A Month After the Earthquake, the Crisis Continues and the Questions Mount

Katsumi Yamauchi’s strawberries didn’t look radioactive. Nor did his tomatoes, or the waxy-skinned turnips nearby, or any of the other fresh fruit and vegetables that customers perused on a busy sidewalk in central Tokyo last week. But this was the first shred of business Yamauchi, a farmer from Ibaraki prefecture just south of Fukushima, had seen in weeks, since people started worrying that produce grown anywhere near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant was irradiated. “Because of the rumors, we can’t sell anything,” said Yamauchi. “I’m happy people are buying this stuff.” Since April 1, Tokyoites have been flocking to this impromptu farmers’ market set up to help quake-affected vendors like Yamauchi. “I’m buying vegetables here to support the farmers,” says Mina Sudo, her 2- and 4-year-old boys in tow. “I’m not sure if all produce is completely safe right now. But I trust the government.”

One month ago, that was hardly a radical thing to say in Japan. But one month ago, Japan was a different place. On March 11, millions of people’s lives were thrown into a tailspin after the largest earthquake in Japan’s recorded history struck off the northeast coast, triggering a tsunami that swallowed swaths of the rugged shoreline and set off a nuclear crisis that is still unfolding. Each day in the past four weeks has brought more grim news; on Monday another massive 7.1 aftershock struck the northeast, prompting a tsunami alert and workers to evacuate their posts at Fukushima yet again. The official tally of those who have died is nearly 13,000. Each day, thousands of Japanese and American troops set out to look for the 15,000 people who are still formally categorized as missing. As their search, and time, wears on, questions mount: Why have officials waited so long to finalize the death toll? Why did Prime Minister Naoto Kan wait over three weeks to visit the disaster zone? And what’s next?

(See TIME’s exclusive pictures from inside the quake zone.)

Answers to those questions will be slow to come. Across the northeast, some 160,000 people are still sleeping, eating and waiting in makeshift evacuation centers. A week ago, at a school turned shelter in Rikuzentakata, a town of 23,000 that was among the worst damaged by the tsunami, 57-year-old Shoko Ito wiped off a photo album she had salvaged from the wreckage of her home. She pointed to a picture of her husband, who was killed in the tsunami. “I have no idea where I’m going to live,” she said. Last week, the town held a lottery for 36 temporary houses erected in the yard of a junior high school — there were 1,160 applicants. Kan has tried to assure people that, with time, towns like this can and will rebuild. He’s casting the effort as an opportunity, promising that homes will be built on higher ground and pledging that the redesign will emphasize green technology. “We will reconstruct with the dream of building a great Tohoku region and a great Japan,” he told reporters on April 1.

For nuclear evacuees, the very idea of rebuilding looks increasingly out of reach. As images are emerging from the deserted zone, where forgotten corpses rest in situ and dogs roam the empty streets, many evacuees are beginning to wonder when and if they’ll be able to return. On Monday, officials said residents of towns outside the original 12-mile (20 km) exclusion zone might also have to evacuate. “It’s possible that people might be able to go home in three to six months,” says Dr. Akashi Makoto, the executive director of Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences. But that’s if the workers can get the plant’s electricity working again soon. And then there’s the issue of decontamination: in order for people to return, radioactive soil would need to be removed, and produce and water imported for years to come. “It’s a big problem,” Makoto says.

(See photos from inside Japan’s exclusion zone.)

That does not bode well for the farmers or fishermen in the northeast who, like Yamauchi at the farmers’ market, have come under huge strain. Along the coast, rice crops were wiped out by the waves, and the infrastructure of key fishing ports like Mizuma and Kesennuma has been devastated. Even the fishermen who did not lose their boats say it will be months before they are able to start selling fish again. In Fukushima, soil around the power plant, including outside the recommended evacuation zone, has been found to have doses of radiation hundreds of times higher than normal. On Friday, the government announced that farmers would be prohibited from planting in soil given the current levels of cesium, the longest-lasting radioactive material leaking from Fukushima. (A study released last week found that cesium 137 levels in a village outside the 19-mile (30 km) recommended evacuation zone were between 590,000 and 2.19 million becquerels per cu m; after Chernobyl, residents living in areas that measured above 555,000 were forced to relocate.)

See Japan’s nuclear crisis explained in four minutes.

See TIME’s full coverage of the Japan quake.

