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Japan Political Pulse: The truth about Fukushima nuclear disaster compensation

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Of the unknown number of children who have been bullied for being from Fukushima Prefecture, where a nuclear disaster is still ongoing at a power station six years since its outbreak, one boy who evacuated to Yokohama was bullied and extorted by his classmates of 1.5 million yen in total.

Now in his first year of junior high school, the boy wrote when he was in sixth grade, “My classmates said, ‘You get compensation, right?’ That annoyed me, but I was frustrated with myself for not standing up against them.”

Ironically, news reports say that because the family voluntarily evacuated from Fukushima Prefecture, they are not eligible for the high levels of compensation from the operator of the stricken nuclear plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), that some victims are entitled to receive.

Those who evacuated from Fukushima Prefecture due to the nuclear crisis can be largely categorized into two groups. The first are those who were forced to leave their homes under evacuation orders from the central government, because they lived in areas where annual cumulative radiation levels exceeded 20 millisieverts, or otherwise faced extenuating circumstances as determined by the state. Such people receive a certain lump sum from TEPCO as compensation.

The second group comprises people who lived in areas with radiation levels that did not prompt government evacuation orders, but who evacuated voluntarily out of concern for the health of themselves and their children. As a general rule, these people are not eligible for compensation from TEPCO.

In the case of forced evacuations, TEPCO conducts individual interviews with evacuees to assess the value of their property and homes. But this is strictly to compensate for the assets that people have lost.

What has often attracted attention but remains commonly misunderstood, is the monthly 100,000 yen per person that evacuees are said to be receiving as compensation for emotional suffering. Those who evacuated without orders to do so from the government are not eligible for this, either.

Meanwhile, the provision of compensation for emotional suffering to state-ordered evacuees whose homes are in areas where evacuation orders are set to be lifted will be stopped in March 2018. Whether or not such evacuees will return to their homes in Fukushima Prefecture once the no-go orders are lifted, they face the harsh reality that they will be cut off from government assistance. The government is rushing to rebuild infrastructure, and appeal to the world that they are lifting evacuation orders. But whether to return or to relocate is a difficult decision, especially for families with children.

People who evacuated from Fukushima Prefecture have not only been exposed to radiation, but to prejudice and misunderstanding regarding compensation that they may or may not have received.

The false rumor that compensation recipients are enjoying the high life from compensation payments has spread. We can’t deny that some probably indulged in the momentary influx of money and bought property or a fancy car. But because of that, the internet has been teeming with rumors that compensation recipients are tax thieves or calls for them to go back where they came from. And there’s no doubt that such a backdrop of online defamation and scandalmongering emboldened the children who bullied the boy in Yokohama.

The truth is, the family of the boy in Yokohama had evacuated Fukushima Prefecture voluntarily. They received a little over 1 million yen from TEPCO, but the parents said in an interview with an NHK new program, Close Up Gendai, that the money was put toward rebuilding their lives. Voluntary evacuees are exempt from paying rent due to the Disaster Relief Act, but many must restart new lives amid unstable finances.

The abovementioned boy moved to Yokohama with his family when he was in second grade. Shortly thereafter, classmates called him by his name, with the word for “germs” added on to the end. He soon found himself the victim of physical abuse such as hitting and kicking, and once he reached fifth grade, classmates demanded he give them money.

“I was so scared I didn’t know what to do,” the boy wrote. He stole from his parents and gave away a total of 1.5 million yen.

His parents, and other parents of children at the school who realized that something was going on, alerted the school. The school conducted an investigation, but took the bullies’ claims that the boy had given them money willingly at face value, and did nothing to remedy the situation for two years.

I, too, only learned the truth about the case just recently, but I believe the school’s misguided judgment was likely based on ignorance and prejudice toward compensation given to Fukushima Prefecture evacuees.

The boy’s mother had been traveling back and forth between Yokohama and Fukushima. He knew how much his parents were struggling, so he remained silent about the bullying.

What moved the case into a new direction were notes the victim had written in the summer of sixth grade. A message calling on bullying victims not to kill themselves also written by the now first-year junior high school student who attends an alternative school, was also released to the public.

