2026-03-10 23:31:22
Kristi Noem is out as Homeland Security Secretary, but a luxury 737 she has traveled on remains in government hands. That plane, reportedly dubbed the “Big, Beautiful Jet” by DHS staffers, has been quietly leased to the department by a company linked to William Walters, a former State Department official who donated thousands of dollars to a pro-Noem political action committee. Walters owns a constellation of businesses that—despite a dearth of prior experience working for the government—won lucrative contracts with Noem’s DHS over the past year.
One Walters company is selling half a dozen planes to DHS, in a deal that has raised questions within the department and on Capitol Hill about the cost of the aircraft. Another firm owned by Walters landed a contract worth up to $915 million last year, through a procurement process that one DHS official said was flawed and “created an appearance of favoritism,” according to previously unreported court documents.
President Donald Trump fired Noem Thursday, announcing via social media that Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) will replace her at the end of the month. But her exit doesn’t undo the massive deals that DHS struck with a vast array of contractors, many with close ties to Noem, her adviser Corey Lewandowski, and other top administration officials.
The 737 jet gained extensive attention in February when the Wall Street Journal reported that Noem and Lewandowski were traveling together on the plane. DHS is reportedly using money meant for the Trump administration’s self-deportations program to lease the plane and is in the process of buying it outright for $70 million. The taxpayer-funded aircraft, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) noted Wednesday, has “a queen-size bedroom” and a “deluxe” bar. “A big, beautiful jet paid for by the Big, Beautiful Bill,” Raskin remarked.
“A big, beautiful jet paid for by the Big, Beautiful Bill.”
During the same congressional oversight hearing, Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) referenced “reports of a romantic relationship between” Noem and Lewandowski and asked Noem if she had “sexual relations” with Lewandowski during her time at DHS. Noem called the allegation “tabloid garbage”; she and Lewandowski, who are both married, have previously denied being romantically involved with each other. Public tittering over the situation reached a crescendo last month when the Daily Show dubbed the 737 “a taxpayer-funded fuck plane,” though no evidence has emerged of anyone actually having sex on the jet.
Noem told lawmakers last week that she had only been on the plane “once.” And she said the plane was being used by other administration officials, though she didn’t name them.
On Friday, Axios reported that Noem and Lewandowski loaned the jet to First Lady Melania Trump, “who used it on several flights from D.C. to New York.” The plane last flew from DC to New York City on March 1, and Melania Trump spoke to the United Nations Security Council the next day. The White House did not respond to questions about the First Lady’s reported use of the plane.
Noem has also asserted that the plane is being “refurbished” to transport detainees.
That claim has drawn derision. A sales brochure says the aircraft—a Boeing BBJ Max 8—“caters to the most discerning of travelers, offering an exquisite flying experience like no other,” and notes that in addition to the bedroom and bar, it includes showers, a kitchen, and four large flat-screen TVs. That would create an unusually sumptuous set-up for deportees who DHS has sometimes shackled on flights.
“What kind of deportee justifies being flown out of the country in a luxury jet with a bedroom?” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) asked Noem last Tuesday.
Typical 737 Max 8s have between 162 and 178 seats, according to Boeing’s technical specs. The brochure for the 737 Max 8 Boeing Business Jet that Noem has used says the aircraft has a passenger capacity of just 17 people. The department has said it plans to add seats by eliminating “at least one of the bedrooms.” On the evening of March 4, after Noem testified before the Senate, the luxury jet flew from New York City to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where there is a facility for modifying jets.
“Wouldn’t it have been cheaper just to buy a deportation plane in the first place?” Raskin asked at the House hearing. “It’s like buying a Rolls-Royce to turn into a Metro bus.”
Other details suggest the plane is primarily intended for high-level passengers. Last year, it received a new registration number: N471US—note the 47. (The Federal Aviation Administration allows aircraft owners to pick their own registration number.) The plane also got a new paint job and design scheme similar to the 47th president’s proposal for Air Force One.
DHS did not respond to a question about when Noem or other DHS employees used the plane. But Mother Jones and Project On Government Oversight found that the jet flew to Amman, Jordan, on December 15 and left the next day. Noem was in Amman meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II on December 16, according to his office.
The plane flew to Bermuda on January 14 and to the Dominican Republic on January 15. Other flight records since December show it going to the closest major airport to Mar-a-Lago, and to various other domestic locations. It’s not clear if Noem or any other administration officials were on those flights.
Walters—the former head of a State Department unit called the Bureau of Medical Services that helped to evacuate personnel in emergencies—left government service in 2021 and later emerged as a vocal Trump supporter. In the fall of 2024, he spoke out in support of Trump’s immigration agenda and received an award from the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank.
After leaving the State Department, Walters launched a series of businesses. Following Trump’s election, his firms began seeking federal contracts to help implement the president’s plan to deport millions of people.
“We have serious concerns about the cost to the American taxpayer.”
Those contractors all seem to be headquartered in a few suites alongside a cluster of other related firms in a nondescript office building in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington. We found over two dozen companies there that list either Walters or two of his former State Department colleagues—with whom he now works—as registered agents.
One company in that building is Valkyrie Aviation Holdings Group, which owns the luxury 737 being leased to DHS. That firm, incorporated last August in Delaware, does not list its ownership or the people who run it. But the FAA’s website shows that the company shares an office suite with Soterex Financial Services, a Walters-run company. Journalist Gillian Brockell previously reported that Valkyrie Aviation is in the same building as the Walters-linked companies, among other ties.
None of the companies responded to queries, and we were unable to access the offices when we attempted to visit the Arlington building.
DHS agreed to pay one of the firms in the building, Daedalus Aviation, $140 million for six 737s, the Washington Post reported in December. Though legally separate from Valkyrie, Daedalus, according to its website, is hiring pilots and a mechanic to work on a 737 MAX 8—specifically one designated “BBJ,” for Boeing Business Jet. In other words, a luxury plane that matches the description of the one owned by Valkyrie. The solicitation contains no suggestion the plane will be used for deportations. Instead, Daedalus states that the pilots will be “executing global flight operations on behalf of a senior executive or government official.”
Federal Aviation Administration records show Daedalus acquiring five 737s to date, none of which is a Max 8 Boeing Business Jet, like the one owned by Valkyrie. Tricia McLaughlin, a former DHS spokeswoman, has claimed that the planes being acquired via Daedalus will save the government money, in part by allowing “more efficient flight patterns.”
