We have decided to leave Japan so Tuning fee slashed to ¥10,200.

We have decided to leave Japan. Tuning fee slashed to ¥10,200.
We loved our life here (all the people we've met, our new apartment, the extremely kind and hardworking teachers in the nurseries, Olga's fantastic job, my beautiful shop, and the food!), but we feel like we cannot risk the children's health - however small the risks may be. So with great sadness we are getting ready to pack up and move our operations back to New York. This is until Olcika finds another sweet job in a nice place. Any ideas are welcome.

Japan Situation per Olcika

It is probably perfectly safe for an adult who is careful about food choice to live in Tokyo right now. For example, the radiation here is twice what it used to be but still less than half of what it is in New York. So in this sense it's crazy to move. Luckily, my institute is swarming with nuclear physicists and they measure the radioactivity at the institute every hour. Also, the Health Ministry posts radioactivity values of water in every purification plant and sampled food on a website. For the last 2-3 weeks our water has been almost completely free of contamination, although we drink only bottled water just in case. The food is also mostly safe. However, every once in a while a certain food item turns up highly radioactive, like green tea leaves in a prefecture way south of us most recently. Also, a supermarket in Tokyo sold banned lettuce for 9 days by accident, and a food delivery service (like the one we use) delivered highly radioactive spinach to 70 households in our area, also by accident. And we just found out that they found hugely radioactive sludge in Tokyo that was sold as construction material, so who knows where that stuff ended up. I feel like they're trying their best, but mistakes are inevitable. And of course the soil and grass is just too scary, although it still doesn't contain uranium like the soil in Colorado. But those reactors are still going to be dangerous for a long time and every day there are a medium-big earthquakes right in Fukushima (mag. 4 and 5). I don't know, these two months and this decision have been the hardest in my life so far.
     Zsófi may be almost 6 but she behaves just like a spacy teenager (except this morning she wrote a letter to the fairies and threw it out our 2nd story window so they could find it in the flowerbed).  Ben may be 63 but he also is a spacey teenager.  

Feher/Treuhaft gangstas may return to NY

We've been back in Japan for about a week, but we're seriously considering getting out of here. We are totally heartbroken since we love everything about this place: people, Olga's sweet job, our new fantastic apartment (which we furnished from zero a month before the earthquake), nurseries, schools, teachers, food food food (which, of course, is ruined now) and Ben's beautiful piano shop (soon expecting pianos). The air is fine, water okay, but the veggies (and SEAFOOD) cannot be trusted and there's radiation in the soil/grass, so the children cannot go to the playground and the park. We're now buying food from western and southern Japan and abroad, but it's hard to live like this for a long time (eg. without eating out) and Olga's tired of always worrying about safety and everything the kids touch and eat.

     Nothing's definite yet, Olcika's talking to her boss tomorrow, but we will most likely be looming.

We are returning to Wako-shi this Wednesday May 11th BUT we may leave again July 2nd.  We haven’t decided yet but Olga is considering suspending her research contract for one year while Japan stabilizes the nuclear reactors and comes to a realistic assessment of the dangers to small children of eating from the sea and from farms affected by the radioactive releases.  

We have been reading that nobody is changing their diet, partly out of amazing solidarity with the residents of Fukushima and partly out of false security promoted by TEPCO and their friends in government (I guess this is unfair, the government also wants to avoid panic).  But there’s a risk that twenty years from now Izzy and Zsófi could develop leukemia or other unimagined horror to their offspring because we needlessly fed them traces of weird sparkly isotopes.

Anyway we hope we will change our minds once we arrive in our beloved Japan.