About Us

worked at jobs, Mommy in ad-industry, Daddy at a preschool. The boys at our local public daycare. Life was comfortable. Our apartment was big enough for us. Always enough food to eat. i-pods on the train and bicycling to the park. March 11, 2011, the ground shook. Like everyone else in eastern Japan, just getting home to the children was only achievable under the power of our own bodies. Having grown up in survival training and been through Hurricane Katrina in 2004, Daddy has the emergency pack sitting on go. We watched the weather patterns closely and the ever-changing worrisome condition of the nuclear plant on the Fukushima prefecture seacoast. After the second black mushroom cloud filled with flame burst forth from the complex on March 14, we all began wearing radiation filter dust masks and secured the airflow to our comfortable home, so recently set back in-place after having been shaken like a maraca a couple of days before. It was bunker down mode at home and then the wind changed. With the new strong winds coming over from China we saw an attempt for an escape with limited risk... (a heated phone call from Uncle Will in America was also a good stimulus). March 22, 2011, after finally securing the quickest plane out of town possible, we were off to America to wait-out and see the risk of staying-on in Tokyo. During golden week in May, after seeing the majority of I-131 having subsided, we made the decision to return home for a year or two. Both Mommy and Daddy quit our jobs upon evacuation and upon our return found ourselves gripped with the overwhelming need to do something to make the situation better for the community in which we lived (in addition to finding stable employment).

Within a week, we received our Geiger counter and began monitoring our own area. Inspired by Tokyo Radiation Levels group on FaceBook, we felt that sharing all information gathered was an obligation of every member of society and began an attempt at doing our part.

Within a couple of days, a friend, seeing our data posts on private FaceBook pages suggested that the data collected was quite important and should be stored/ shared in a manner in which those needing it may have access. We promptly created a Google docs spreadsheet and Twitter/ FaceBook groups. May 19, 2011, we located our first micro-hotspot in front of a local children's hall and had no idea what to do about it. measuring 0.7μSv/h on Radex RD 1706 (and weighing in at probably no more than 500g) in hind-sight, this was really very contaminated. Within a week, we began to work on creating a local action network based on protecting children from internal exposure to radionuclides. Safe-Suginami Project was kicked-off on June 10, 2011 with a petition to government, local residents, and business organizations to act in order to prevent risk of injury to the kids around us.Tokyo Kids & Radiation maintained monitoring of Suginami-ku and other areas we visited for 3 months and began more thorough investigation there-after. In August 2011, we began the move into scintillation counting and eventually Radio-isotopic identification and quantification.

Studying from online material, burning up Skype, FaceBook, and email, we did years of study in a matter of months. Working full-time jobs and kids going to school, organizing local action, such as: meeting with the mayor, hosting several safety symposiums, decontaminating every relative high spot in our own neighborhood, and trying to stay married at the same time; we are still a young family living in western central Tokyo with two young kids. We got a crash-course in nuclear catastrophe and believe every human being has an obligation to work towards making our environment a safer place for our children.