But DHS has not provided details to bolster that claim, which has drawn broad skepticism.
“For months, we’ve requested a briefing from DHS about its purchase of these aircraft because we have serious concerns about the cost to the American taxpayer,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement. “DHS has refused to provide basic transparency and continues to stonewall the Committee.”
An agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, raised concerns about the cost of the planes. That official said that former acting DHS Under Secretary Christopher Pratt was involved in arranging to buy the jets. Pratt—who overlapped with Walters at the State Department—recently left DHS, according to two DHS officials. Pratt did not respond to inquiries.
Two other companies linked to Walters appear to have quietly provided even more planes to DHS. Vigilant Aviation Holdings and Transnational Aviation Holdings—which were both registered in Delaware on the same day as Valkyrie—own business-class jets operated by DHS, according to flight tracking data. Both of these Gulfstream G650 jets have Trump-themed tail numbers that are strikingly similar to that of the luxury 737: N472US and N473US. FAA records show Transnational has the same business address and suite number as Daedalus Aviation. And the tail number for the Gulfstream jet owned by Vigilant was initially registered to Valkyrie, according to the FAA. As with its luxury 737 job posting, Daedalus is seeking a pilot to fly a Gulfstream 650 for a senior government official.
Walters’ biggest piece of DHS business appears to have come through a contract the department awarded last year to yet another firm he owns. That company, Salus Worldwide Solutions, is also located at the Arlington address, though apparently one floor up from Valkyrie. Under that contract, which is worth up to $915 million, Salus is supposed to arrange free flights for immigrants who agree to self-deport; it is also tasked with processing $1,000 exit bonuses for individuals and $2,500 stipends for unaccompanied minor children who take part in the program. Additionally, the company provides DHS with “diplomatic engagement” support to boost work by foreign governments to persuade their citizens to leave the United States.
Mother Jones and the Project On Government Oversight previously reported that DHS awarded the contract to Salus through a “limited competition,” following extensive contacts between company employees and top DHS officials, among them Pratt.
“I can’t think of any legitimate reason there could not have been a full and open competition for this work.”
A rival contractor, CSI Aviation, sued the federal government last August over the Salus deal, calling the award “a sham competition with a predetermined outcome.” CSI’s suit notes that Salus had no previous record of contracting directly with the federal government—though a court filing states that a $113 million State Department subcontract Salus was awarded a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration “was a significant factor in DHS’s award decision.”
In a December court filing, federal officials, even as they opposed CSI’s lawsuit, made striking admissions about flaws in the procurement process.
The government said that Salus won its DHS contract after contacting the department with an unsolicited proposal to provide services on January 23, 2025, just days after Trump’s inauguration. That’s a legal but unusual inversion of a standard solicitation, in which the government determines a need and then seeks bids from contractors to fill it. Salus’ pitch, according to DHS’s own account, led to extensive contacts between DHS and company officials about a potential contract.
A DHS contracting officer found that Salus had “appeared” to shape the government’s requirements for the contract that the firm was trying to win, which suggested “biased ground rules,” the filing says. The officer, according to the filing, also found that DHS officials “shared high-level budget and task information with Salus that was not available to the public, suggesting an unequal access to information.” All of this “created an appearance of favoritism toward Salus,” the officer found.
But, according to the court filing, the contracting officer recommended waiving restrictions meant to prevent conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety, citing steps DHS said it took to mitigate Salus’ advantages. A higher-level official concurred, noting the contract’s supposed urgency and “national security considerations.” And then Salus got the contract.
“I can’t think of any legitimate reason there could not have been a full and open competition for this work, and it’s not as though the government hasn’t contracted for charter flights before,” said Don Fox, a former acting head and general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics.
Noem and other DHS officials have touted their voluntary deportation program, which they call Project Homecoming, as a success. DHS said last fall that “tens of thousands of illegal aliens” had used the Customs and Border Protection app to assist with self-deportation.
However another court document in the Salus case suggests the program is failing to meet the administration’s hopes. Taundria Cappel, Salus’ chief financial officer, revealed that, as of December 1, Salus had paid out more than 17,000 stipends to voluntary deportees and had contacted tens of thousands of immigrants. But Cappel said the company, since receiving the contract in May 2025, had provided just “9 chartered aircraft flights” which supported “917 voluntary departures.” At that pace, Salus’ performance will fall far short of what, according to a CSI court filing, was the department’s stated goal of “1480 charter flights over three years.” Neither Cappel nor DHS responded to questions about those figures.
Other Walters-run companies are also involved in DHS’s effort to facilitate self-deportations. Soterex Financial Services, the company that shares an office suite with Valkyrie, appears to be handling payments made to people who agree to voluntarily deport, according to payment records on DHS letterhead listing Soterex as the sender reviewed by Mother Jones and POGO.
Soterex, which was formed just days after Trump announced the launch of Project Homecoming, does not itself appear to hold a federal contract. That suggests the company is working under the contract held by Salus, in effect as a subcontractor for a company run by the same person. A government procurement website does not show any federal contracts or subcontracts held by Soterex Financial, although subcontracting data is often missing.
Noem told lawmakers last week that neither she nor other political appointees at the department have influenced who receives contracts. But Noem has also touted a policy under which her office must personally approve any significant DHS spending, including contracts. In Senate testimony last Tuesday, Noem said she had personally evaluated all contracts worth more than $5 million. That gave her an undeniable role in the department’s procurement decisions.
And there’s another link she has to Walters.
In October 2024, Walters donated $10,000 to a political action committee tied to Noem, who at the time was the governor of South Dakota and widely seen as angling for a cabinet post if Trump won. That super PAC, American Resolve, is part of a network of groups that support Noem. Another, American Resolve Policy Fund, a nonprofit, paid Noem’s personal company $137,842 that year for “fundraising consulting,” the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported in January. American Resolve Policy Fund also paid $265,500 to a Lewandowski company, according to its tax filing.
Noem did not reveal those payments to her South Dakota constituents or in the financial disclosure form she filed after her nomination as DHS secretary. They remained secret until Propublica last year reported that the group had paid Noem $80,000 in 2023.
Noem was not asked about those payments at last week’s hearings. Much of her testimony involved defending her statements falsely accusing Alex Pretti and Renee Good, Minneapolis residents killed by DHS agents, of domestic terrorism. (Prior to her firing last week, POGO called for Noem’s removal, in part because of how she responded to the shootings of Pretti and Good.)
