Conservation group Greenpeace warned on Friday that the environmental impact of the Fukushima nuclear crisis five years ago on nearby forests is just beginning to be seen and will remain a source of contamination for years to come.
The March 11, 2011 magnitude-9.0 undersea earthquake off the nation’s northeastern coast sparked a massive tsunami that swamped cooling systems and triggered reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.
Radiation spread over a wide area and forced tens of thousands of people from their homes — many of whom will likely never return — in the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.
As the fifth anniversary of the disaster approaches, Greenpeace said signs of mutations in trees and DNA-damaged worms were beginning to appear, while “vast stocks of radiation” mean that forests cannot be decontaminated.
In a report, Greenpeace cited “apparent increases in growth mutations of fir trees, … heritable mutations in pale blue grass butterfly populations” as well as “DNA-damaged worms in highly contaminated areas.”
The report came as the government intends to lift many evacuation orders in villages around the Fukushima plant by March 2017, if its massive decontamination effort progresses as it hopes.
For now, only residential areas are being cleaned in the short-term, and the worst-hit parts of the countryside are being omitted, a recommendation made by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
But such selective efforts will confine returnees to a relatively small area of their old hometowns, while the strategy could lead to re-contamination as woodlands will act as a radiation reservoir, with pollutants washed out by rains, Greenpeace warned.
The conservation group said its report relies largely on research published in peer-reviewed international journals.
But “most of the findings in it have never been covered outside of the close circles of academia”, report author Kendra Ulrich said.
The government’s push to resettle contaminated areas and also restart nuclear reactors elsewhere around the country that were shut down in the aftermath of the crisis are a cause for concern, Ulrich said, stressing it and the IAEA are using the opportunity of the anniversary to play down the impact of the radiation.
“In the interest of human rights — especially for victims of the disaster — it is ever more urgent to ensure accurate and complete information is publicly available and the misleading rhetoric of these entities challenged,” she said.
Scientists, including a researcher who found mutations of Fukushima butterflies, have warned, however, that more data are needed to determine the ultimate impact of the Fukushima accident on animals in general.
Researchers and medical doctors have so far denied that the accident at Fukushima would cause an elevated incidence of cancer or leukemia, diseases that are often associated with radiation exposure.
But they also noted that long-term medical examination is needed, especially due to concerns over thyroid cancer among young people — a particular problem for people following the Chernobyl catastrophe. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/03/04/national/science-health/mutations-dna-damage-seen-fukushima-forests-greenpeace/#.VtmtlObzN_m
Torn bags containing radioactive soil from decontamination work are seen dumped on a beach devastated by the March 11, 2011 tsunami in Naraha, near Tokyo Electric Power Co’s (TEPCO) tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture.
The level of incompetence and irresponsibility displayed by the government is staggeringly awful.
Tokuo Hayakawa carries a dosimeter around with him at his 600-year-old temple in Naraha, the first town in the Fukushima “exclusion zone” to fully reopen since Japan’s March 2011 catastrophe. Badges declaring “No to nuclear power” adorn his black Buddhist robe.
(For a video of ‘Fukushima refugees face a bleak return home’ click here)
Hayakawa is one of the few residents to return to this agricultural town since it began welcoming back nuclear refugees five months ago.
The town, at the edge of a 20-km (12.5 mile) evacuation zone around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant, was supposed to be a model of reconstruction.
Five years ago, one of the biggest earthquakes in history shook the country’s northeast. The 10-metre (33-foot) tsunami it spawned smashed into the power plant on the Fukushima coastline triggering a meltdown and forcing nearby towns to evacuate. The disaster killed over 19,000 people across Japan and caused an estimated 16.9 trillion yen ($150 billion) in damages.
Only 440 of Naraha’s pre-disaster population 8,042 have returned – nearly 70 percent of them over 60.
“This region will definitely go extinct,” said the 76-year-old Hayakawa.
He says he can’t grow food because he fears the rice paddies are still contaminated. Large plastic bags filled with radioactive topsoil and detritus dot the abandoned fields.
