They've been rattled by days of aftershocks and gone hungry because of food shortages, but the greatest fear of two metro Atlantans living in Japan is that the government is understating the danger from a damaged nuclear power plant.
"The Japanese government is not telling the truth," Katherine Xiao, an Agnes Scott College junior studying in Japan, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "The atmosphere around Tokyo is tense."
Xiao, 20, came to Japan to study its language and history; she hardly expected to be involved in the worst crisis the the country has faced since World War II. After days of waiting in lines and almost getting in fights over food, Xiao decided to flee to a safer place.
Before she could leave, however, she had to obtain a re-entry permit that will allow her to return when the crisis is past. When she arrived at the office in Tokyo where the permits are issued, she found a line of people that stretched three city blocks. She waited five hours in frigid temperatures.
By then, the hardships were piling up. Food was so scarce that she was spending her days "in a state between hungry and less hungry," she said in an email to the AJC. "I almost got in a fight for a bag of potatoes at the local greengrocer."
Her fears drove her to buy a face mask; actually, she bought a box of 50 of them, as they were almost sold out. She stopped drinking the tap water for fear it was radioactive. She sent an email saying, "Weather has been strange in the area, the wind today is not unlike the winds of Georgia coast during the hurricane season. Trees are hitting the window and doors."
Her foreign study program strongly urged her to get out of Japan while she could, and the program offered to pay for the $1,000 plane ticket to Korea, where she arrived Thursday.
Even then, Xiao was fearful and unsure of her next step. "I don't understand Korean at all," she said.
Ryan McDonald, a Snellville native who graduated South Gwinnett High School, has decided to stay in Japan, where he has taught English to children for several years. But, as he was living 30 miles from the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, he has driven inland to put distance between himself and the damaged reactors.
Conflicting reports about efforts to avert a nuclear meltdown have set his nerves on edge, and he doesn't know what to believe or what to expect next.
"We go from calm to panic and then back to calm," McDonald, 39, said in an email.
After eating only a cup of noodles and a rice ball over 24 hours, McDonald and three of his fellow teachers hopped in a car and started driving west. By that time many staples in his home of Koriyama were either gone or being rationed: two bottles of water per person, 2.7 gallons of gas per person (costing $14, about the regular price), four slices of bread per person.
It took a while before the panicked travelers realized they had no defined destination. So they stopped at an internet cafe and started making calls. They found a couple they knew who offered refuge. McDonald is now 60 miles from the reactor, with a mountain range standing between, checking the news all the time.
He worries that he'll never be able to return to his home, which he fears will be "blocked off as a radioactive wasteland."
For now, he has running water, enough food and a plan. If the crisis escalates he will head further west or fly south or leave the country.
"I'm really hoping this blows over," McDonald said.
Even as Xiao and McDonald headed away from the heart of the disaster, another Georgian was headed toward it.
Dan Polanski, a radiation expert with the state Department of Community Health, departed Wednesday to lend his expertise to Japanese efforts to cope with the effects of the radiation leaking from the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. On Friday, he contacted his office to report that he had arrived in Tokyo and dived right into the task at hand.
"I'm up about 18 to 20 hrs a day'" Polanski reported.
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