Fukushima Has Turned These Grandparents Into Avid Radiation Testers
After losing trust in official information, the Japanese public took it upon themselves to learn to measure for radioactive matter. Nearly a decade after the nuclear disaster, they're still testing.
Takenori Kobayashi lugs a garbage bag full of soil across a parking lot to an unmarked office. His wife, Tomoko, holds the door to a tiny work space with lab equipment and computers set up. On the edge of Fukushima's former nuclear exclusion zone, this is the place the couple likes to call their "grandma and grandpa lab."
It started as a makeshift operation in the city of Minamisoma the year after the 2011 nuclear disaster, when people — mostly elderly — returned to the area and were worried about high radiation levels in their food and soil.
"We've given up hope that our children and grandchildren will come back to live here," Tomoko, 67, says. Most young people decided to