With few rituals to perform at the temple, Hayakawa devotes his energies campaigning against nuclear power in Japan. Its 54 reactors supplied over 30 percent of the nation’s energy needs before the disaster.
Today, only three units are back in operation after a long shutdown following the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. Others are looking to restart.
“I can’t tell my grandson to be my heir,” said Hayakawa, pointing at a photo of his now-teenaged grandson entering the temple in a full protective suit after the disaster. “Reviving this town is impossible,” he said. “I came back to see it to its death.”
That is bound to disappoint Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Rebuilding Naraha and other towns in the devastated northeast, he says, is crucial to reviving Japan.
Tokyo pledged 26.3 trillion ($232 billion) over five years to rebuild the disaster area and will allocate another 6 trillion for the next five years.
VANISHING TOWN
More than 160,000 people were evacuated from towns around the Daiichi nuclear plant. Around 10 percent still live in temporary housing across Fukushima prefecture. Most have settled outside their hometowns and have begun new lives.
In Naraha, two restaurants, a supermarket and a post office, housed in prefabricated shacks, make up the town’s main shopping center. The restaurants close at 3 p.m.
No children were in sight at Naraha’s main park overlooking the Pacific Ocean on a recent morning. Several elderly residents were at the boardwalk gazing at hundreds of bags stuffed with radioactive waste.
In fact, the bags are a common sight around town: in the woods, by the ocean, on abandoned rice fields.
Little feels normal in Naraha. Many homes damaged in the disaster have been abandoned. Most of the town’s population consists of workers. They are helping to shut down Tokyo Electric Power Co’s (9501.T) Daiichi reactors or working on decontamination projects around town.
Other workers are building a new sea wall, 8.7 meters high, along a nearly 2 km stretch of Naraha’s coast, similar to other sea walls under construction in the northeast.
A local golf course has been turned into dormitories for workers. Some families have rented their houses to workers.
“Naraha is a workers’ town now,” said Kiyoe Matsumoto, 63, a member of the town council, adding that her children and grandchildren have no plans to come home.
RADIATION LEVELS
The town’s future depends on young people returning, residents say. But only 12 below the age of 30 have returned as worries about radiation linger.
Radiation levels in Naraha ranged from 0.07 to 0.49 microsieverts per hour in January, or 0.61-4.3 millisieverts per year. That compares with the government’s goal of one millisievert a year and the 3 millisieverts a year the average person in the United States is exposed to annually from natural background radiation.
The significant drop in atmospheric radiation allowed the government to lift the evacuation order last Sept. 5 – “the clock that had been stopped began ticking again,” Japan’s Reconstruction Agency said on its website.
“It is hoped that the reconstruction of Naraha would be a model case for residents returning to fully evacuated towns,” the agency statement said.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the town a month after that and repeated one of his favorite slogans: “Without reconstruction of Fukushima, there’s no reconstruction of Japan’s northeast. Without the reconstruction of the northeast, there’s no revival of Japan.”
But with few people coming back, there is little meaning in what the reconstruction department in Naraha does, said one town hall official who requested anonymity. “I don’t know why (Abe) came,” he said.
Back at his Buddhist temple, part of which he has turned into an office for his anti-nuclear campaign, Hayakawa called the idea Naraha could be a model of reconstruction “a big fat lie”.
“There’s no reconstructing and no returning to how it used to be before (March 11). The government knows this, too. A ‘model case’? That’s just words.”
The atmosphere in the packed meeting room is tense. It is a Wednesday night in November, and perhaps a hundred people have gathered at a community center in the city of Minamisoma, which begins about six miles north of the decimated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. At the front of the room sits a phalanx of government officials in dark suits. Facing them are men and women who were forced from their homes in Minamisoma’s Odaka district by nuclear fallout, and who are now being told they might be allowed back by spring. The question on the table is whether that move is premature. Twenty minutes into the discussion, the deep divide between the officials and the residents is clear.
An older man raises his hand. “There’s a tombstone behind my house where the radiation measures 10.5 microsieverts per hour. 10.5!” he says.
