Japanese cherry blossoms radiate from the ghostly figure, dressed in what might be a shroud, or perhaps a gown, adorned with traditional Ukrainian embroidery. The new installation in the lobby of Ukraine’s Chernobyl Museum entwines the two nations with a poem about Kiev’s chestnut trees embracing Japan’s sakura like a sad and worried  brother. Below it, a pair of French backpackers and a trio of Turks watch a video loop replaying the serial explosions that rocked the Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant after Japan’s March 11^th earthquake and tsunami triggered the worst nuclear disaster since Unit 4 at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station (named after V.I. Lenin, naturally) exploded 25 years ago. 

It seems ironic that the video screen bears the logo of Japan’s foreign development agency – a red sun hugging a blue globe.  In 2010, Japan gave $74,000 to improve the museum’s displays, including touch screens and DVD players. Now, it is like a funhouse mirror, with the Japanese DVD players intended for showing scenes of the Soviet nuclear disaster 60 miles north of Kiev in what is now Ukraine showing scenes of the disaster in Japan instead.

Japan has supported Chernobyl studies and projects in Ukraine for years.  Though one people suffered from the Bomb, and the other, a civilian nuclear plant explosion, both were bound by scars of the atomic age. That both, after Fukushima, are now also victims of the “peaceful atom” is almost getting weird.  No two peoples could seem further apart in their stereotypes than the productive and dutiful Japanese from the ne’er do wells of post-Soviet Ukraine.

But they actually have more in common than you might think. 

Both take their shoes off before entering a home.  Both honor their ancestors with annual cemetery feasts.  And both traditionally ward off evil spirits with sprigs of wormwood, sometimes mistranslated to the Ukrainian as chOrnobyl (or, more usually, bastardized in Russian as “chErnobyl)  In Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl, I used wormwood as a metaphor for expulsion, the ending of human life in a place because of radioactive contamination.  Now Japan’s evacuated no-man’s lands await their own wormwood forests.

The world’s worst (so far) nuclear disaster happened in what was then the Soviet Union 25 years ago. Ukraine inherited it along with independence. It also bore the brunt of the clean up.  Of 829,000 “liquidators” (so called because they were supposed to be “liquidating the consequences of the accident”, in the official parlance) from throughout the USSR, nearly half came from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – including the heavyweight Klitschko boxing brothers’ father, who recent died of cancer at 64.

Regardless of nationality, though, the vast majority of liquidators had no idea of what they were supposed to do there and most didn’t actually do very much.

That’s the opinion of Yuri Andreyev, the head of Ukraine’s Chernobyl Union, a non-governmental group for liquidators. As a 35-year-old engineer, he was in the control room 12 hours after the explosion hit Unit 4.  “Only 20,000 people, maybe 30,000 did any good at Chernobyl,” he said in the Union’s modest three-room office, where employees bring their own lunch and anyone with a Chernobyl problem is welcome. The rest – more than 800,000 people – were sent there just to prove that the Communist government in Moscow was “doing something”. Their radiation exposures were completely unnecessary.

Some studies show liquidators have worse health than the general population.  But the research is sufficiently flawed for the Ukrainian authorities to deny that specific illnesses were caused by radiation exposure and thus avoid paying for medical treatment.  While Chernobyl’s 8000 thyroid cancers are well studied, neither governments nor nuclear industries have provided any significant funding for researching more controversial health effects of radiation such as breast cancer and heart disease. Whenever you hear that “there are no studies proving any connection between radiation and [insert medical condition]”, you can be pretty sure it’s because no studies have actually been done.

Unfortunately, you would be wrong. While Kiev offered Tokyo its best nuclear disaster specialists within the first days, Japan turned them down.  An outraged colleague from NBC who was in Kiev at the time told me it was because the Japanese didn’t want any associations with Chernobyl.

That’s the problem with nuclear energy.  The industry has always treated safety as a PR problem, as though any admission that the technology was not perfectly safe would lead to the closure of every single plant tomorrow.  Well, Fukushima showed that it isn’t perfectly safe and that disasters will happen.  No one is even pretending otherwise anymore. And yet, the nuclear plants are still running and will continue for some time.

