Despite the official government spin that everything is back to normal-indeed, Japan is touting the upcoming Olympic games as the so-called “Recovery Olympics”-life in Fukushima is far from normal. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Modern treatment can significantly improve quality of life and may extend survival.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.
However, some forms of the disease remain frustratingly difficult to treat. Today, more people diagnosed with cancer are living longer. Cancer specialists, called oncologists, have made remarkable advances in cancer diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. Melanomas are cancers that arise in the cells that make the pigment in skin.Ĭancer has been recognized for thousands of years as a human ailment, yet only in the past century has medical science understood what cancer really is and how it progresses. Sarcomas arise in bone, muscle, fat, blood vessels, cartilage, or other soft or connective tissues of the body. Carcinomas - the most commonly diagnosed cancers - originate in the skin, lungs, breasts, pancreas, and other organs and glands.
The major types of cancer are carcinoma, sarcoma, melanoma, lymphoma, and leukemia. The term " cancer" encompasses more than 100 diseases affecting nearly every part of the body, and all are potentially life-threatening. Malignant, or cancerous, tumors crowd out healthy cells, interfere with body functions, and draw nutrients from body tissues.Ĭancers continue to grow and spread by direct extension or through a process called metastasis, whereby the malignant cells travel through the lymphatic or blood vessels - eventually forming new tumors in other parts of the body. Most cancers form tumors, but not all tumors are cancerous.īenign, or noncancerous, tumors do not spread to other parts of the body, and do not create new tumors. A tumor is a mass composed of a cluster of such abnormal cells. Cancer starts when a cell is somehow altered so that it multiplies out of control. Throughout our lives, healthy cells in our bodies divide and replace themselves in a controlled fashion.
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