Noem also said about 650 DHS agents remain in the Twin Cities “to get to the bottom” of widespread social services fraud in Minnesota. Noem has suggested DHS would look into public officials there who, she implied, had profited from their positions. Just after Good’s death, Noem said she was sending more agents to Minneapolis “to uncover the true corruption and theft that has happened.”
This story was reported with POGO Investigates, the news reporting division of the Project On Government Oversight.
2026-03-10 22:30:54
On Monday evening, as his administration escalated air strikes on Iran, President Donald Trump openly mused about his next moves on Cuba. “It may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover,” he said. “It wouldn’t matter because they’re really down to, as they say , fumes. They have no energy, they have no money.” He told CNN last week that “Cuba is gonna fall pretty soon.”
From the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to a blockade on oil shipments to Cuba, President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape Latin America are in full swing—impacting millions of lives. People in Venezuela continue living under a repressive government now supplying oil to the US. Meanwhile, Cuba’s healthcare system has been strangled by the US-orchestrated fuel crisis there. The fear across the region is being fanned by a US arsenal aimed at killing what Trump has labeled drug dealers.
Across the globe, protestors have condemned the administration’s recent actions in Venezuela and Cuba. But as my new three-part video series for Mother Jones reveals, I saw a different story unfolding in my hometown.
Miami is home to the country’s largest Venezuelan community, which largely wanted Maduro gone, according to recent polling. It’s also home to a Cuban community that I was born into and helped raise me—one that has historically encouraged US-backed regime change.
At the same time, these communities—which had organized together to shape US foreign policy toward Latin America—now share another concern: the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The White House has targeted Venezuelan migrants at seemingly every turn, from revoking their temporary protected status to trying to use a wartime deportation law against them. And the administration is now repatriating Cuban migrants, who had long benefitted from uniquely generous immigration policy, in record numbers.
“If Cubans fall off the Republican bandwagon and the Democrats take the opportunity to do something about it, then you have a chance to shift things,” said Guillermo Grenier, the lead researcher behind Florida International University’s Cuba poll.
But the longheld assumption that younger Cubans would drive that shift has gone unfulfilled. In fact, polling shows that younger Cubans have swung rightward. It’s a reality that’s difficult to square with my personal experience.
When I turned 16, I didn’t get my driver’s license. This enraged my grandfather, who worked for decades as a driving instructor and bus driver. It also delighted him, because it meant he could keep picking me up from school. His car speakers always blared conservative talk radio, which in the runup to the 2016 election—and after spending eight hours closeted in an all-boys Catholic school—was the last thing I wanted to hear. Mostly I just sat silently, listening to what my grandfather agreed with and wondering what he would think of me if he were ever to truly know me.
It’s easy to remember the car radio and forget the time he took every day to wash out the tumbler, fill it with a cold drink, drive across town to spend a fraction of my day with me, and then drive across town again, back to Little Havana. During my grandfather’s life, I focused on political divides between us. After his passing, I’ve thought more about what united us.
Generational politics in Miami’s Cuban American community also produced the government official at the heart of all this. The complex history of US imperialism in Latin America is bigger than any one person. But we can’t understand our current chapter in that history without understanding Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles from Miami, is the senior US government official in charge of foreign policy. That includes the capture of Maduro, the oil blockade against Cuba, and regime change efforts elsewhere. He’s project managing US intervention in Cuba, with the president’s trust and backing. And Trump is reportedly testing Rubio’s name for a possible presidential run in 2028. And to understand how this man at the highest levels of government is reshaping global politics, we need to understand something he and I have in common: the experience of growing up Cuban American in Miami.
What does it mean to be an heir to the Cuban diaspora, a group both targeted by and largely encouraging US imperialism? Marco Rubio and I have different answers to that. His could explain where Venezuela, Latin America, and our world are heading—and why Rubio is steering us there.
2026-03-10 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The war with Iran has brought shipping traffic to a virtual standstill in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow Persian Gulf channel through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas flows. That has sent fossil fuel prices surging—and with them, the potential for profit.
The price of Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, is up more than 10 percent since the conflict started almost a week ago, and natural gas prices in some places, especially Europe, have doubled. US consumers are already feeling the effects, with gasoline around 27 cents per gallon higher than before the war. But industry analysts say that, at least in the short-term, higher prices could be a windfall for producers that aren’t dependent on Persian Gulf supplies, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and the French company Total.
“What’s delayed, what’s disturbed, and what’s destroyed, I think that’s the whole key.”
“If you are operating, if you’re producing, and you’re going to enjoy higher prices for your product, you are going to benefit,” said Abhi Rajendran, who leads oil market research at the analysis firm Energy Intelligence and is a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “These high prices are going to be good for energy companies in general.”
Energy stocks are to some degree reflecting those price jumps, with firms like Venture Global and Cheniere Energy seeing notable gains this week. An analysis by the EnergyFlux newsletter, for example, found exporters and traders of American liquefied natural gas are set to earn nearly $1 billion more per week based on higher prices. Refineries in the region have sustained damage that will make that business more profitable for companies located elsewhere, too.
The stock gains aren’t ubiquitous. ExxonMobil, for example, is down slightly and Chevron has been hovering around its pre-war price. Those more tepid responses could be due to a range of factors, such as geopolitical uncertainty or increased refining costs that come with high prices, but even those companies are probably selling their product for more than they were last week.
“You are opportunistic in a sense. You see a price spike and you want to capture that upside,” said Vincent Piazza, senior equity analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. At the same time, he said, “I don’t think anyone is happy with volatility.”
Shell declined to comment, and none of the other companies named in this article responded to requests for comment. But Piazza said long-term oil and gas futures show that investors expect stabilization, meaning that the gains companies are seeing now may not last. “It provides them with a modest short-term windfall,” he said. In the 12-month futures market, “prices in the latter months haven’t changed.”
Both Piazza and Rajendran made comparisons to the war between Russia and Ukraine. Energy prices skyrocketed at first—far more than they have during the Iran conflict—but eventually moderated. That also implies, of course, that there is still plenty of room for the current situation to continue to escalate before it improves.
President Trump has said US and Israeli strikes could continue for four to five weeks. More than 1,000 people have died in Iran since the United States and Israel launched their attack Saturday. Iran’s retaliatory strikes throughout the region have killed more than a dozen civilians and seven American troops.