Multiplied over a year, the figure is 4.6 times the standard Japan’s government has set for mandatory evacuation, and 92 times the limit the International Commission on Radiological Protection recommends for the general population under normal circumstances. It is also far higher than most measurements taken recently in Odaka, where a massive government-sponsored cleanup – together with natural decay – is steadily lowering radiation levels.
“It’s probably a hotspot,” an environment ministry official says. “We can take care of it for you.”
“I asked the government for data about that spot in August, but I haven’t gotten anything. Why not?” the resident demands.
A woman in the audience shouts out: “Because they’re liars!”
“We think you’re afraid to give us the real data,” the man says.
Another resident speaks up: “The forest surrounding my house has not been decontaminated. Would you live in a place like that? I beg of you, please delay the resettlement!” Applause breaks out in the audience.
I kneel at the back of the crowd, surprised by the depth of the anger and skepticism coursing through the room. The normal tone of public space in Japan is deferential courtesy. That ordinary residents of a provincial town are willing to challenge officials so openly reflects a profound shift brought about by the nuclear disaster.
Simply put, far fewer people trust the government today than they did five years ago. The immediate cause of the disaster was an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011 that deprived the coastal Fukushima plant of its power supply, and hence of its ability to keep reactors and spent fuel cool. A series of explosions and meltdowns followed, which led to the eventual evacuation of 164,000 people. Subsequent investigations soon revealed, however, that poor oversight and cozy ties between government, industry, and academia (the so-called “nuclear village”) laid the groundwork for the disaster. The public also learned that the government bungled the evacuation, causing thousands of people to suffer more radiation exposure than they otherwise would have.
Since then, resistance has extended deep roots. The clearest evidence of that is here in Fukushima, where residents like the ones in this room are fighting to make sure their rights are respected. But far beyond these borders as well, communities are embracing renewable energy and citizens are protesting government abuses of power more loudly than they have in decades. The question that remains after I slip out into the cool night air is how much that resistance is changing policy and politics in Japan.
At times, the answer seems to be: very little. The same political party that enabled the Fukushima disaster through half a century of pro-nuclear policy is back in power, three nuclear reactors are running again despite safety concerns, one more is about to restart, and 20 more are awaiting approval. Meanwhile, Japan played only a minor role at the Paris climate talks in November, and is pouring money into coal plants to compensate for its idled nuclear fleet. In Fukushima, the government remains intent on repopulating the 310-square-mile exclusion zone as quickly as possible.
I have come to Japan on the eve of the disaster’s fifth anniversary to try to make sense of these changes – to weigh hope against cynicism, transformation against retrenchment. What happens here matters globally. Japan is the world’s fifth largest carbon dioxide emitter, is the number-one importer of liquefied natural gas and number-two importer of coal, and a leading exporter of nuclear and “clean coal” technologies. Its domestic energy choices clearly affect the world’s efforts to tackle climate change. But my motivation is also personal. I was living in Japan when the disaster occurred. I witnessed firsthand both its devastating aftermath and the sense of hope for a more sustainable and democratic future that sprang up in its wake. I want to know the fate of that hope.
My host in Minamisoma is a retired postman and lifelong activist from Odaka named Tomio Kokubun. He began protesting nuclear power when he was 20 years old and a new plant – Fukushima Daiichi – was proposed south of his home. Back then, his anti-nuclear activism placed him on the fringe of a community eager to benefit from the jobs the plant brought to the region. Today, he tells me with just a hint of vindication, his neighbors concede he was right to worry.
Long-time anti-nuclear activist and Fukushima native Tomio Kokubun stands next to a sign he wrote and posted near his abandoned house. It reads: “Abe administration, don’t ignore the voice of the people and restart the nuclear reactors.”
I first met Kokubun in 2013 in the snowy mountains west of Fukushima City, where he and his family had been living since they fled the coast after the first explosion at the plant. It was clear that two years of displacement had taken their toll. Kokubun’s ailing mother-in-law and sister-in-law died after a series of evacuation-related moves, and his wife Mieko told me she felt isolated and unhappy in her new surroundings. His grown son, too, talked about how much he wanted his old life back.