Compensation is given to some victims of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. But there is still too little compassion toward and understanding of the various misunderstandings, discrimination and divisions that disaster victims face.

http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170326/p2a/00m/0na/003000c

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March 26, 2017 Posted by | Fukushima 2017 | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Radiation brings fear, and kids let it all out

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Kids say the cruellest things: A girl bullied at school with the taunt ‘You’ve got the radiation!’ (right) sits at her home in Chiba Prefecture, where she moved after fleeing Fukushima Prefecture in the wake of the March 2011 nuclear disaster

Radiation is a fearful thing. Colorless, odorless, undetectable except by special instruments, it’s one of those evils you can dismiss from your mind altogether, until the special instruments start registering. Then suddenly it’s everywhere, or seems to be — a ubiquitous and ineradicable contaminant.

Children, as we all know, say and do the damnedest things. They mean no harm, they just know not what they do, sometimes. Their innocence is terrifying. Sometimes innocence looks anything but innocent. But all societies recognize it.

Children are not legally responsible for their actions. Parents and teachers may punish them in order to teach them responsibility. But it’s a long process. Until it’s complete, the evil they do, when they do evil, gets filed under “mischief,” in recognition of the spirit in which it was — probably — committed.

When Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant cracked under the strain of a tsunami six years ago and irradiated large swaths of Fukushima Prefecture, refugees streamed out of the stricken area, settling where they could. Forty thousand of them remain out-of-prefecture, 5,100 in Tokyo. Most of them will never go home again. Will they ever be at home where they are?

Josei Seven magazine raises the issue of “nuclear bullying.” Children too young, one might think, to even know the word “radiation” picked it up under the circumstances, and flung it with what seems like gleeful malice at disoriented new classmates who had enough to cope with already. Six years on, says Josei Seven, they’re still flinging it.

“It started immediately,” says one refugee, recalling her son’s transfer to a Tokyo elementary school in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. “‘Fukushima kids are weird,’ they’d shout at him. Kids would crawl under his desk and jab his feet with pencils. In the mornings he began saying he wasn’t feeling well. At the time, frankly, I was too traumatized myself to take much notice.”

Lawyer Yukio Yamakawa, director-general of the Tokyo Disaster Support Network, takes up the story with an account of other children he’s spoken to. What starts with name-calling (“Hey, Radioactive!” “Hey, Bacteria!”) easily escalates into what’s hard not to call torture. One kid is forced to drink a bottle of ink. Another has his shoes tossed into the toilet. A third is met in the corridor by classmates poised as if brandishing guns: “Radiation! Bang! Bang!” A fourth suffers extortion of what adds up over time to ¥1.5 million: “You can afford it, your family gets (disaster victim) compensation payments!”

Yamakawa reports this taunt making the rounds: “Fukushima kids won’t live past junior high school anyway, so you may as well die now.”

“Tanaka-san,” as we’ll call the mother cited above, began to fear her son might commit suicide. A poem he wrote contained the line, “Oh, to be able to go to heaven.” Fully focused now, she transferred the boy to another school. The peace that followed was short-lived. Name-calling, exclusion — it started all over again. The homeroom teacher was well-intentioned and put a stop to it — what she could see of it. What went on behind her back was beyond her control. A lot did, its viciousness increasing.

“I’d been bullied myself as a child,” Tanaka says, incidentally reminding us that the problem is neither new nor necessarily nuclear-related. “I understood what he was going through.”

She transferred him again. That seems to have ended the ugliest persecution, but, once a victim, you don’t simply get over it. The boy as a small child had dreamed of being a botanist when he grew up. Now he simply says, “I have no dreams.” Fukushima No. 1 destroyed much that is quantifiable — lives, property, livelihoods — and much that isn’t.

What to make of little kids who inflict this torment on other little kids? Can innocence itself be evil? Or fictitious? One hypothesis Josei Seven raises is that children merely absorb what they hear from their parents. Lacking critical faculties and adult inhibitions, they act where grown-ups merely talk.

The energy and imagination they put into it make it hard not to suspect they enjoy it. Enjoyment of other people’s sufferings is a well-attested human trait, exploited for mass entertainment at least as far back as the Roman circuses. Nothing has happened since to root it out of us, and if radiation stimulates it today, in that respect at least it breaks no new ground.

Naked fear is a factor too. Radiation, unseen, unheard, is the most fearful of stalkers. Might school kids seriously believe their Fukushima classmates are contagious? If so, the rational response would be to stay away from them, but fear and hatred merge, short-circuiting rationality and generating “Radiation, bang, bang!”