The energy impacts have so far been relatively temporary, said Piazza, and confined mostly to delays in delivery. Prices are already coming down off their initial spikes. But if, say, a major gas port in Qatar or oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia is severely damaged or destroyed, that would drastically change the outlook. A prolonged war could also cause countries like Iraq to shutter production that couldn’t easily reopen. EnergyFlux says that if Qatari gas remains offline into the summer, companies could see as much as $20 billion more in profit each week compared to before the war.
“What’s delayed, what’s disturbed, and what’s destroyed, I think that’s the whole key,” Piazza said of the benchmarks he’s watching as the conflict continues. “Think of it as a massive storm hitting the Gulf Coast as opposed to a tsunami that wipes out entire sections of infrastructure.”
Rajendran also warned that prices could rise high enough that demand slumps, and it backfires on producers. “Once you start getting to $100 or $100-plus range, then it starts becoming economically disruptive even for the oil companies,” he said. But for now, he added, “as long as oil prices remain where it doesn’t become disruptive and destructive, oil companies are going to benefit.”
2026-03-10 04:39:29
When six-year-old Joseph Rodriguez got sick, his mother had to bring him along to her regular check-in at a California ICE office. There, last week, he was immediately detained and quickly deported—all without his hearing aids.
Rodriguez is Deaf; he and his mother Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez, an asylum seeker from Colombia fleeing domestic violence, live in the congressional district of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who sent staff to Colombia over the weekend to return Rodriguez’ assistive devices. A relative who attempted to provide them to the boy while he was in ICE detention was turned away; ICE officials refused to give him the hearing aids, according to local station KRON.
“This child has been dragged from detention center to detention center, to places that are not meant for children,” his attorney said to KRON. “They are definitely not built for children with severe disabilities. It’s inhuman, illegal, and unconstitutional.”
The family, who were deported as a group—six-year-old Joseph, his four-year-old brother, and Rodriguez Gutierrez, their mother—had lived for four years in the Bay Area city of Hayward, until their detention last week without due process or contact with their lawyers. Joseph was enrolled at the California School for the Deaf in nearby Fremont.
“Think about that for a moment: a six-year-old child with a disability suddenly in a different country, separated from the country he has come to know,” Swalwell said, “now surrounded by silence. The horror stories from this White House continue from ICE.”
Unlike many other medical devices, most hearing aids are highly customized to an individual’s hearing loss, and quality hearing aids can easily cost thousands of dollars, making them extremely difficult or impossible to replace in a situation like Rodriguez’s. (Some Deaf people choose to not use hearing devices and rely entirely on signing; Rodriguez and his family’s proficiency in ASL or other sign languages is unclear, and ICE facilities are not equipped to accommodate Deaf people without assistive devices.)
At the press conference, Swalwell also referenced ICE’s deportation of a six-year-old with cancer, among other deportations and deaths in custody that sum to a pattern of sometimes fatal hostility towards kids and adults with disabilities or other health needs. As I reported in February, the Department of Homeland Security now has just a few staff investigating civil rights complaints, meaning the department and its officials are unlikely to face any internal repercussions for their conduct—or any pressure to change course.
Swalwell, who is also running for governor of California, said that his office was working with the family’s lawyers to secure their return under humanitarian parole, but it’s not clear how long that would take.
“We will not stand by while ICE tears our families apart and endangers innocent children,” Swalwell said at the conference. “What happened here was not about public safety.”
2026-03-10 01:42:54
Zohran Mamdani maintained the right to peaceful protest on Monday, two days after two counterprotesters allegedly deployed two explosive devices during an anti-Muslim demonstration targeting the New York City mayor.
“Anti-Muslim bigotry is nothing new to me, nor is it anything new for the one million or so Muslim New Yorkers who know this city as our home,” Mamdani said in a Monday press conference. “While I found this protest appalling, I will not waver in my belief that it should be allowed to happen.”
Mamdani called the demonstration a “vile protest rooted in white supremacy,” but stressed that “violence at a protest is never acceptable.”
Jake Lang, a right-wing influencer and pardoned January 6 rioter, organized Saturday’s demonstration outside Mamdani’s official residence at Gracie Mansion. The rally, billed as “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City, Stop New York City Public Muslim Prayer,” drew counterprotesters who allegedly detonated two explosive devices at the scene. Lang has a history of organizing similar events; in January, he led an anti-immigration, pro-ICE rally in Minneapolis shortly after federal agents killed Renée Good.
According to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, Lang’s weekend protest drew about 20 people. The counterprotest, called “Run the Nazis out of New York City, Stand Against Hate,” drew about 125 demonstrators.
Tisch said one protester from Lang’s group used pepper spray against counterprotesters. About 15 minutes later, an 18-year-old counterprotester threw a lit device toward the protest area, where it hit a barrier and went out. The same counterprotester then took a second device from a 19-year-old and dropped it on the ground about a block from Gracie Mansion; that device also failed to detonate. No injuries from either device were reported.
Six people were arrested following the protest on Saturday: the two men involved in handling and deploying the devices, the person who used pepper spray, and three others related to disorderly conduct.
Mamdani said that he and his wife, Rama Duwaji, were not at the residence during the incident.
During the Monday press conference, Tisch said at least one of the devices NYPD officials found contained TATP, a chemical commonly used in improvised bombs. The two men who were arrested for deploying the devices would be prosecuted in federal court. The incident is being investigated as an act of “ISIS-inspired terrorism.”
A federal criminal complaint was released on Monday afternoon, which charges the two men with attempting to provide support to ISIS and using weapons of mass destruction.
2026-03-10 00:36:49
This story was originally published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and was supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center.
The word of the year last year in Japan was bear. Black bear sightings doubled from the previous year. There were 200 injuries and 13 deaths. Okuma, meaning “big bear,” is a town on the east coast of Japan. But it is not the bears that people in Okuma fear the most. It is radiation.
Okuma is the closest town to the three nuclear reactors that melted down at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant on March 11, 2011. On that day, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami destroyed the backup generators and cooling pumps at three reactors loaded with nuclear fuel. A fourth reactor was unfueled, but its building, filled with hydrogen from the neighboring unit, exploded along with the other three.
