Kashiwa, about 30 km northeast of Tokyo, is known for its humble beginnings as a 1970s bedroom community for Tokyo workers.
News photo
Hot or not: Hiroko Aki, a resident of Nagareyama, Chiba Prefecture, places a food sample in a radiation detector Oct. 11 at Bec-Miru, a DIY irradiation scanning store in nearby Kashiwa. YOSHIAKI MIURA PHOTO
The tranquil residential city of 406,000 in Chiba Prefecture rarely enters the national spotlight, except when Kashiwa Reysol, the local soccer team, is playing at home.
But on a street just six minutes from JR Kashiwa Station, the Bec-Miru facility that Motohiro Takamatsu opened in October is turning heads by offering residents a chance to scan their own groceries, garden soil and other items for radiation.
"To have Kashiwa become contaminated with radiation, that was a big deal for me," the software engineer and accidental entrepreneur said in a recent interview with The Japan Times.
Takamatsu imported several LB 200 gamma spectroscopy machines from Germany to equip his new shop, which allows anyone to check items for contamination from the Fukushima nuclear crisis for a fee of ¥980 per 20 minutes.
The high-tech radiation detectors cost ¥1 million each but can detect cesium levels as low as 20 becquerels, as long as customers provide 1 kg of the item.
The machines have proven popular. People brought in 3,000 items to Bec-Miru for scanning in the first two months, and reservations are now common.
The surreal sight of a do-it-yourself radiation testing facility standing next to a hardware store and an Internet cafe raises a question for Japan: Is this the new normal?
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