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On March 11, 2011, a 9-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Honshu, Japan, setting off a catastrophic chain of events: The quake caused a tsunami, which in turn caused the Fukushima disaster, one of the worst nuclear disasters in history. In total, about 19,000 people died.

The day after the tsunami hit, Hiroko Tabuchi, then a reporter for the Business desk of The New York Times, pleaded with her editor. “I remember crying on the phone with her, saying ‘Please let me go to the tsunami zone,’” Ms. Tabuchi said in an interview.

Instead, her editor suggested she stay in Tokyo, sensing that there might be a bigger story to cover: the nuclear fallout from the power plant in Fukushima. Covering the disaster became a turning point in Ms. Tabuchi’s career. “It was my introduction to writing about climate, with the disaster so entwined with environmental pollution and climate change,” she said.

In 2014, Ms. Tabuchi joined The Times’s Climate desk, focusing her coverage on policy. She took on a new, messier beat this summer: pollution. In recent months, she has written about “forever chemicals” on American farmlands and the uproar surrounding plastic packaging at Costco.

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In a phone conversation from her home in Manhattan, Ms. Tabuchi, who grew up in Kobe, Japan, discussed her accidental path to The Times and the challenges of deciphering climate science. These are edited excerpts.

Did you always want to be a reporter?

I never wanted to be a journalist. I studied international relations in college, and my dream was to work for the United Nations or UNICEF. After college, I ended up working for this Japanese governmental agency, the Japan External Trade Organization. It was a tough adjustment. I wasn’t used to traditional office culture in Japan. The stories about its work culture are true: If you’re a first-year female in an office, you serve everyone tea.

Eventually, I ended up doing some work for interpretation and translation firms. I’d be dispatched to TV stations, for example, to help interview foreign sources. I met people in media at news conferences. Eventually, I was recruited by The Times of London, which was my first real media job.

How did you end up at The New York Times?

I worked for The Associated Press, then The Wall Street Journal, and was eventually recruited by The Times. I worked in the Tokyo bureau as a business reporter. A couple of years after I joined, Fukushima happened, which became the biggest news event I covered out of Japan.

In 2014, my editors said I should work in New York, so I made the jump to the United States. I had never lived in the States before. I was apprehensive because I had a competitive advantage in Japan as someone who grew up there, could report in Japanese and knew English. I didn’t know a thing about the States. I had never studied the U.S. government, so I had to learn about the judicial branches, and how counties are different from cities.

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Your new beat is pollution. Why focus on that?

Climate is very politicized. In a lot of red states, climate change can be a tricky subject. But a lot of red-state voters still care about clean water and air. Also, I sometimes struggle to get readers to my stories; if we say something like, “Our average temperatures will rise by this much in 100 years,” it’s hard to wrap your head around that. But pollution — such as chemicals turning up in our drinking water — feels much more immediate.

What are your greatest reporting challenges?

I do find the climate and environmental beat to be very challenging. You have to dig through a lot of science. I don’t want to say that business reporting was easier, but if retail sales were down, I could write a story about how analysts thought bad weather was a factor. Nobody can necessarily prove them right or wrong. But with climate science you have to be careful, or you can get things completely wrong.

There’s also a lot of policy, which is very dense. I struggle to wrap my mind around that. You have to be accurate, find the issues and write about them in a compelling way. Getting those elements into one story can be very challenging.

What’s the best part of your job?

My favorite moments as a journalist are when I’m talking to people, like a family in the Navajo Nation or a cattle farmer in Texas. I feel very thrilled when I meet someone I would have never crossed paths with if I weren’t a journalist.

You write about a lot of heavy subjects. How do you decompress?

I’m terrible at that. It helps that my husband is not a journalist. If I come home and say, “Oh my God, this terrible thing happened,” he will say, “That sounds really bad, but what should we have for dinner?” He’s only interested up until a certain pointroyal swerte, which is nice. It reminds me that there are other important things in life. I’m amazed how journalists marry other journalists and stay sane.

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