Iam two levels down in Tokyo’s massive central railway station, eating seafood with my wife, Penny, and a crowd of hungry Japanese commuters and travelers. In August 2023, the Japanese government, with the blessing of the International Atomic Energy Agency, released more than a million metric tons of still-radioactive water from the nearby Fukushima nuclear power plant, which had suffered a catastrophic meltdown 12 years earlier. The seafood we are eating—large pieces of shrimp tempura and fatty tuna laved with soy sauce— could well have been caught in waters containing traces of radioactive tritium, but no one seems particularly bothered. If they are, they’re not letting it interfere with dinner.