The wave that washed over Japan’s eastern shore killed 20,000 people, many of whose bodies were washed out to sea and never recovered. As radiation levels spiked around the destroyed reactors, 160,000 people were evacuated from Okuma and 11 other towns. A 20-kilometer ring around the plant, an area twice the size of New York City, was declared a nuclear exclusion zone. Hit by a freak snowstorm that covered the town with cesium 137 and other radionuclides, even Iitate, a village 60 kilometers to the northwest, was evacuated.
Fifteen years later, 4,000 workers struggle to control the ongoing disaster. The three melted reactors remain so radioactive that they destroy the robots sent to explore the damage. No one knows exactly where the melted fuel is located or how deep it has burrowed below the reactors’ concrete pedestals, possibly into the ground.
The water used to cool the reactors is stored in more than 1,000 tanks that reached capacity in 2023. This cooling water, which Tepco initially claimed was clean and has been releasing into the Pacific Ocean since 2023, was found to be contaminated with 62 radionuclides, including cesium, strontium, and plutonium. Two fuel pools packed with spent nuclear fuel have yet to be emptied. They sit precariously on top of units 1 and 2, which are exploded tangles of metal ready to fall over and spill into the ocean.
Cesium-laden microparticles from Fukushima have been found in air filters across Japan. As one drives the highways in Fukushima, some of the large green road signs that would usually indicate towns and turnoffs have been replaced by panels displaying radiation levels, given in microsieverts per hour. (A microsievert measures the biological effect of ionizing radiation on human tissue.) These readings can spike to dangerous levels depending on which way the wind is blowing. The radioactive material blown out of the destroyed reactors made Fukushima’s forests, which cover three-quarters of the nuclear exclusion zone, unsafe to enter. The wild boars that used to be hunted here, as well as the plants and mushrooms that used to be foraged for food, are too radioactive to eat.
Radiation levels in town centers and school yards were lowered, but a short walk into neighboring patches of grass will spike the needle on a dosimeter.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Japanese government denies that Fukushima is an ongoing disaster. “The situation is under control,” then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the International Olympic Committee as he lobbied for Japan to hold the 2020 Summer Olympics (which were delayed until 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic). Dubbed the “Recovery Olympics,” the torch was run through Fukushima’s depopulated towns before the first games were played at a baseball stadium in Fukushima City.
Okuma is the centerpiece of the government’s plan for resettling Fukushima. The government has spent millions of dollars decontaminating the streets and rebuilding the train station and other public buildings. Large subsidies and free schooling are offered to anyone willing to move into Okuma. Despite a new gym, a hotel, and a sample apartment where one can live for a week to try out the town’s amenities, Okuma has the forlorn feeling of someplace yet to recover from a great disaster. In a town that once had 11,000 people, the population is currently nudging over 1,000, with half of them newcomers. It is still unsafe to enter the woods or walk through the town’s weed-filled lots, many holding abandoned houses.
Some of Japan’s efforts to revive the area have been successful. Other measures have created injustices and stigma. The lived experience of people resettling the evacuation zone reveals an ongoing disaster at Fukushima—a disaster that is not well known in Japan or the rest of the world.
The 160,000 atomic refugees from Fukushima, known officially as internally displaced persons or IDPs, fled to other parts of Japan or were housed nearby in temporary shelters, measured by the size of tatami sleeping mats (roughly three by six feet). An eight-mat structure was deemed big enough for a family. IDPs received housing subsidies until 2017, when the government declared parts of Fukushima’s nuclear exclusion zone open for resettlement. This attempt to force displaced people back into the exclusion zone was criticized by UN rapporteurs on human rights, and the hardest hit of Fukushima’s towns still have only a handful of people living in them. The government claims that the current number of IDPs is 30,000. The United Nations says the actual number might be twice as large.
The push to resettle Fukushima’s red zone began in April 2011, when the allowable radiation dose was raised twentyfold, from 1 millisievert per year to 20. One millisievert per year remains the allowable dose for the rest of Japan, whereas 20 millisieverts per year was formerly the dose allowed for workers in nuclear power plants. The difference explains why women, particularly women with young children, have resisted returning to Fukushima, regardless of the new schools and subsidies for everything from eating out in local restaurants to gym membership.
Massive seawalls were built along Japan’s eastern coast. Fukushima was dotted with incinerators that burned up the debris left behind by the wave that washed up to 20 miles inland. Decontaminating the area included a pharaonic project to remove and bag all the topsoil contaminated with cesium 137. About 100,000 workers in protective suits and masks swarmed over Fukushima’s farms and fields, scraping up five centimeters of soil and piling it into great pyramids of black plastic garbage bags.
Radiation levels in town centers and school yards were lowered, but a short walk into neighboring patches of grass will spike the needle on a dosimeter. So, too, do the winter storms that wash radioactive material down from the mountains. In the forested hills that ring the coast, there is no way to lessen Fukushima’s radioactivity other than to wait out the half-life of cesium 137, which is 30 years. So how long does one have to wait? In about 300 years, or 10 times the half-life, the quantity of this radioactive isotope will have dropped to a thousandth of what it was.
Other strategies for decontaminating the area have had mixed results. Big gashes on the hillsides show where sand has been quarried and dumped into Fukushima’s rice paddies. With their intricate drainage systems destroyed by heavy equipment, deprived of topsoil, and covered in sand and gravel, many of Fukushima’s rice paddies have been abandoned, and the crop is barely more than half of what it was before 2011.
Many of Fukushima’s fields are covered with solar arrays. Others hold state-sponsored projects for building hydrogen fuel cells or drones. This is part of the government’s effort to turn Fukushima into what it calls the “innovation coast,” beginning with demonstration projects that the government hopes will develop into businesses. Another stretch of abandoned farmland is filled with the multimillion-dollar Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum. Opened in 2020, the museum is currently being expanded to include a hotel, a convention center, and even possibly a golf course.
The government seems to be ignoring Japan’s history and geology as it pushes to restart reactors on an archipelago that every year is struck by over 1,000 earthquakes.
A town in Fukushima, such as Iitate, might be considered decontaminated when as little as 15 percent of the radioactive soil is removed. This creates a kind of lily pad effect; people can safely hop from one clean spot to another or walk along narrow paths between radioactive hot spots. A law passed in November 2011 mandates that all of Fukushima’s radioactive soil, roughly 15 million cubic meters, will be removed from the prefecture by 2045. With no place having volunteered to take any of the soil, the government has decided to spread it across Japan.
