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.
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