VICE Radioactive Man: 20 minute mini documentary about a man living/farming alone in the Fukushima area

SNIP

“I was born and raised in this town,” he told us. “When I die, it’s going to be in Tomioka.” Naoto’s face is browned by the sun and wrinkled from smiling; his dark eyes peer out from under heavy lids—it’s not the face of someone you’d expect to defy the government by living in an area other people aren’t even allowed to visit, but Naoto wears his iconoclasm lightly.

Because he is being bombarded with as much as 17 times the amount of radiation a normal person is, and because for a while he was eating meat, vegetables, and fish that were contaminated by radiation, as well, some researchers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency wanted to run some tests on him. “When I went down and let them look me over, they told me I was the ‘champion,’” he said, meaning he had the highest level of radiation exposure in Japan. “But they also told me that I wouldn’t get sick for 30 or 40 years. I’ll most likely be dead by then anyway, so I couldn’t care less.”


Naoto at home. He doesn’t have electricity, so he uses a solar panel to power his PC and cell phone.

They did tell Naoto not to eat any more locally produced food, so now he drinks spring water that has been checked for contamination and eats relief supplies delivered from the outside. But otherwise, his day-to-day life is mostly unaffected by the invisible, but harmful, particles and waves floating all around him.

“I got used to the radiation. It’s not like I can see it, after all,” he told us. “Other people who come here temporarily stop worrying about it, too… I’m sure if you guys came back here a few more times you’d stop caring. But the needles on the Geiger counters never stop moving, so if you brought one with you then you might still care. That’s why I don’t carry one. Even if I had one, I wouldn’t use it.”

The radiation dosage per hour inside Naoto’s house, as measured by the Geiger counter we brought with us, is two microsieverts per hour, and outside our reader spiked to seven microsieverts. When we asked Doctor Hiroyuki Koide at the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute how bad this was for Naoto, he said, “Japanese law states that any location with an hourly dosage exceeding 0.6 microsieverts [per hour] should be designated as a radiation-controlled area and closed off to the general populace. Once inside a radiation-controlled area you can’t drink the water, and you really shouldn’t eat anything. It’s inconceivable to me that a normal person could live there.”

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tl;dr There is a guy in Japan near the Fukushima plant that is living his life as though nothing happened. He's getting hit with a ton of radiation and does not care.