So, does my rant about Amazon's staggeringly awful Kindle book reader mean that the Japanese Nuclear Clusterfuck of 2011 is over? No. Things are still fucked. The food chain is suspect, some areas are ruined. From my selfish Tokyo perspective, the main problem is the looming electric shortages. We haven't had blackouts for a while, but it's not the hot summer yet. Even though we don't have the blackouts yet, the entire city (and basically eastern Japan), is doing setsuden (節電), or electricity conservation, which completely fucks up a city like Tokyo. It's hot in the buildings, most escalators are stopped, and it's dark on the streets at night as if it was fucking China or something.
So it still sucks. But in one important way, it has improved:
That's the levels of cesium and radioactive iodine in the drinking water in Tokyo. None detected. While I don't tend to drink that water (even before Fukushima), I do have to shower in it, and recently since it is looking better I have started to cook with it again.
And then there is the rain:
That's looking good, too. It really sucks when you can't walk around in the rain and get wet without tripping out about what kind of radioactive shit might be giving you cancer and harming your unborn children, etc. I walked to work this morning, got wet, and didn't worry about it.
Those numbers are from http://atmc.jp (which we all still check every day), and are clearly good news.
This summer is still gonna fucking suck, though.