Most of Fukushima’s bagged soil has been re-deposited into a dump built on the cliff behind the destroyed reactors. This facility separates the most radioactive elements from the soil and sequesters them in concrete bunkers. Soil containing less than 8,000 becquerels per kilo of radioactivity, which the Ministry of the Environment calls “Happy Soil,” is readied for shipment across the country, to be used in landfills and construction. (A becquerel is a unit of radioactivity, corresponding to one nuclear disintegration per second.) A load of Happy Soil, described as “revitalized and strong,” was recently dumped into the flower beds in front of the Prime Minister’s office in Tokyo.
“This is a dangerous level of radioactivity,” says Yukio Shirahige, who worked for 36 years as a cleaner mopping up spills at Fukushima Daiichi. “At these levels, you have to wear gloves and protective gear. If you had any cuts or open wounds, you were taken off the job.” At up to 8,000 becquerels per kilogram, one would not want to use this soil for growing food. (The maximum radioactivity concentration allowed for food in Japan is 100 becquerels per kilo.)
Japan has adopted this strategy to reduce the heavy burden on Fukushima and accelerate the area’s recovery. But Shirahige suspects another motive: “If all of Japan is contaminated, then Fukushima will appear to have recovered because it looks just like the rest of the country.”
In fact, the rest of Japan is already contaminated. Radiation detectors along highways measure gamma radiation, resulting from the presence of cesium 137. Recent research has found that highly concentrated cesium-bearing microparticles, formed during the reactor core melt-downs and scattered widely across Japan, might be far more dangerous if inhaled than external exposure to cesium.
“I debate this with my friends,” says Shirahige. “Those of us who worked at Fukushima believed that inhaling the dust or ingesting radioactive particles, where they do long-term damage to your lungs and other parts of your body, is more dangerous than external radiation.” Shirahige regularly scrubs down his house, trying to remove the dust, and he measures the radioactivity in every room. “The windows leak when the wind blows, and I can never get it down to zero,” he says.
The official investigation into the Fukushima disaster called it a “made in Japan” failure by a nuclear industry that suffered from regulatory capture, inbred leadership, defective engineering, and ruinous cost-saving decisions, such as not building an adequate seawall or waterproofed generators and pumps. The disaster at Three Mile Island could be dismissed as human error. The disaster at Chernobyl (as it was then spelled) could be dismissed as the product of human error and inferior Soviet technology.
“The government wants people to think that everything is improving, that there is nothing to worry about, but this is not true. “
Fukushima was different. The world’s worst industrial accident took place in an advanced industrial country with 54 nuclear reactors, supplying a third of Japan’s electricity. The final bill for containing the destroyed reactors, storing the waste, and rebuilding parts of the nuclear exclusion zone could cost over $1 trillion. This is one quarter of Japan’s annual economy. Yet, the government seems to be ignoring Japan’s history and geology as it pushes to restart reactors on an archipelago that every year is struck by over 1,000 earthquakes.
Every year in January, Coming of Age Day, a national holiday in Japan, honors teenagers turning 20 and assuming full citizenship. This year, Okuma held its ceremony on a Saturday afternoon. The event resembled a high school graduation, only more serious. The girls wore formal furisode kimonos with elaborate bows. Even the boys in Japan sometimes dress in traditional hakama skirts and half-coats. In Okuma, the boys wore black suits and neckties. Ten young people were coming of age, five boys and five girls. The ceremony took place in an auditorium flanked by long rows of seated politicians and town officials. It involved a great deal of bowing and many speeches, none by the young people coming of age.
The national news was covering the event, and the stage was sometimes more crowded with photographers than participants. This was a big day for Okuma. It represented coming of age after a nuclear disaster, a ceremonial rebirth for the town. These young people were five years old when they fled the area. So what did it mean to have them back in Okuma, transitioning from teenagers to adults?
Unfortunately, the event was not what it seemed. The town would have had 135 young adults coming of age this year, were it not for the nuclear disaster. Instead, 10 students returned for the ceremony, and they traveled long distances to get to the auditorium, as none of them live in Okuma. “I am sorry to say that I don’t know any of these people. I have never seen them before,” says Takumi Sakamoto, a slender young man who is studying sociology at Hosei University in Tokyo. The same is true for the other participants. Their official family registry is in Okuma, but these young people are returning to a town they no longer know. At least Takumi has a good reason for being here. He plans to write his thesis on Fukushima’s nuclear trauma and how people are coping with the ongoing disaster.
With remarkable ingenuity and self-reliance, people in Fukushima are living with high levels of radioactivity. These Argonauts of the Anthropocene are learning how to decontaminate their towns and fields. They are building citizen-science laboratories to check their food and monitor radiation levels. They compile archives and organize trips to Chornobyl (as it is now spelled) to learn from those who live in other nuclear exclusion zones.
Ai Kimura, a director and lead researcher at Tarachine, the Mothers’ Radiation Laboratory in Iwaki, with a yearly budget of a million dollars, primarily from donations, is as busy as ever. She runs a clinic for children and a laboratory outfitted with sophisticated equipment, including new machines for monitoring the tritium, strontium, and cesium in the cooling water that Tepco began releasing into the Pacific Ocean in 2023. (Tepco, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, owns the Fukushima nuclear power plant and other reactors in Japan.)
“The government wasn’t giving us the information we wanted, or they were giving it to us weeks or months too late,” Kimura says. “We are mothers. There are things we need to know now to take care of our children and families. It is not as if the crisis is over. There is no end in sight. The government wants people to think that everything is improving, that there is nothing to worry about, but this is not true. We have seen radiation levels rise in certain instances. We have seen parks and schools recontaminated. We have to monitor constantly and never forget. The need to test the water and soil and food and people’s health in Fukushima is ongoing, and even more dangers, from the delayed effects of radiation, lie ahead.”
“We can’t sell our fish as we used to. We get less money for our fish than other prefectures.”
Tepco plans to dump 22 trillion becquerels of tritium per year into the Pacific Ocean over the next 20 to 30 years. This is less than the tritium released from Canada’s nuclear reactors, which dump more than 3,000 trillion becquerels per year into the Saint Lawrence River. But cooling water from functioning reactors is not the same as water contaminated by melted fuel rods, which contain a brew of other radionuclides.
On several occasions, Tepco has been caught faking its safety data and covering up incidents. In 2018, the company was forced to admit that its treated water was still contaminated with plutonium, strontium, and cesium—62 radionuclides altogether—at levels, in some cases, thousands of times above regulatory limits. Tepco acknowledges that as much as two-thirds of the cooling water in its storage tanks remains contaminated. Strapped for cash, the company announced in January that it would cut $26 billion in expenses. This will slow even further the decommissioning effort at the melted reactors.
