Chiho Kaneko maintains close ties to family and friends in Iwate prefecture, 150 miles from Fukushima Dai-ichi, which continues to suffer from the effects of the nuclear disaster. She interpreted for former Japanese Prime Minister Kan on his trip to the United States following the Fukushima disaster and has served as an interpreter for atomic bomb survivors in various international venues.

Chiho was born in Japan’s Iwate Prefecture and graduated from Hokkaido University with a degree in agronomy. She attended University of Massachusetts at Amherst as a graduate student in its Landscape Architecture program, when she realized she wanted to take her life’s path to a different direction. Influenced by Kenji Miyazawa (1896 – 1933), a writer and poet from Iwate, Chiho has dedicated her life to exploring the conditions for universal happiness and peace through her work as a visual artist, as a language translator and interpreter, as a newspaper columnist, and as a vocalist. In the last twenty years, she and her husband have lived in Hartland, Vermont, growing most of the vegetables they eat year-round. She is a board member of Fairewinds Energy Education.

Norma Field grew up in Tokyo, Japan, with an American father and Japanese mother. Listening to her parents’ conflicting views on Pacific nuclear weapons testing turned out to be her introduction to the atomic age. The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster occurred just as she was preparing to retire from thirty years’ of teaching at the University of Chicago. That disaster brought together questions that have always been important to her : what are people able and willing to understand, given economic, social, and political constraints, in such a crisis? How do taboos get set in place, silencing people and alienating them from profound anxieties about themselves and their children because of radiation, the invisible intruder? How do these reverberate with the still unresolved history of atomic bombing?

Until the pandemic, Field traveled on average twice a year to Fukushima. She has organized symposia, translated and written on Fukushima. Recent publications include  Fukushima Radiation: Will You Still Say No Crime Has Been Committed? (editor and co-translator, 2015) and “This will still be true tomorrow: ‘Fukushima ain’t got the time for Olympic Games’” (2020).