Kokubun alone seemed galvanized by the chain of events. He had founded a sprawling association of evacuees and supporters, and was traveling regularly to speak against nuclear power. He was also deeply involved in a class-action lawsuit to gain more compensation from Tepco, the plant operator, for damages caused by the accident. (By 2015, over 10,000 evacuees and nearby residents had filed similar claims.) The stricter safety rules for nuclear plants that the government implemented later that year – including more rigorous backup power requirements – did not placate him. To the contrary, the disaster and its aftermath proved what he had always suspected – that any man-made system contains the potential for failure, and in the case of nuclear power, failure is catastrophic.
Now, two years later, Kokubun was back in Minamisoma, and I had arranged to meet him there the morning of the community meeting. As I looked around the clean, quiet bus stop, I caught sight of him grinning and waving at me from across the street. He was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, his snow-white hair poking out from under a tweed hat.
“We’re doing well,” he told me as I climbed into his car. He and Mieko had finally pulled together enough money to start building a new house farther north. In the meantime, they are living in a house in a part of their hometown that was only briefly evacuated. One reason for this move was Mieko’s worsening depression, which Kokubun told me had eased now that she was on familiar ground. The other reason was political.
“I felt strongly that I needed to expand my activism, and I thought if I came back here more people would sympathize with my message,” he said. In July of last year he launched a local organization focused on radiation safety, which so far has attracted around 100 members.
We headed into Odaka where Kokubun’s abandoned house is located. The cleanup was in full swing. Industrious men in masks power-washed sidewalks, dump trucks crowded the streets, and orange placards marked houses for demolition. Everywhere we went we saw squat black bags stuffed with tainted dirt and debris. (Almost 10 million of these bags litter Fukushima, awaiting transportation to a mid-term storage site near Fukushima Daiichi.)
At the community meeting later that night, the mayor of Odaka insisted that all this work was meant only to ensure displaced residents could return if they wanted to – not to force them back.
The dilemma, of course, is that contamination cannot be completely removed from the environment. It will linger in forests and ponds and backyard corners for decades to come, exposing anyone who returns to low but persistent levels of radiation. Science provides no clear answers regarding the potential health risks of that exposure. Above 100 millisieverts (mSv) cancer rates clearly rise; below that level, they may also rise slightly, but the increase is extremely hard to detect in population-level studies.
Following the Fukushima disaster, Japan’s government used the lack of scientific consensus on low-level radiation impacts to justify raising the acceptable level of exposure for the general population from 1 mSv to 20 mSv per year above background levels. (The International Commission on Radiological Protection’s recommended maximum exposure for the general population is 1 mSv under normal circumstances and between 1 mSv and 20 mSv after a nuclear accident.) The decision was, in effect, a pragmatic one. If the government had stuck with the 1 mSv limit, it would have had to evacuate far more people and establish a large, long-term exclusion zone similar to the one around Chernobyl. With the higher limit, bringing nuclear refugees back home became a possibility.
But why the fixation on return? Is it merely that Japan is small, land is precious, and people’s attachment to place fierce? As we drove through the strange landscape of black bags and masked men, Kokubun told me he believes otherwise. “The government is doing this to regain support for nuclear power,” he said. The logic is that if even Fukushima can be “fixed,” people will stop fearing the reopening and operation of other plants.
Kokubun’s response has been to do whatever he can to prevent the illusion of normalcy from seeping in – from dragging Tepco through court to lecturing nationwide about the situation on the ground to hosting visitors who want to see the exclusion zone for themselves. That he is 70 and has been fighting the same fight for 50 years appears not to bother him.
“Right now, the old have to protect the young,” he told me. “We’re the ones who accepted the nuclear plants, who allowed them to be built. The real responsibility lies with us.”
“Do you ever feel like giving up?” I asked.
“I will never give up,” he replied, almost cheerfully. “I will never accept nuclear power.”
A majority of Japanese now share Kokubun’s opinion. Over 70 percent of respondents in recent polls say they want to phase out nuclear power, and 8.5 million have signed a petition calling for renewable energy to replace reactors. Anti-nuclear protests in Tokyo drew hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens at their peak in 2012. When the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) – which briefly held power before and after the disaster – asked for public input on its energy and environment policy in 2012, a record-breaking 89,000 people sent in comments, close to 90 percent of them opposing nuclear power.
