In her purse, Ikuko Hebiishi carries a Geiger counter, one of two she owns. Wrapped in a protective plastic bag, it makes her feel safe by telling her exactly where radioactivity is dangerously high.
Mrs Hebiishi is a city councillor for Koriyama, a town in the Fukushima prefecture 34 kilometres from the site of the triple meltdown that struck the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant last year. Today, Koriyama, which lies 4km outside the mandatory evacuation zone, has 250 radiation monitoring posts, where Geiger counters like Mrs Hebiishi's measure for hotspots in real time.
On this particular day, she is not looking for radiation left behind by a one-year-old disaster, but one from 25 years earlier.
She has flown more than 8,000km to tour Chernobyl and the villages where its radioactive plume had hovered after the 1986 explosion and meltdown. She had a question. What becomes of a community a quarter century after a nuclear disaster?
Two nations, separated by tradition and culture, had been thrown together by disasters that changed the way the world thought about atomic energy.
Japan was a donor to Ukraine for the construction of a sarcophagus to cover the damaged Chernobyl reactor building. In the past year, the aid has flowed in the other direction, with Japanese nuclear officials visiting Chernobyl headquarters for guidance and with an agreement signed last month to cooperate on post-disaster response.
"Countries that have experienced such terrible disasters at nuclear power plants are quite naturally attempting to coordinate efforts not only in tackling their consequences, but also in preventing them in the future," Andriy Kliuyev, the secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council, told Ukrainian media. "We, in turn, are ready to use the experience we have accumulated over the last 25 years to help … Japan tackle the consequences of the accident at the Fukushima plant."
On the surface, Japan and Ukraine face many of the same challenges - containing out-of-control reactors, relocating citizens from contaminated zones and regaining the public's trust. But the two nations have chosen opposite paths when it comes to the future of atomic power.
When the Soviet Union faced the crisis in Ukraine, it temporarily shut down Chernobyl Unit 4's three sister reactors and halted construction on a fifth. But it was quick to bring what was Ukraine's first nuclear power station back online: Unit 1 restarted in October 1986, just six months after the meltdown, and units 2 and 3 soon followed.
Although Ukraine shut down the last of Chernobyl's capacity in 2000 because of international pressure, half of its electricity still comes from 15 reactors.
In contrast, Japan was due to shut down the last of its 54 reactors yesterday, taking the technology that once provided a third of its power completely offline. Local authorities have been loath to give the green light for the reactors to restart, although many of the plants are run by companies other than Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the Fukushima Dai-ichi operator.
The attitude of Mrs Hebiishi, who has participated in sit-in protests at government ministries and Tepco's headquarters as part of an activist group called Women of Fukushima, illustrates the distrust some Japanese feel towards atomic power.
"When you look into the big risks of nuclear power plants, even economically it doesn't match the risks and benefits," says Mrs Hebiishi, speaking through a translator. "The people who suffered the most from this nuclear contamination were the women who tried to keep their children away from the risks."
In Kiev for a meeting with Ukrainian ministers and the head of parliament, Mrs Hebiishi unfurled a colourful quilted map of the Fukushima prefecture, with the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant marked by a black piece of cloth. "Say goodbye to nuclear power plants!" the quilt reads in Japanese.
The costs of withdrawing from nuclear energy are high. Replacing nuclear power with oil and gas is costing Japan an estimated US$100 million (Dh367.3m) every day.
Last month the government pumped ¥1 trillion (Dh45.99 billion) into Tepco in return for a controlling stake in the company, effectively nationalising it.
The government is also considering increasing the contribution of renewable energy by 2030 to between 25 to 35 per cent, the proportion that nuclear energy used to contribute.
Other nations, including Germany and Italy, have moved even further away from nuclear power, accelerating phase-outs or scrapping plans to build plants in a replay of the global reaction to the Chernobyl disaster.
Nuclear executives fear that it could take 10 years for the industry to become competitive again.
The earthquake that started it all came without warning for officials such as Mrs Hebiishi. Her memories of the nuclear emergency are inseparable from the natural disaster that sparked it.
