an expert."

The Business of Uncertainty
The frustration of not knowing is the subtext of a lot of what happens in Fukushima these days. In part, that's because the economic power of fuhyo — rumor — is a force that even gumption and initiative can't combat. Every day, residents read headlines that feature Fukushima, once synonymous with verdant rice paddies and mountain hot springs, as a byword for why nuclear power is bad. Reservation books at the quaint inns to which tourists have flocked for decades are empty. Though some sectors are thriving in the disaster bubble, with hotels booked up by insurance salesmen and izakaya packed with engineers repairing the grid, anyone who isn't there on business simply isn't there.

Local fishermen and cattle farmers are forbidden to sell their products, and exports of the produce that it is legal to sell are slipping. In Iitate-mura, an evacuated farming village, roadside paddies have gone to seed. The town's shops are shuttered. On a Friday morning, the only car in the local bank's parking lot belongs to a woman who used to run a restaurant there. She says she's considering reopening once the residents are allowed to move back. "But if the soil is contaminated, the farmers can't come back," says the woman, who declined to give her name. "I won't have any customers."

Some relief is on the way. In early August, the central government passed a law creating a fund of public money and contributions from Japan's nuclear power companies to help TEPCO pay evacuees, fishermen, farmers and business owners whose lives have been upended. After posting losses of $7.4 billion last quarter, TEPCO, Japan's largest utility, is expected to owe billions of dollars in claims from victims of the disaster. Hundreds of millions of dollars in payments have been made, but many who have lost money are complaining that their compensation is taking too long. "They say, 'We're going to pay, we're going to pay, we're going to pay,'" says Kuniei Kanno, a farmer in Koriyama who lost his annual broccoli crop because it was illegal to sell. "But they never say when."

The lifeline of cash needs to arrive soon. People may be relocating only temporarily, but the businesses they supported are shuttering for good, and when they do, jobs will disappear, driving more residents away.

What Comes Next
A more permanent exodus may have already begun. After dozens of schools closed in evacuated towns, the prefectural government announced it would not be hiring any new public-school teachers for the next school year. In Minami-soma, most of which is located in a voluntary-evacuation zone, half the city's 70,000 residents have left, including 70% of its children. Their mothers went with them. Women who are pregnant are also gone, as are people with disabilities, the elderly, the infirm and anyone else who would not be able to leave town quickly if there were another explosion at the plant nearby.

As TEPCO has regained control of its reactors, people have been trickling back. But officials worry that even after Tokyo lifts the evacuation zones, which could happen as early as September, the city may never recover. Some basic services found in most cities its size — particularly one in the world's third richest country — have already eroded. Only two of the town's hospitals are still functioning, and many of the doctors and nurses who were no longer needed moved on to find work elsewhere. If somebody has a heart attack, he or she has to get driven to a city half an hour away. On the top floor of Watanabe Hospital, a private facility that can no longer provide any major services to patients, head nurse Manabu Takano unlocks the door to an empty ICU, immaculate and stuffy with disuse. Built two years ago, it is a state-of-the-art facility. Now the hospital's administration is discussing turning it into a senior-citizens unit. "There's already a shortage of doctors in rural areas," says Norihiko Itou, a doctor from Hokkaido who is spending his vacation volunteering at Watanabe Hospital. "Getting doctors to come back will be hard."

Still, Takano, whose nursing staff has shrunk from 80 to 30, refuses to leave. Since March, his work has become his life. After his wife and kids evacuated to Japan's west coast, he moved into a room at the hospital, where he sleeps six nights a week. He has encouraged his staff to leave the city and go where they feel safe, but he has chosen to stay and try to give the patients who still come in what care he can. When asked how long he envisions living this way, Takano shrugs. "Zutto." Forever.

It may not take an eternity, but by any estimate, recovery is still a long way off. To get there, Fukushima will need all the help it can get, whether it's the doggedness of the nurse who refuses to budge from his post or the defiance of the scientist who volunteers for a second job protecting his city, one eggplant at a time.

• Krista Mahr / Fukushima City
• Five months after the nuclear disaster, Fukushima is still struggling to clean up and dig out