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While people in the 20 km exclusion zone around the Fukushima disaster site have been evacuated, the residents of this densely populated city have already waited nine months for decontamination of their houses, gardens and parks without getting any official government support for relocation, not even for children and pregnant women. We spent four days in Fukushima City doing a radiation survey in the neighbourhoods of Watari and Onami. People there have been left to cope alone in a highly contaminated environment by both the local and national governments. Our radiation experts found hot spots of up to 37 microSieverts per hour in a garden only a few meters away from a house and an accumulation of radioactivity in drainage systems, puddles and ditches. Overall, the radiation levels in these neighbourhoods are so high that people receive an exposure to radiation just from external sources that is ten times the annual allowed dose. How high their internal exposure is from eating contaminated food and inhaling or ingesting radioactive particles remains unknown, since no government program is keeping track of this.

 Parks are the most contaminated areas in Fukushima City. Some are marked with signs: “Due to radioactive contamination, don’t spend more than one hour per day in this park.” Even on sunny days last week, the parks where empty

Even inside their houses, they have to worry about radiation. We measured the rooms of an elderly lady’s house who is expecting her grandchildren for Christmas. She wanted to know what the safest place was for her grandchildren to sleep.   People in Fukushima City are worried about their health, especially families with children and pregnant women. We walked around with dosimeters and radiation detection equipment and were aware of what we are exposed to and of the risk we were taking. The residents of Fukushima City had one government survey at their house last July, if any at all. Detected hotspots where left unmarked, no instructions were given on how to behave in a radioactive environment. Since then, only 35 of the thousands of houses that need to be decontaminated have been cleaned by the government.  

FUKUSHIMA -- The Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) and residents of the zone between 20 and 30 kilometers from the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant held an emergency evacuation drill on Sept. 12.

The GSDF held a similar drill without civilian participation in July. The scenario for the drill presupposed further meltdown of the Fukushima plant's No. 3 reactor core, and a local accumulation of radioactive materials emitting 20 millisieverts of radiation within the next four days. A total of some 400 GSDF personnel were deployed for the drill held in the municipalities of Minamisoma, Tamura, Kawauchi, Hirono, Tomioka and Naraha. Thirty-two municipal workers and firefighters along with 18 local residents also joined the drill.

GSDF personnel went to assigned homes to drive elderly residents to evacuation points, as well as hospitals to drive and fly patients to medical facilities in the city of Fukushima.

This could have been homecoming week in this pretty seaside town. Seven months after most residents fled as explosions rocked the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the Japanese government has declared it safe to return to Hirono.But a week after the country’s Nuclear Disaster Minister lifted the government’s evacuation recommendation for Hirono and three other towns, no one has returned. The only people in Hirono are the same hard-core few who ignored the evacuation advisory all along, plus the teams of rescue workers who use the town as a base while they race to and from the battle to repair the four damaged reactors to the north.

For the rest of the town’s pre-disaster population of 5,500 – including the outspoken mayor – an assurance from Tokyo is nowhere near enough to persuade them to return. Most prefer to remain, for now, in cramped temporary accommodations further from Fukushima Daiichi.“I don’t plan to come back, ever,” said a middle-aged woman who briefly visited Hirono this week to retrieve belongings from the two-storey home that she and her family fled on March 12, the day after the tsunami that set in motion the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. She paused to take in her abandoned home’s view of the ocean and its now-unkempt garden. “I’ll never feel safe here. I’ll never feel secure.”

Hirono and the three other towns that the government is encouraging residents to return to are in a third zone, between 20 and 30 kilometres from the plant. Pregnant women and hospitalized patients were advised to evacuate the towns in mid-April, the rest of the 58,500 who live in the area were told at the same time to be ready to flee “on a moment’s notice.” All left immediately, with the exception of 300 steadfast residents, most of them elderly enough to claim they aren’t worried about the long-term effects of radiation.

Radioactive radium-226 was the source of a high radiation reading in Tokyo’s Setagaya district yesterday, officials said, ruling out the possibility it may have come from the crippled Fukushima nuclear reactors. An investigation of a house near the contaminated area turned up two boxes of bottles containing radium-226, Takao Nakaya, head of the Science Ministry’s office of the radiation regulation, said by phone today. “The high readings have nothing to do with Fukushima,” Nakaya said. Investigators found the radium under the floor of the house in Tsurumaki 5-chome and readings suggested an elderly woman who had been living there until February may have been exposed to radiation 30-times safety levels, Nakaya said. The ministry is investigating where the radium came from, according to another ministry official Tomokazu Ueda.

Residents in the radiation danger zone, instructed to stay inside their homes, are venturing out in search of food and fuel. A Japanese businessman in the country's northeast tells Joan Juliet Buck how government incompetence is killing people who escaped the earthquake.

Writer, cultural critic, and actor Joan Juliet Buck wrote to a foreign-born Japanese friend in the food business to ask him how we in America could help Japan. Below is his answer. Tellingly, he does not want to be identified

“As you are a journalist,” he wrote back, “first I would like to explain how the Japanese government and bureaucrats are incompetent against the crisis.”