On March 11 last year, she was attending a ceremony at a senior citizens centre as part of her duties as a city councillor. She had already spent the morning at a middle school's commemoration, part of the graduation frenzy that takes place in Japan every year before the new term starts in April. Then the quake struck, she recalled, rocking her body to and fro to demonstrate how the shaking affected her. The walls of the senior centre collapsed. People thought they would die. Mrs Hebiishi struggled to get outside.
The streets were full of debris, and fences and walls had fallen from the impact of the earthquake, whose epicentre was far out at sea.
"I felt it was the end of the world," she says.
Now, she has demands for Tepco and the government. Compensate those who were displaced by the nuclear emergency. Abolish the plants. Make Koriyama safe. Residents are still finding what they think are hotspots even at home.
Volodymyr Udovichenko, the mayor of a Ukrainian town, has a proposal for Japanese living in contaminated areas: build a town from scratch.
In April 1987, as a young official in the former Soviet Union's Communist Party, Mr Udovichenko was appointed to serve in the city of Slavutich. The town had just been built to house the evacuated workers of Chernobyl. To clear the contaminated earth, city planners had levelled the site one metre deep.
Today a broad square sits at the centre of the low apartment blocks and green playgrounds of Slavutich. In June, a white statue of an angel, donated from St Petersburg, is to be erected at the city centre. To the residents, the angel represents a rebirth from the ruins of Chernobyl.
Wiping the slate clean has worked well for Slavutich, says Mr Udovichenko, although he admits that residents still rely on jobs at Chernobyl, where several thousand workers monitor spent fuel, mow the lawn, and build the new sarcophagus that is to replace an ageing cover for the destroyed reactor building. He has been elected mayor six times, he enjoys telling visitors.
"We had hard times," he told a delegation that included Mrs Hebiishi. "And at that time we had just to give up or to climb up, and we did, and now we have a competitive town."
From Slavutich, it is only a short train ride to the plant. During the journey, Ukrainian men play cards or sit upright in their seats with their eyes closed, as if sleeping. The site is controlled like an airport, with passport checks for visitors who must have already received a security clearance. On the grounds, Unit 4 is surrounded by rusting barbed wire. A team called the International Department conducts tours, including for visitors such as Mrs Hebiichi.
"We are ready to show them the level of responsibility when we deal with nuclear power and show them the consequence of these activities, the consequences of human mistakes in our industry," says Valeriy Seyda, the deputy general director for strategic planning and development at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the government-owned body that runs the site. "But it doesn't mean that we cannot use nuclear power plants. It only means that we must bear responsibility for these.
"My opinion is nuclear energy is more ecologically friendly."
Mr Seyda's philosophy is motivated by the same factors that drove a revival of nuclear power about two decades after Chernobyl that the industry likes to call "the nuclear renaissance".
To supporters, renewable energy cannot deliver power reliably enough to replace traditional generation. That leaves two choices in the fight against climate change: rely on fossil fuels and watch emissions spin out of control, or keep nuclear power going.
Faced with global warming's threats - among them a rise in sea levels that would drown some communities - a growing number of environmentalists and economists who had been anti-nuclear have converted to the cause.
"We won't meet the carbon targets if nuclear is taken off the table," Jeffrey Sachs,an American economist, told an audience in Manila last week.
The UAE, China, India and even Lithuania are in this camp.
Others remain unconvinced.
"OK, you want to continue playing Russian roulette?" says Alexandr Likhotal, the president of Green Cross International, the non-governmental organisation that brought Mrs Hebiichi to Ukraine. "For what, just to make your bill 10 per cent less?"
Mr Likhotal, a policy adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev during his final days as president, witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a process in which he believes Chernobyl served as a trigger by exposing the weakness of the Soviet system and opening the door to the creation of environmental NGOs and more public discourse.
With Mrs Hebiishi and a group of others sponsored by the Green Cross, he makes his first visit to Chernobyl and Pripyat, the evacuated workers town where street lights shaped like a hammer and sickle lie unused - "a ghost from the past," he remarks.
The train from Chernobyl back to Slavutich also seems unchanged from the Soviet era. An open window lets a cool breeze blow in from over the water that surrounds the power station.
Mr Likhotak shuts the window. Here, he says, it is better to be careful.
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