Winifred Bird: Chernobyl Expert and Tohoku Trees

Somewhere between downtown Utsunomiya in Tochigi Prefecture, and the village of Ogisu, an hour's drive to the northeast, Dr. Tatsuhiro Ohkubo pulls over to buy a box of sakura mochi. Back on the road, he passes one of the bright-pink rice cakes to the back seat for Dr. Sergiy Zibtsev, who is visiting Japan for the first time. His tall frame folded grasshopper-fashion into the small car, the Ukrainian forest ecologist bites into the salted cherry leaf wrapped around the rice cake. "Mm," he says. "What speciies is this?" Ohkubo doesn't miss a beat. "Prunus speciosa," he says. Ohkubo, 53, also a forest ecologist, can match Zibtsev thrust for thrust in Latin-laced banter. Despite the light mood, however, the pair's mission on this late March morning is somber. They're on their way to visit an organic farmer whose forests have been contaminated by radioactive fallout from the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant about 100 km to the northeast. Some 70 percent of Fukushima, and a similar portion of neighboring prefectures, is covered in forests. Managing the aftermath of the recent nuclear disaster is therefore largely a question of managing contaminated forests, but almost no one in Japan knows how to do that. Fifty-year-old Zibtsev, a professor at the at the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences in Kiev, does. He has been studying forests contaminated by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster on and off for 19 years. Ohkubo, who teaches at Utsunomiya University, has been doing the same, in Japan, for just one year. The two met in 2005 at Yale University's famed School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, where Zibtsev was a Fulbright scholar and Ohkubo a visiting associate professor.