The same day, China expanded its ban on Japanese produce and food from 12 prefectures in the vicinity of the plant, joining the U.S., South Korea, Russia, Taiwan and Singapore in banning imports from the stricken area. Meanwhile, as Japan has started dumping low-level radioactive water directly into the ocean (a process that was scheduled to stop on Sunday), many more nations have balked at putting Japanese seafood on their table, regardless of where it came from.

Last week, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) announced a plan to make token payments to farmers and residents in nine communities around the plant by the end of the month. The offer was made to 10 towns, but one — Namie, with a population of about 20,000 — has already refused to take the handout. Though TEPCO itself did not confirm the amount it would offer each city, a Namie city official told CNN that it was around $240,000 — about $12 for each of Namie’s residents. Tamotsu Baba, Namie’s mayor, told the network that they were rejecting the money on principle. “Where’s our direct apology?” he asked. After Japan’s National Federation of Fisheries Cooperatives Associations issued an unsparing statement expressing fishermen’s anger at not being consulted in TEPCO’s “unforgivable” decision to dump toxic water into the sea, the government announced that fishermen, too, would be included in the compensation scheme.

(Watch a video of a father’s search for his daughter after the quake.)

For both TEPCO and the government, however, addressing residents’ growing sense of outrage will have to take a backseat to the ongoing fight at the power plant itself. On Saturday, Industry Minister Banri Kaieda, who is in charge of Japan’s 50 reactors, donned a white protective suit and went in to thank the hundreds of workers who have braved dangerous radiation levels. Thanks to the workers’ efforts, some electricity wiped out by the tsunami has been restored at the damaged reactors, but as of Monday, their cooling systems are still not online. Until they are, workers will have to continue to pour water onto the reactor cores and spent-fuel pools to keep the fuel from releasing high levels of radioactivity into the atmosphere. As they do that, the amount of radioactive wastewater generated will continue to grow, further complicating the work site. Once stabilized, actually decommissioning the Fukushima power plant so that it no longer poses a threat to Japan could take decades.

TEPCO bonds have plummeted since the quake, and there has been much speculation that the utility may have to be at least partially taken over by the government in order to pay out huge compensation claims — up to $12.3 billion in the best-case scenario, according to a report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Last week, the government made moves to set aside up to $47 billion to finance the reconstruction of the northeast — a sum the government says can be financed without the Bank of Japan (BOJ) buying government bonds. The BOJ has, however, offered $12 billion to lend to bank branches in the affected region to facilitate the flow of cash there and avoid bankruptcies. It did so as it lowered its economic outlook for the nation, issuing a statement that “the earthquake has sharply dampened production in some areas by damaging production facilities, disrupting the supply chain and restricting electric power supply; exports and domestic private demand have been affected accordingly.”

(Watch a video of U.S. volunteers helping clean up after the quake.)

Of course, the most profound effects of the past month will probably not be measurable in yen or becquerels. Reports of Fukushima residents being shunned because of their exposure to radiation are already trickling out in Japanese media — a disturbing echo of the institutionalized prejudice faced by victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after World War II. But as Charles Ferguson, president of the Federation of American Scientists, points out, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of war. This has been a question of judgment.” He says the approval of a nuclear power plant in a seismic zone that was within reach of a tsunami, the placement of backup generators that failed in the water’s way and TEPCO’s handling of the disaster have all been called into question.

The growing sense that Japan deserves an answer to these and so many other questions has charged the air in Tokyo with a new political energy. In a city where regular protests haven’t been seen in 30 years, on Sunday some 15,000 demonstrators gathered in the afternoon in the capital’s Koenji neighborhood, carrying placards and chanting to protest Japan’s reliance on nuclear power. “I don’t want nuclear power to be what we hand on to the next generation,” said Leona Yuyama, a 36-year-old mother who took her four kids to the rally. “When I look at their faces every day, I keep thinking about the dangers of nuclear power and what they will have to face in the future.” Many protesters worry that there are simply too many reactors on this small island nation; others talked about geothermal power as a good alternative for a relatively small country like Japan. “We need new politicians who will represent our feelings about being opposed to nuclear power,” said Makoto Kitazume, a 57-year-old fisherman in the crowd. “After March 11, we lost many, many things.”

— With reporting by Lucy Birmingham and C. James Dale / Tokyo

See pictures of the Fukushima workers.

See pictures of life inside Japan’s evacuation centers.