Photo/Illutration Participants of a bus tour measure ambient radiation levels on a road in Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, on Aug. 4. (Yasushi Okubo)

FUTABA, Fukushima Prefecture--The Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum here offers a tour like no other.

At selected locations, participants get off the bus to measure radiation levels where they stand, in the grass and elsewhere.

The magnitude-9.0 earthquake that struck on March 11, 2011, generated tsunami that devastated Pacific coastal areas of the Tohoku region in northeast Japan and knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, triggering a triple meltdown.

The Futaba-based museum has offered a number of bus tours since the disaster, but this is the first designed to give people a sense of how radiation, which remains a huge problem even after 13 years, transformed the lives of the former inhabitants.

Fifteen people from both within and outside Fukushima Prefecture joined the inaugural Aug. 4 tour of the towns of Futaba and Namie.

It took them to, among other places, a ruptured section of road and Futaba’s municipal Minami Elementary School, where pupils’ satchels and other belongings remain exactly where they left them when they fled the building.

Tour participants used monitoring equipment to measure ambient dose rates there.

The government has set a long-term goal of reducing ambient radiation levels to 0.23 microsievert per hour, which is the equivalent of 1 millisievert per year.

The dose rate in the vicinity of the museum was only 0.05 microsievert per hour. But the radiation level in the bus rose to 0.3 microsievert per hour as it traveled through a government-designated “difficult-to-return zone.”

“Dose rates vary from place to place, and they tend to be higher, for example, in the grass,” Masayuki Seto, a curator with the museum who served as a guide for the tour, told the participants. “High levels of radiation, which, of course, is invisible, continue to hinder efforts at rebuilding.”

A woman in her 60s who came from the city of Koriyama in the prefecture said, “The tour has made me realize, once again, the horrible nature of nuclear power.”

And 80-year-old Koriyama resident Yasushi Takada said, “As I saw communities utterly destroyed by the tsunami and the nuclear disaster, I felt as if I were hearing the voices of those who are no longer there.”

A special exhibition titled “Fukushima and radiation” is currently running at the memorial museum through Nov. 25. It charts the consequences and challenges that resulted from the tsunami and the nuclear meltdown.

The latest bus tour was organized in a broader framework of that project. A second bus tour to measure air dose rates will be held at no cost on Oct. 13 for a maximum of 20 participants on a reservation-only basis.

For further information, visit the memorial museum website at  (https://www.fipo.or.jp/lore/en).

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