Shopping...Now with Radiation!

Today was unusual in that it was a Saturday and I didn't have to work because it is some sort of national holiday. Huzzah!
So I slept in, but still woke up before noon. I elected to go to the grocery store at noon to avoid the hordes of housewives and families that would be coming later in the day. At noon, many more traditional suburban families are having lunch. Exactly noon. This seems really weird to me, as lunch for me happens when I am hungry and it's in the middle of the day or I have a break. Some days I don't even have a class before noon, but still what I eat before work is breakfast to me.

Regardless of my lunch versus breakfast semantics debate, I went to the grocery store and only had to battle a few people to get to where I wanted to go. Crowded spaces tend to freak me out. If I can't find a way out easily, I start to hyperventilate. It's my nerves. Apparently part of my mind is always in a zombie film. That would explain my fear of being surrounded as well as my comfortable, useful, and unfashionable taste in footwear. (Always sneakers. Always...)

To my delight, they finally stopped trying to sell peaches from Fukushima! Other stores in the bigger cities don't even carry produce from that prefecture as almost everyone thinks "radioactive" when they see the name. Not my local grocery.

The whole "eat local produce" thing doesn't really work when you live here. Miyagi doesn't have the worst of it, but the government's dedication to checking for contamination leaves something to be desired. As far as I know, they still haven't even let independent investigators anywhere near the actual Daiichi plant and are busy telling the rest of us that of course everything is ok. I'm not buying it. Neither is my Japanese husband.

So we don't buy produce from Fukushima. Miyagi, Iwate, Yamagata, and even Aomori have some issues but probably aren't as dangerous. Seeing as we're trying to make a baby in the near future, we're trying to be as safe as possible, so we don't buy from them either. This also means Chiba is out. Despite being next to Tokyo and therefor not so close to Fukushima itself, the prefecture was directly in the path of the winds from the time of the meltdown. As far as my cautious husband is concerned, they're out, along with Ibaraki and just about everywhere north of central Japan. South of Nagoya is okay, apparently.

This means every time I go grocery shopping, I have to read carefully for where everything comes from. Mind you, all these names are in Kanji. The basic tactic I've adopted is if I can't read it, it's probably not safe. This makes shopping for dinner much more challenging.

I feel bad for the farmers. Through no fault of their own, everything they've ever known has become contaminated and almost if not completely worthless. The land that may have been in their family for generations, the seeds they plant, the fruit they harvest, the livestock they keep--if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, it's all for nothing. Meanwhile, most of Japan is perfectly fine, like nothing ever happened. Honestly even those farmers have reason to rejoice because after all, they are still here to tend the land. The sea did not steal them away like so many near the shores.

It's been a year and a half. Somehow that doesn't seem to mean anything. Thousands of families are still in trailers. Thousands of people are still "missing" and their families suffer. But keep in mind, that's just Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate. If you ever go to Tokyo, it will be fine because NOTHING HAPPENED THERE.

But I digress...


We wind up buying a lot of stuff from Hokkaido. Because I can read "Hokkaido"...though in my mind it's read as "North...sea (mom with a hat and water)...street?" Yeah, that's my brain and Kanji.

And I've been out here for almost five years.