JAPAN: THE REACTORS AND THE TEMPLE

For the Buddhist temple Empukuji, in Iwaki City, the ritual of Ohigan brings daily visitors. Iwaki City, located on the northeast coast of Japan and about a hundred and twenty-six miles south of Sendai City, was hard hit by the March 11th earthquake and tsunami. It’s an area I know well; I’ve been visiting Iwaki and Empukuji, which is run by my family, since I was four years old, and set much of my novel, “Picking Bones from Ash,” in Japan’s beautiful north. Most of Iwaki’s more than three hundred thousand residents evacuated long ago, but Sempou Mita, who is my cousin and the temple’s head priest, has staunchly refused to leave with them.

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