2025-01-29
20 分钟Armed with measuring devices, groups of citizens are embracing science to monitor radioactive fallout — and regain control of lives upended by the 2011 meltdowns in Fukushima.
Hi, my name is Martin Fackler, and I'm the acting Tokyo Bureau chief for the Times.
I lived in Japan off and on since I was in college, so 27 years in total.
And I was working for the Times when the Fukushima nuclear disaster happened in 2011.
The disaster started with an enormous earthquake.
On Friday, March 11, I was in downtown Tokyo,
and the skyscrapers started swaying around me, and the traffic came to a halt.
And the thing is about an earthquake is that you don't really hear it.
You feel it.
It's like something that resonates your bones.
I've experienced many earthquakes during my time in East Asia,
and this was by far the longest and most powerful that I've ever felt.
When it was over, all the cell phones were knocked out.
The trains had stopped, the taxis had vanished from roads.
So I had to walk home across Tokyo, and that took a couple of hours.
When I got back to my apartment, I learned about the tsunami.
This huge ocean wave had ravaged the northern coast of Japan's main island of Honshu,
washing away entire towns.
I knew I had to report on this natural disaster that was taking place,
but traffic was at a standstill, so it took us hours to get out of the city limits.
And it was early the next morning when we were actually driving up