The five Buddhist monks hurried toward the gleaming bullet train, their
wooden sandals click-clacking on the platform, their pale gray robes
fluttering in their wake. For two days, they had slowly made their way from
their mountainous monastery in Fukushima prefecture, not far from the
crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, to the city of Niigata,
which serves as a regional transportation hub.
When the 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck northern Japan on March 11, felling
ancient pines and toppling a statue of Buddha off an altar, the residents of
the monastery felt the ground buckle under them. But the monks had no
Internet or cell phones — and the landline was severed. So they had no idea
that a killer tsunami had rushed inland, obliterating entire villages and
leaving more than 15,000 people dead or missing, according to estimates a week later that are sure to rise. And they certainly didn’t know that
a cloud of radioactive material from the quake-damaged Daiichi nuclear plant
was permeating the surrounding air.