“We feel betrayed,” says Tadaaki Sawada, spokesperson for the Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Associations in Iwaki. “The government promised to consult us. They had other options besides dumping the water in the ocean, but they went ahead and did it anyway.”
A sturdy man in a blue work jacket, Sawada was visibly upset when I last saw him in 2022. At the time, Japan was reporting that a radioactive rockfish, glowing with 18,000 becquerels per kilogram of cesium 137, 180 times the legal limit, had been caught out of Shinchi harbor, 35 miles north of Fukushima Daiichi. The rockfish joined the list of 44 species that, at one time or another, have been banned from sale in Japan. The freshwater fish from Fukushima’s rivers are still banned because of high levels of radioactivity, but the rockfish and another 200 ocean species are back in the clear, at least for now.
Fukushima’s fishing fleet is half the size it used to be, and the catch is one quarter as large. The number of days allowed for fishing is limited. “We can’t sell our fish as we used to,” Sawada says. “We get less money for our fish than other prefectures.” The list of countries banning food imported from Fukushima includes Russia and China. “As long as the damage continues, we want to be compensated,” Sawada says. The criteria are complicated, and the subsidies could end soon, but at least for the moment, Fukushima’s fishers are paid for the days they don’t fish and for the fish they are forced to sell at a discount. “The money is paid by Tepco,” Sawada says, “but really it comes from the government.” (Tepco was effectively nationalized after the company was bailed out by a capital infusion of 1 trillion yen, or $12.5 billion, in 2012.)
Tomoko Kobayashi is showing me around the kindergarten she attended as a child. With a stopped clock and children’s desks exactly as they were on March 11, 2011, the kindergarten has been preserved as a memorial to the Tohoku earthquake. It is one of several memorials built in Odaka, a town that once had 13,000 residents and now has a third of that number. “We have to do this for ourselves,” Tomoko says. “We need to remember what happened. We need to know what life was like and how people survived the disaster. This archive will help us restore the town.”
Odaka is the most self-sufficient and creative town in Fukushima, in good part because of Tomoko. She owns the 13-room inn down the street from her former kindergarten. This is a traditional ryokan with warm water baths for men and women, but not much heat anywhere else, except in a central room with a long table that is piled with books, pamphlets, maps, drawings, and plans for the dozens of projects that Tomoko has helped to launch with the guests who gather every night for her common meal. In order to reopen her ryokan, Tomoko and Takenori, her husband, before his death in 2024, gathered volunteers from across Japan. They scrubbed everything and filtered the air. They opened a radiation laboratory for testing their food, and then the lab began testing food for everyone in Fukushima.
Every year, they gathered more volunteers to walk through Fukushima’s farms and fields, mapping radioactive hot spots. They organized four trips to Chornobyl to study life in another radioactive red zone. Tomoko published three volumes of interviews with Fukushima survivors. She filmed her travels and events as she revived the town’s traditional festivals and nurtured new businesses and restaurants. With unfailing cheerfulness, she worked as a sort of benevolent spider, weaving connections between everyone who came to sit at her table. The latest venture she helped to launch is the Oretachino Denshokan (commonly shortened to Oreden). Meaning “our memorial museum,” Oreden is a sculpture gallery, art space, museum, pottery studio, and library installed in a former warehouse that was decontaminated and rebuilt by a crew of 250 volunteers from around the world.
Ryoichi Sato, a ninth-generation rice farmer in a valley near Fukushima Daiichi, had a very good year in 2025. Rice paddies in his valley were not heavily hit with cesium. After deep plowing and the application of zeolite, potassium, and lots of organic material, Sato returned to growing rice again and selling it commercially in 2017. A lean, distinguished-looking man whose farm includes drones for surveying his fields, automated tractors, and a large conference room with a TV monitor and several whiteboards, Sato estimates that the rice crop in Fukushima is only 60 percent of what it used to be.
At first, the government demanded that he check radiation levels in every bag of rice, even the small ones that he sold for marked-down prices. Now he checks one bag out of every 50. Last year, Japan faced a serious rice shortage. Prices spiked by 50 percent, and Sato had a bumper crop. Since then, he has doubled his land holdings and now runs Fukushima’s largest cooperative farm, with 15 employees. He is experimenting with growing other crops such as corn and soybeans. In the meantime, a steady stream of officials from Japan’s Ministry of the Economy and other visitors parade through his conference room, consulting Sato for advice on how to improve Fukushima’s economy.
Haruo Ono also had a good year. He has a new fishing boat captained by one of his three sons. They run a 50-foot, near-shore trawler out of Shinchi harbor, Fukushima’s northernmost port. The catch was good last year, and no more radioactive rockfish have turned up. But Ono is still angry about the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. He speaks bitterly, almost yelling with frustration, about Tepco dumping radioactive water into the ocean. “They are treating it like a sewer,” he says.
With close-cropped black hair on top of a wind-weathered face, Ono is still restricted to fishing no more than 12 days per month. “Tepco plans to end its subsidies by the end of the year,” he says. “I am going to oppose it because they have yet to finish the decommissioning. They don’t even tell us when they are releasing the contaminated water. Most of us fishermen are calm now and don’t complain, but even if we spoke up, our voices wouldn’t reach all the way to Tokyo. The government never loses. They never apologize. They never take responsibility for what they have done. No one outside is talking about Fukushima, but we have not recovered.”
Another enterprising person trying to jumpstart the local economy is Yuji Onuma. Onuma, a big, bold character, worked for eight years as a professional actor in Tokyo playing Jean Valjean, the hero in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Onuma currently runs a solar power company in Ibaraki Prefecture, northeast of Tokyo. The price for the electricity that he sells to Tepco is being reduced now that the government is pushing to restart Japan’s mothballed reactors. Onuma often makes the four-hour drive to his hometown of Futaba, where he cleans his family’s graves and rents out four apartments. Futaba, which once had 7,000 residents, is the poor cousin to neighboring Okuma. The town held two of Fukushima Daiichi’s six nuclear reactors and was trying to build two more when the plant blew up. Fukushima’s expensive new memorial museum is located in Futaba, but on the coast, outside of town. “Look over there,” Onuma says as we walk in front of the abandoned houses that line what was once the main street. “They built an elevated bypass. Now people headed to the museum can turn off the highway and fly straight over Futaba.”
