Free Into the Forbidden Zone by William T. Vollmann Page B

ARRIVED IN HIROSHIMA, the Ministry of Energy classified the reactor accident as a Level Seven, as bad as Chernobyl. One agency said 370,000 terrabecquerels had been released so far. Another said 630,000 terrabecquerels. 40 I figured that nobody knew and everybody lied.
    I asked the wide-faced taxi driver who was taking me to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum which he considered worse, the reactor accident or the detonation of the atom bomb over his city. He replied, “Of course, the nuclear bomb! It instantly killed more than two hundred thousand people!”
    (A wall display at the museum stated that 140,000 died by the end of 1945.)
    I mentioned that the Tohoku people appeared to know or care little about what happened at Hiroshima, to which he replied in his reedy voice, “Of course. More foreigners visit the museum than Japanese. At that time, I was three years old. One day before, we were ordered to evacuate because Hiroshima was a military capital and in danger.” He laughed, quite cynically and bitterly, I thought. His mother took him to the countryside, but on the day after Little Boy was dropped she returned to Hiroshima to look after relatives, which was why she—lucky woman!—became eligible for atomic victim status. “She showed no symptoms, but when I was fourteen she got recognition. Myself, if you have that hibakusha health book, if you’re a victim, that means that no one wants to marry you, so I didn’t want to get one.”
    He went on: “Those who used to live close to the dome”—the hypocenter of the explosion—“they hide it, since they are discriminated against.”
    “How many years did it take for the radioactivity to go away?”
    “For that I’m not sure, but in 1945 they said that for fifty years no plants would grow, and soon weeds came.”
    “Do you think that the reactor accident at Fukushima could affect people here?”
    “I think it’s rather irrelevant to me. I won’t be affected. You’re going to the museum, and you’ll see that the atomic bomb gives you burns and hair loss,” he explained wisely, and so we pulled up there, on the edge of the Hongkawa River, among the pinkish-white clouds of cherry blossoms.
    Visiting the museum, my heart grew as brown-gray as a salinized rice field. The torn, stained rags of the summer uniform and chemise that the thirteen-year-old schoolgirl Oshita Nobuko had sewn herself, oh, yes, these flattened, faded, bloody tokens, weren’t those enough to see? Just as one can find on display at that museum a lightbulb painted black except for a neat ring of transparency at the base, in order to decrease, however slightly, the probability that the Allied bombers could locate nighttime targets, so I could see of various radioactive issues, matters, and agendas what little there was to see. And I have told you what I saw. What did I see? What did I know?
    At Hiroshima my dosimeter registered 0.2 millirems per twenty-four hours—twice Tokyo’s background. At first I thought I had found some artifact of the bomb, but an American dosimetrist later remarked that this reading probably fell within the preatomic norm for that area.
    On the bench across from the ruined Fuel Hall with its atomic dome within, a pigtailed child sat upon her young mother’s lap, giggling and rubbing noses with her, the blue sky glaring through the blank window holes in the brick.
    Then the petals began to rain down, losing themselves upon the whiteness of the granite flagstones, floating down onto the long dark hair of two young women who sat drinking coffee together, turning their faces toward each other.

The author getting radiation screening in Koriyama following his second visit to the hot zone.

About the Author
     
     
    William T. Vollmann is the author of nine novels, including Europe Central , winner of the National Book Award. He has also written three collections of stories, a memoir, and five works of nonfiction, including, most recently, Imperial and Kissing the