Fukushima today, with hundreds of tanks holding radioactive water. Asahi Shimbun file photo.

As the fifth anniversary of the onset of the continuing Fukushima nuclear disaster approaches, Mary Olson, director of NIRS Southeast office in Asheville, NC and Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates are on a five-week speaking/listening tour of Japan. We will be posting Olson’s “tour diary” beginning today and continuing with new posts through March 11, the day the disaster began.

I have been to speak at the global Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons in Vienna (December 2014) and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review at the United Nations in 2015. Now, finally I am here in Japan for a five-week speaking tour during February and March 2016. Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates is here too.

In 2011, in the week that this nuclear disaster began, I became consumed by a question that women (3 or 4 of them…