Eventually, Japan did accept some dosimeters and masks from Ukraine but never did take up the offer of nuclear disaster specialists.

Not officially, at least.  According to Andreyev, the Japanese Embassy in Kiev quietly worked through Japanese-Ukrainian friendship societies and other NGOs to try to hire the specialists privately, as day laborers -- without any contracts.

“They wanted to lawlessly exploit our people’s qualifications and economic difficulties the same way they exploit their nuclear gypsies,” he said, referring to the migrant laborers drawn from Japan’s underclass to clean up the radioactive spills and other incidents that happen regularly in the nuclear industry.  They have also been drafted into the Fukushima clean-up, lured by pay that would be a pittance for professionals. “But we said ‘no’,” Andreyev continued, as his next meeting poked her head in the door: a liquidator’s widow. “This can only be done by highly qualified personnel, with their own equipment and dosimeters, through an intergovernmental agreement.”

Andreyev clasps his hands on a desk stacked with magazines and books.  A secretary comes in for his signature, but he waves her off. “The Japanese didn’t want that.  They see themselves as the brightest in Asia and because of their arrogance, have made their disaster worse.”

Dr. Genn Saji, a former Japanese nuclear regulator who has so far sent out 134 email updates about Fukushima, had a different view.  He blamed the “political amateurs” in Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s government, which hasn’t been tapping Japanese talent to deal with the disaster, much less international expertise. “They simply do not understand the specialized knowledge necessary for accident management,” he wrote in an email.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if at least part of what Andreyev was true.  For 25 years, Hiroshima was the elder brother to Chernobyl.  Now Chernobyl is elder brother to Fukushima.  Officially accepting Ukraine’s experience would have meant acknowledging that the roles had reversed. Hiring it privately was less humiliating because Ukrainian day laborers would be subordinates and under Japanese control.

The result is that Fukushima could have been avoided, and if it could not have been avoided entirely, it could have been much less bad than it is.

Andreyev recites a litany of “stupidities” committed at Fukushima because no one heeded the lessons of Chernobyl: they shouldn’t have cooled the cores with water, they shouldn’t have dumped sand, they should have had back-up power at higher levels where it couldn’t flood.

Despite the obstacles, Andreyev has been trying to get his message out in many dozens of interviews with Japanese and other foreign media, sprinkled with tips like making sure that workers protect their heads. While radioactive particles wash easily off skin, hair must be shaved off if it is contaminated.

He cautions against building a heavy, concrete Sarcophagus around the ruined reactor core, as the USSR did at Chernobyl. The thing was never hermetically sealed, and was only supposed to be a temporary solution.  But after 25 years, the Sarcophagus is now itself contaminated.  What to do with it next would consume another article, but Andreyev suggested that the Japanese initially erect a light shielding of fabric or film to isolate the buildings from the environment.

When I told him that Tepco is planning a polyester shelter at Unit 1, Andreyev sighed. “At least that message got through.”

Sitting under photographs of the Chernobyl Unit 4’s blackened and cratered innards – before the Sarcophagus was constructed – Andreyev sounds exasperated when I ask him if Fukushima changed his mind about nuclear energy. “As of now, there are no other ways to preserve civilization,” he said, dismissing alternative fuels.  “For windmills or solar to fuel all of Ukraine’s energy needs, they would have to cover 30% of our territory.”

Like it or not, we are stuck for the foreseeable future with the 440+ nuclear reactors around the world unless we all give up our electronic gizmos and condemn the developing world to the perpetual poverty that would shrink its growing appetite for energy.

If nuclear energy is as dangerous as Chernobyl and now Fukushima prove it to be, we have to somehow reduce those dangers by heeding the lessons of both. Andreyev thinks the solution lies in internationally enforceable safety standards and the establishment of a global nuclear disaster SWAT team for the inevitable disasters of the future.  “Even an advanced country like Japan proved helpless,” he concluded. “They didn’t know what to do.” 

In that light, Japan’s refusal to officially accept Ukraine’s nuclear disaster specialists does not bode well.