Radiation today, tuberculosis a century ago, different causes producing similar effects. Novelist Ayako Miura (1922-1999), herself a sufferer, made what might be called “tuberculosis bullying” a sub-theme of her novel “Shiokari Toge” (Shiokari Pass), set in late-19th-century Hokkaido: “It was an age when sufferers of tuberculosis were so hated and feared that they were even forced to leave the neighborhood.” A character who innocently brings up the subject arouses horror in his listener: “Mr. Nagano, even if you only mention the name of that dreadful disease it makes your lungs rot!”

“Radiation, bang, bang!” Last July a 26-year-old man slipped into a facility for disabled patients in Kanagawa Prefecture and slaughtered 19 of them, his apparent intention being to free the world from the scourge of disability. Disability, bang, bang. In February Satoshi Uematsu was declared fit to stand trial. A psychiatric evaluation found in him symptoms of a personality disorder but not of incapacity to distinguish right from wrong.

The disorder in question, writes psychiatrist Rika Kayama in the weekly Spa!, amounts to an extreme form of self-love. “Of course,” she writes, “we all love ourselves; we all at one time or another fantasize about being king or queen of the world …” We’d all, in short, be insane, more or less, if we let our fantasies rule our actions. Most of us know when to stop.

Uematsu’s self-love, Kayama hypothesizes, took the form of a conviction of having a mission, a destiny to fulfill. Maybe we all have that too, to some degree. Adults usually stifle it. Children often don’t.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/03/25/national/media-national/radiation-brings-fear-kids-let/?utm_source=Daily+News+Updates&utm_campaign=10c9bd6edc-Sunday_email_updates26_03_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c5a6080d40-10c9bd6edc-332835557#.WNbGPRjMx2Y

March 26, 2017 Posted by | Fukushima 2017 | , , , , | Leave a comment

“Abita”, an animated film about the plight of 360,000 Fukushima Children

 

This is an animation from 2013 made by a japanese student living in Germany. A girl living in Fukushima suffers fron radiation exposure.

“Abita”, is an animated short film about Fukushima children who can’t play outside because of the radioactivity. About their dreams and realities.

 

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Children in Fukushima can no longer play in nature due to radioactive radiation.
For nature is not 100% decontaminable.
This is just a story of 360,000 children who stay at home and dream of their freedom in nature and experience reality.

Abita was given many international prize, but this not reported in Japan. Sad country!!

Awards:
Best Animated Film, International Uranium Filmfestival, Rio de Janeiro, 2013
Special Mention, Back-up Filmfestival, Weimar, 2013

Upcoming Competitions:
Eco-Filmtour, Potsdam, 2014 (nominated)
Winter Film Awards, New York City, 2014 (nominated)

Screenings:
International Festival of Animated Film ITFS 2013, BW-Rolle
Japanese Symposium, Bonn, 2013
Nippon Connection, 2013
International Uranium Filmfestival, Rio de Janeiro, 2013
International Uranium Filmfestival, Munich, 2013
International Uranium Filmfestival, New Mexico, 2013
International Uranium Filmfestival, Arizona, 2013
International Uranium Filmfestival, Washington DC, 2013
International Uranium Filmfestival, New York City, 2013
Back-up Filmfestival, Weimar, 2013
Mediafestival, Tübingen, 2013
zwergWERK – Oldenburg Short Film Days, 2013
Konstanzer Filmfestspiele, 2013
Green Citizen’s Action Alliance GCAA, Taipei, Taiwan, 2013
Stuttgart Night, Cinema, 2013
Yerevan, Armenien, ReAnimania, 2013
Minshar for Art, The Israel Animation College, Tel Aviv, Israel, 2013
IAD, Warschau, Gdansk, Wroclaw/Polen, 2013
IAD (BW-Rolle, Best of IC, Best of TFK) Sofia, Bulgarien, 2013
05. November 2013: Stuttgart Stadtbibliothek (BW-Rolle) , 2013
PISAF Puchon, Southkorea, (BW-Rolle, Best of IC, Best of TFK) , 2013
Freiburg, Trickfilm-Abend im Kommunalen Kino (BW-Rolle), Freiburg, 2013
Zimbabwe, ZIMFAIA (BW-Rolle, Best of IC, Best of TFK), Zimbabwe, 2013

Upcoming Screenings:
18. Dezember 2013: Böblingen – Kunstverein Böblingen (BW-Rolle)
21.-22. Dezember 2013: Schorndorf – Kino Kleine Fluchten (BW-Rolle, Best of IC, Best of TFK)
27. August 2014: Künzelsau – Galerie am Kocher (BW-Rolle)
Movie Night for the anniversary of the Fukushima desaster,Zurich, 2014
：引用終了

http://saigaijyouhou.com/blog-entry-1519.html

February 10, 2017 Posted by | Fukushima 2017 | , , | Leave a comment

How Pasadena-based cellist and Chernobyl survivor helps children in Japan

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Cellist Marek Szpakiewicz will perform a recital with pianist Jiayi Shi at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa Oct. 15 to raise funds for a three-quarter sized cello for the Soma Children’s Orchestra in Fukushima, Japan.