Bags stuffed with tainted dirt and debris stored near the sea. About 10 million of these bags litter Fukushima, awaiting transportation to a mid-term storage site.
The relationship between this surge in anti-nuclear sentiment and Japan’s broader energy policy is complex. The Fukushima disaster occurred just as global concern over climate change was accelerating. In 2009, then-Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama had committed Japan to lowering carbon emissions a quarter below 1990 levels by 2020 – largely through a plan to increase nuclear power to half of the country’s electricity mix. The meltdowns changed everything.
“With the 3-11 disaster, everyone’s attention turned toward nuclear power. Since then, climate change has fallen more and more off the public’s radar as an important issue,” Takako Momoi told me when I stopped by the Tokyo office of Kiko Network, Japan’s biggest homegrown climate-change NGO, where she works as a manager. A minority of activists even began to spread the message that climate change was a ruse to gain support for nuclear power. In 2013, when the new government traded Hatoyama’s ambitious emissions goal for a 3 percent increase over 1990 levels by 2020, few people protested.
Coal has already seen a major resurgence. Construction of coal-fired power plants had stalled around 2009 due to climate change concerns, but now 48 new plants are planned or under construction, says Momoi. Even with much-touted new “clean coal” technology, she adds, these plants will emit as much carbon dioxide as those that burn oil.
Then there is the fact that even if the public prefers renewables to coal or nuclear, most people still prioritize the economy over the environment in elections. In 2012, voters ousted the DPJ in favor of the pro-nuclear Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has monopolized power for most of Japan’s post-war period. The LDP quickly set about formulating its own energy vision. It tossed out the public comments the DPJ had collected, kicked anti-nuclear advisors like those from Momoi’s organization off policy committees, and last summer finalized a long-term energy vision that calls for electricity to come from roughly equal parts nuclear, liquid natural gas, coal, and renewable sources by 2030.
At the local level, however, a more ambitious vision has started to emerge. Many communities are formulating their own renewable energy plans – Minamisoma among them. This March, the city of 63,000 released a “Non-Nuclear Power Declaration” reaffirming an earlier pledge to generate 65 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, and 100 percent by 2030 (compared to around 10 percent today). Construction is slated to begin this year on a solar farm large enough to power almost all of the city’s households, and four windmills are planned as well. A generous national feed-in tariff program introduced in 2012, which guarantees high prices to individuals and companies selling renewable energy to the grid, has lured corporate investors to these projects.
Cleanup workers power-wash a parking lot in the Odaka district of Minamisoma.
That, together with some smaller subsidy programs, should get the city to its 2020 goal, says Shunichi Shiga, who heads Minamisoma’s newly-established renewable energy division. Reaching 100 percent could be tougher. Power distributors say they’ve already reached the limit of how much renewable energy they can incorporate without major improvements to the grid, and now that the feed-in-tariffs are being ratcheted down, investing in renewable energy is looking riskier. Overcoming these obstacles, Shiga says, will require action at the national level. Momoi concurs. “The [local] movement to increase renewable energy is great, but within the current policy context, it will hit a ceiling,” she says. “There’s a need to think more about the big picture.”
Many people are, in fact, starting to think about what it will take to achieve true change at the national level. One of the most interesting developments set off by the disaster has been the emergence of a strong student movement protesting the government’s disregard for democratic processes. Although its focus is on military policy rather than energy issues, the underlying concern is the same.
Called Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy, or SEALDs, this small but vocal group of high school and university students coalesced in mid-2015 against a set of security bills that the LDP ultimately pushed through the Diet (Japanese parliament) in September. Using social media and protests outside the Diet building featuring fierce, smart speeches, the students quickly engaged a broader slice of society than old-school protesters had been able to. It was the most significant student movement since the 1960s.
Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Tokyo’s Sophia University says SEALDs is a “direct descendant” of the civil-society awakening that followed the nuclear disaster. “They were high school students at the time [of the meltdowns], and for many of them the first experience of protest was those anti-nuclear rallies,” he tells me. “The disaster exposed the myth that was more credible in earlier times about the trustworthiness of ruling elites in Japan.”
