High radiation keeps Fukushima evacuee Mitsue Masukura away from home

FUKUSHIMA, JAPAN – Retiree Mitsue Masukura, 63, who used to live in the coastal town of Namie, knows she will not be returning home anytime soon.

The Japanese government’s target is to declare all areas around the crippled Fukushima No. 1 power plant livable by March next year (2017), except for three towns. Namie is one of the three. Certain parts of the town remain off limits because decontamination works have been suspended given the high radiation dosages.

Residents like Ms Masukura, a former fishmonger, are already allowed to return for only short periods during the day. They are not allowed to stay overnight.

Not that she has any plans to return.

She said: “Even if we move home, there will hardly be any amenities because many of the former merchants have moved out and started new businesses elsewhere.
“Besides, people still do not really feel safe about returning to a town so badly affected by the nuclear fallout.”

Despite official assurances of the contrary, her unwillingness to trust the authorities stems from a case of ‘once bitten, twice shy’.

In the immediate aftermath of the March 11, 2011, disaster, there was poor communication of the situation, and conflicting instructions, which led to a lot of speculation, she said.

“We didn’t know who said what or where we should go,” she said.

As a result, her family of five moved five times from town to town, ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn) to ryokan, before settling in their current temporary living quarters in Fukushima city. Each unit is smaller than the size of a one-room flat in Singapore. Her family used to live together under one roof, but now stay next door to one another across three units.

She looks forward to the family buying a house and moving to Minamisoma next year, after her grand-daughter graduates from senior high school.

When asked how she felt about not being able to return home to Namie, she said: “It’s been already five years since we left. There are all these memories of the past, which will continue to live on in the mind.”

http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/high-radiation-keeps-fukushima-evacuee-mitsue-masukura-away-from-home

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How the viewing public was ‘protected’ from seeing what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombing did to people

Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the cutting room floor https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-on-the-cutting-room-floor/ By Thomas Gaulkin, August 5, 2019 Seventy-four years after nuclear weapons were first and last used in war, it can be challenging to conceive of the devastation they cause. But even in the immediate months after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, news accounts offered a view of ingenuity and destruction that often elided the human cost.

The newsreels below [on original] were mainly screened to audiences in 1946 and 1947 and detail the destructive force of the explosions almost entirely through excited accounts of the structural damage to the cities. There’s occasional mention of the lost city populations and the scientific knowledge to be gained from studying their casualties, but hardly any description of what people actually suffered, let alone personal accounts. It’s instructive to look at and listen to these reports today, and contemplate what is missing.

The 12-minute reel below was produced by the US War Department in 1946. “Tale of Two Cities” makes selective use of film that was confiscated from a Japanese filmmaker, Akira Iwasaki—though you wouldn’t know that from the narration, which boasts that “army cameramen have found and filmed pictorial evidence that tells in twisted steel and stone the effect of death-dealing atomic power.” (Some twenty years later, historian Eric Barnouw obtained more of Iwasaki’s footage and produced a remarkably different narrative that documented the horrible physical impact of the attacks on Hiroshima’s citizens.)

Contrasted with the triumphant tone of the news/propaganda made for 1940s audiences, silence changes everything. Made public only decades later, the two films below —one beginning with footage of wounded victims, the other, a full-color glimpse of survivors picking up the pieces of the ruined city—report what those above do not, without a single word.

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