He was only 16 in 1986, but Marek Szpakiewicz understood the impact of the nuclear reactor meltdown in Chernobyl. Though it was less than 400 miles away from his home in Lublin, Poland, his family was unable to leave. However, Szpakiewicz was a talented cello player, and in 1991 he won a scholarship to study at the Peabody Institute of John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and later settled in Pasadena.

In 2011, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan kept Szpakiewciz glued to the news, moved by the survivor stories and the deaths of more than 15,800 people and recalling his own memories of Chernobyl.

“In Fukushima, there is a community there living, and they are affected by this, and we have stopped talking about it, but the kids are growing and we won’t know the consequences, we don’t know the amount of devastation,” Szpakiewicz said. “What can I do? I know music, so I can bring the music, and we know the power of music is just incredible.”

In 2012 El Sistema Japan formed the Soma Children’s Orchestra in Fukushima and Szpakiewicz immediately began lending his support. Two years later, when he spent a day with the orchestra in Japan, he noticed that mostly it was only older, bigger kids that played the cello. He also learned that one student, Risa Yoshida, was heartbroken when she’d had to give her up her half-sized cello to another child.

Szpakiewicz remembered a similar experience of his own.

“As a child, I was small and in Poland the funds are not so big and the school didn’t have the quarter-size (cello), the size I should start (with),” Szpakiewicz said. “So for a year I was practicing on the broom to practice my motions. Luckily, I was growing fast so the second year I could pick up the half-sized cello. I could finally have the cello at home from school and practice and that’s how my education started. So the pain of not having the instrument, I remember.”

In 2015, Szpakiewicz held a concert and was able to raise the money to provide Risa with a half-sized cello.

“Marek’s gift means a lot to our children in terms of ensuring a young girl’s access to quality music education,” said Yutaka Kikugawa, president of El Sistema Japan. “The new cello has broadened her horizon for music passage and made it possible for her to play the Beethoven’s 5th Symphony side-by-side with the Berliner Philharmonic in March 2016, which was certainly a lifetime experience for her.”

Szpakiewicz will perform a recital with pianist Jiayi Shi at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa Oct. 15, hoping to raise money this time for a three-quarter sized cello for the Soma Children’s Orchestra. Monrovia resident Shi also came to the United States to further her education. The two perform together often and will play selections by Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Schumann, Barber and Gershwin.

In addition to Chernobyl, Szpakiewicz lived through communist rule, which had its hold on Poland until 1989.

“From the moment I was growing up, the music was a hope for a better life,” Szpakiewicz said. “Music didn’t only play a tremendous role in my education, but my development, all the dreams and hopes that music provided for me.”

Arriving in Baltimore unable to speak a word of English, Szpakiewicz worked hard and then went on to USC, earning three degrees and a doctorate. In 2008 the U.S. government granted him permanent residency as an Extraordinary Ability Artist, and he landed a job teaching cello and serving as the director of chamber music at APU. This year he was also named an assistant professor.

“I feel the power of America, a country for foreigners. I came here, I feel so good here. My roots are in Poland, but this is my home now. This is my country,” Szpakiewicz said. “I always dreamt about coming to the States, that’s the country where I pictured myself as a child. With all the tragedy that happened in my life, I have no reason to complain because I feel privileged, I feel lucky and I feel that I have to share, so that motivates me, the kindness that I came and witnessed, so I want to pass it on.”

Szpakiewicz has a full concert schedule, including a performance with Shi in Tokyo Oct. 29. There, the Soma Children’s Orchestra, along with Risa, will join him in the encore.

http://www.dailynews.com/arts-and-entertainment/20161012/how-pasadena-based-cellist-and-chernobyl-survivor-helps-children-in-japan

 

October 14, 2016 Posted by | Fukushima 2016 | , | Leave a comment

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