I meet Plaintiff #8 one morning at breakfast in our hotel. Plaintiff #8 is a young woman with thyroid cancer who has joined a lawsuit against Tepco, claiming damages for radiation exposure when she was a child. Plaintiff #8 is how she is identified in this case and by lawyers and the press. She has to remain unnamed because of the threats directed against people from Fukushima, particularly women with cancer, who are considered personally dangerous and politically injurious to the reputation of Japan. Thyroid cancer used to be rare in Fukushima Prefecture, with one case in a million. After five rounds of screening, the incidence rate is now 400 cases out of 380,000 people—1,000 times higher than before the disaster.
Plaintiff #8 had her thyroid removed when she was 17. “I was anesthetized but had my eyes open and cried throughout the surgery. Even today, recounting the experience makes my legs shake. I have suffered less than other people, but I still sometimes find myself weeping uncontrollably.” Plaintiff #8 is officially registered as handicapped after a nervous breakdown. At the trial, she was given five minutes to describe her experience.
The young woman and I walk to Odaka’s new heritage museum, where she shows me a photo of herself kneeling in front of one of the museum’s displays. Mariko Gelman, an artist from Chernobyl, had come to Fukushima and installed a sculpture called “Transparency Japan.” The sculpture is a wall of lighted bricks, each one containing a box of medicine for the pills that thyroid cancer victims in Chernobyl and Fukushima have to take for the rest of their lives.
Ruiko Muto, co-founder of the 3.11 Fund for Children with Thyroid Cancer, is helping to organize the thyroid trial. A longtime opponent of nuclear power in Japan, Muto is known for having addressed a large antinuclear rally in 2011, during which she compared Fukushima’s atomic refugees to hibakusha, the “bomb-affected people” of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. (Japanese Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe later declared that Fukushima was a third atomic bomb dropped on Japan, only this time Japan dropped the bomb on itself.)
Muto was the plaintiff’s representative in a criminal trial claiming that Tepco’s top three executives were criminally liable for placing corporate profits over public safety. After a 13-year trial, Japan’s Supreme Court found the executives not guilty. “Our courts in Japan are not politically independent,” Muto says. “They cleared the way for the next nuclear disaster.”
The government is fighting the thyroid case, claiming overdiagnosis and a lack of proof that Fukushima Daiichi is the radiogenic cause of cancer. “No matter how the case is decided, it is important for us to establish the facts and allow the plaintiffs to make a claim for justice,” Muto says.
If the coastal plains of eastern Japan are coming back to life, the hill towns in the Abukuma mountains are another matter. Rushing to beat a January snowstorm, Junko Takahashi, the Japanese journalist with whom I am traveling, and I drive up the winding roads and push farther into the forested hills to find Yoichi Tao. A University of Tokyo-trained physicist and hibakusha survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, Tao was the founder of a large engineering company before he retired to Sasu, the most remote of Iitate’s 20 hamlets. Here, he started an organization called Saisei-no-kai, the “resurrection of Fukushima,” a group whose ambitions are as large as its name. Tao built a laboratory and a guest house. He developed new methods for decontaminating rice paddies. He designed handheld radiation detectors linked directly to the internet. He and his daughter, an architect, turned a former hardware store into a research center filled with projects.
Tao hands us a statement that he wrote about living in Iitate. It describes his philosophy about the need for self-sufficiency in local communities, before concluding, “The past two years have made it clear that such ideas have remained no more than grains of sand—largely ignored by global leaders, experts, and bureaucrats.”
“The trees are too contaminated to use in my wood-burning stove,” he says. “I also failed at growing shiitake mushrooms without elevated levels of cesium. The old people are dying. We see lots of ambulances on the road, and the young people have not come back. This is our most serious problem. I thought we could revive Fukushima, but now I believe the area is likely to return to the mountains out of which it came.”
Tao pulls no punches when criticizing Tepco’s engineers. “They take advice from nobody, not even the Nobel prize winners who want to help. If their soil is safe, why do they have to remove it? Dumping cooling water in the ocean is another bad idea. Years ago, I advised them to build a closed circulation system. There is no way they can decommission the reactors by 2051, their target date. They tell us they have 880 tons of melted fuel, and, so far, they have managed to remove a piece the size of a grain of rice. I estimate it will take 100 years or more. Future generations will be cleaning up Fukushima long after we’re dead.”
Junko and I drive up another narrow valley to find Nobuyoshi Ito, who is known locally as “the measuring fanatic.” Ito walks around Iitate and up in the hills wearing a vest filled with radiation detectors. The bedroom in his house holds two professional spectrometers imported from Ukraine. Ito publishes a blog and regularly tests all the wild fruits and berries that people used to forage here in abundance.
When I last saw him in 2022, Ito handed me an Inohana “boar’s nose” mushroom, considered one of the most delicious of Japan’s 200 edible species. Ito warned me that the mushroom was radioactive. Finding his measurements hard to believe, I took the mushroom to an independent laboratory. How radioactive was it? The mushroom contained 88,000 becquerels per kilogram. It was 900 times more radioactive than the legal limit for food in Japan.
Things are a bit better this year, but not by much. Ito pulls a bag of Inohana mushrooms from his refrigerator, measuring 55,000 becquerels per kilogram. He thinks that reopening Iitate to returnees and settlers was a mistake. Three hundred people came for the housing and other subsidies, but some of them have already left. A town of 6,500 people is shrinking to one-tenth of its former size.
Ito hands us another interesting item. It is a postcard he mailed to people at the end of the year explaining why he was not sending them New Year’s greetings. “My existence is inconvenient to the village of Iitate,” he says. “They are exploiting poor people, trying to draw them here. They list subsidies but don’t mention radiation.”
As I traveled around Fukushima, I often heard people describe themselves as inconvenient.
“I am an annoyance to the town officials,” Ito says. “My existence makes life difficult for them. They lied about obtaining the people’s consent. They said they would consult us before releasing the contaminated water. They never did.”
Ito is also angry about Tepco trying to restart its nuclear reactors on the west coast of Japan. “I hate the unluckiness that I was born in a country that can forget its history in only 80 years,” he says, referring to the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II.
Ito leaves the room again and returns with a small brass bell. “The town gave me this to ward off bears,” he says. “We have had five reports of bears in the village. But they have given us nothing to protect against radiation.”
