FUKUSHIMA CITY, Japan — City officials say they will give radiation-measuring devices to 34,000 children in September to gauge their exposure from the province’s crippled nuclear power plant.
In Fukushima City, home to more than 300,000 people about 40 miles from a meltdown at three nuclear reactors, radiation levels in the air are 40 times higher than in downtown Tokyo, 90 minutes away by train.
“We are afraid of going outside,” said Akira Suzuki, a civil servant and father. “Many people want to leave, but their jobs and families are here.”
Responding to increasingly angry and skeptical parents, education officials here said they would provide badgelike devices called dosimeters that children will wear to measure radiation around them.
Authorities increased the radiation-exposure limit 20-fold after the March 11 tsunami swamped Fukushima’s nuclear plant, causing it to leak radioactive material. Parts of the province now register radiation levels higher than the new limit.
Fukushima City’s radiation levels are generally higher at playgrounds, where children are forbidden to play. On a recent afternoon, the only souls at the Fukushima No. 1 elementary school playground were two radiation specialists testing the soil with Geiger counters.
Unable to play outdoors, children such as Mr. Suzuki’s 11-year-old son, Shunpei, are increasingly antsy.
“I want to play outside, but I can’t,” said Shunpei, an athletic sixth-grader who normally would spend a summer day swimming at his school’s outdoor pool.
Worried about the long-term effects of radiation exposure, his parents have warned him to keep the windows closed at home and to stay out of the family garden, which wasn’t planted this spring.
Exposure to high levels of radiation can cause many types of cancer, which can take years or decades to develop. Japan is enforcing an 12-mile no-go zone around the hobbled nuclear plant to help limit exposure.
Shunpei’s parents also have warned him to step around drainage holes, where toxic water can collect, and to avoid busy streets, where traffic can churn up radioactive particles, said his mother, Yoko Suzuki.
“It’s difficult for my son,” Mrs. Suzuki said. “He has a lot of energy, and he wants to play outside, just like kids in other parts of Japan.”
In many towns and cities in eastern Fukushima province, children can’t play outside. Many schools have cleared off the top level of soil, where radioactive particles can accumulate, and they are searching for ways to safely bury it.
Inside the schools, Shunpei and other children have to wear long-sleeved winter uniforms in stuffy classrooms with the windows closed, allowing no fresh air to relieve the discomforting rainy season’s heat and humidity.
While many children are forced to stay home and study after school, Tomoki Fujita, 15, and Maho Anza, 16, practice music in a riverside cultural center. “We are lucky we play music, not sports,” said Maho, who plays upright bass in a band with 90 children who perform on local TV.
Tomoki, an articulate junior high school student who plays classical violin, said he and his classmates are naturally afraid of radiation in the air, soil and tap water.
“I am young, so I am more vulnerable to cancer from cesium or other radioactive particles,” he said. “I’m scared, really scared, but I don’t want to leave Fukushima City. It’s my hometown, and all my friends and family are here.”
Students say it’s not fair that Fukushima province, which for decades provided electricity to the Tokyo area, must suffer worse power shortages than other parts of the country. “People in Tokyo should try living like we have to,” Maho said. “Then they might understand.”
More than 15,000 people died and more than 8,000 were missing after the tsunami, but no deaths as a result of radiation exposure have been recorded.
Authorities have said the Fukushima crisis has released about 15 percent of the radiation spewed during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, in which more than 30 workers died of exposure to high levels of radiation.
A U.N. atomic agency report said of the 5 million who were exposed to radiation in the Ukrainian region near Chernobyl, only 4,000 will die from various types of cancer.
To limit exposure to radiation, most schoolchildren in Fukushima wait in a lobby for their parents to pick them up in cars, but a few dare to cycle home.
Tor Duffin, a teacher who moved here five years ago from Portsmouth, England, said he must hurry home after a quick shopping trip by bicycle.
With a Japanese wife and a job at a private English school, Mr. Duffin said, he doesn’t want to leave behind his friends and students. Some of them are grieving for relatives lost in the tsunami, which set off the world’s worst nuclear crisis since the Chernobyl disaster.
“I feel that I’m within the safe levels for adults, as they say, though I’m not really sure,” he said. “But my wife and I plan to have kids. My wife has made it very clear that it will be too dangerous to raise them here in Fukushima.”
He said they are considering moving to Niigata, across the mountains on the side of the East Sea/Japan Sea, far from the radioactive elements being leaked into the Pacific Ocean by the stricken nuclear plant.
Like Mr. Duffin, many others say they would like to leave Fukushima but can’t.
“There are no jobs anywhere because the economy is so terrible across Japan,” said Umetsu Etsuzo, 66, who rents out pink bicycles by the station. “At least I have a home and a job here. …
“I’m going to stay here. I am already 66 years old. It doesn’t matter so much if I get cancer from cesium or iodine 10 or 20 years down the road.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.