Walking about Tokyo in the wobbliness of constant aftershocks, I wouldn’t allow myself to eat a single piece of fish during a 30 hour layover last April. I had chicken katsu for every meal and a lot of Kirin milk tea (which I have since learned might be a great source of melamine). My elementary understanding of ticket vending machines in Shinjuku—however irrelevant—was signal enough that I didn’t want to be a bother, asking people undecipherable questions about the quality of hamachi.“Don’t go to Fukushima! It’s a nuclear bomb!” A friendly young man joked darkly while helping me buy a ticket to Shibuya.But after all this time, how safe are seafood conditions? How bad could a little bite into some fatty toro be? And what if the fish came from Fukushima’s coast where serious radioactive spillage happened?Over a year and a half later, Ken Buesseler, a marine chemist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is busy dealing with such questions off Fukushima’s coast. Having looked at the 9,000 samples published by Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Buesseler has concluded that fish are at consumable levels while still containing various and complex ranges of radioactivity.While MSNBC reports that storage of Fukushima’s radioactively contaminated water is “enough to fill more than 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools,” and Buesseler’s papers are set to come out in today’s issue of Science, a future of food-rioting for some genuinely uncontaminated fish begins to feel more inevitable.Ken’s report showed not-harmful-for-consumption but scattered levels of contamination throughout a multitude of species. Bottom-feeders carried the highest levels of radioactive elements cesium 134 and 137. Cesium 137 has a half-life of 30 years, but diffuses in ocean water where it is much less of a worry than on land environments. In terms of Buesseler’s research, it’s difficult not to hypothesize that bottom-feeders are worse off due to stagnated cesium accumulated on the seafloor, or possible leakages from the Fukushima no. 1 plant.Nevertheless, if the latent amount of cesium contamination doesn’t scare Japanese health officials (who have already tightened regulations, but apparently not by much), then what will? After interviewing Louie Psihoyos, maker of The Cove, I keep thinking back to him talking about mercury-laden fish for 10 minutes. He told me about a research experiment that had shown longer-living and larger fish—the more expensive grade of sushi tuna—harbored higher levels of mercury. Although I don’t intend to quit eating fish anytime soon, I can’t help but consider a future in which I really should.
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