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`Catch,' said the conductor with a grin, and my hand shot out to grab a small black and yellow box. But my smile of gratitude faded rapidly. I was holding a Geiger counter. Being nonchalantly thrown a radiation monitor at the beginning of a bus journey was a new travel experience, even for me. But as the engine of the bus hummed efficiently to life and pointed me in the direction of the Fukushima exclusion zone, it was too late to get off. Expectations of a post-apocalyptic landscape in the wake of the disaster were happily unmet. But several years after the tsunami had breathed its destruction across the eastern coast of Japan, the clean-up operation was still in progress. A large boat lay stranded in a field; a reminder. Its final destination rudely determined by the enormous wave that had carried and dumped it, like a child's plastic toy, several kilometres inland. The boat looked forlorn, awkward in a landscape as alien to it as a bus might have been if found floating across an ocean. Although some people had returned to the area since the disaster in 2011, everything was very still. A great silence lay heavily across the landscape. The sense of contamination was everywhere, held in its very invisibility, scattered by its soundlessness. The only disturbance was the men in white suits patiently scraping away at contaminated topsoil; agricultural astronauts repairing their own lunar landscape. For the local community, what happened that day is tattooed across almost every waking moment. While remnants of the annihilation created by the tsunami have largely disappeared, what remains is the intangible presence of radioactive fallout from Fukushima's nuclear plant. It tiptoes surreptitiously across the landscape, and into the lives of local communities. The earth rumbled a momentary warning below, as the man who'd passed me the Geiger counter wandered passed me. `What should I do if the numbers start to increase'? I asked nervously, pointing at the wasp-like object in my hand. He stopped, gently turning his head to look back at me over his shoulder. 'Hold your breath'. He winked conspiratorially and I caught a smile as he turned away, reminding me of the inimitable human spirit whose resilience in the face of such a disaster was mirrored by the one remaining tree that stood so determinedly for so long on that same coastline, where all others had been torn brutally from their roots. I momentarily held my breath. Just in case.