Nakano is himself active in an organization opposing the security bills, and has collaborated closely with SEALDs over the past year. He too sees the roots of the nuclear and military issues as intimately linked. “There’s a sense that the 1 percent increasingly control our fate and the 99 percent of us are left out in the dark, uninformed and practically disenfranchised,” he says. “In the case of the security bills, it’s about the ruling elites of Japan in collusion with the American elites changing the interpretation of the constitution to allow Japan to take part in America’s wars even without Japan being attacked. The nuclear power issue is very similar because nuclear power is something that those big powers need to continue on for lucrative reasons. They wouldn’t want to see Japan dropping out from the nuclear power club.”
In spite of this, Nakano believes citizen activists have changed the government’s course, at least on energy. “There was a long period in which even [Prime Minister] Abe couldn’t restart the nuclear reactors. That has only to do with the strength of the opposition,” he tells me. “We are talking about ordinary citizens, without resources, stopping the reactors for many, many months.”
As important as these popular movements may be, the people who will determine Japan’s longer-term energy path are not in the crowds outside the Diet, or even inside its halls. They are in elementary and middle school classrooms across the country. Japan’s education system played a key role in creating the so-called “myth of nuclear safety” – the widespread belief that Japan’s reactors were indestructible – that led towards poor oversight and, ultimately, disaster. Likewise, the lessons children learn now about the Fukushima disaster will shape their views on energy and the environment throughout their lives. So, on my last day in Japan, I take the train back to Fukushima to talk with a professor who has spent the past five years trying to improve radiation education.
The contamination will linger in forests and ponds and backyard corners
for decades to come.
Shinobu Goto is a tall, serious man in his forties who teaches environmental education at Fukushima University. We meet on a Saturday evening in a cluttered university office, where we are joined by two members of the Fukushima teachers’ union, Toshiki Kokubun (no relation to Tomio) and Hiroshi Sato, whose name has been changed to protect his identity. All three were deeply impacted by the disaster.
Goto in particular says the unexpected catastrophe thrust him into a period of intense reflection and regret. He had not previously focused on nuclear education, but now he began to scour official teaching materials on the topic for evidence of bias. He found plenty: elementary-level readers titled Exciting Nuclear Power Land, illustrations of frowning coal plants juxtaposed with friendly nuclear reactors, claims that Japan’s reactors could withstand large earthquakes and tsunamis. Goto was not alone in his critique. The minister of education himself admitted that the pre-disaster texts contained information “contrary to reality,” and soon had them replaced.
Yet the new radiation readers that the ministry published in late 2011 were hardly an improvement. They included just 8 lines about the Fukushima disaster, and instead emphasized how useful and ubiquitous radiation is in daily life. In this, Goto saw the makings of a new myth – not that reactors are infallible, but that the radiation they emit when they do fail is nothing to worry about.
“The concept that the level of radiation we have in Fukushima is safe is being steadily created through education and PR,” he tells me as we sip tea in the quiet research building. He was particularly worried that kids weren’t getting the information they needed to protect their own rights to physical, mental, and social wellbeing. “If you don’t know the exposure limit is 1 or 5 mSv per year in other places, you don’t realize the situation in Fukushima is abnormal,” he says. “Education is empowerment in the sense that it allows you to make those critiques.”
Teachers needed a better option, so in early 2012 he assembled a group of 16 Fukushima University professors, and together they wrote an alternative reader from a human-rights perspective. He also began holding workshops to teach critical thinking skills to public school students, so they could assess government and media claims on their own. At this point, top-level administrators began pressuring him to tone down his activism. The school is the only national university in the prefecture; from the start, its administrators had echoed the government’s emphasis on recovery over risk.
A sign in Fatuba, directly north of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, reading “Nuclear power, energy for a bright future.” The town is closed off now.
“They told me I had to put a sticker on the reader saying it wasn’t an official publication of the university. I said that’s discriminatory; you don’t do that for other publications,” Goto says. (University representatives tell me they are unable to confirm or deny Goto’s claims, citing personnel changes and a lack of relevant meeting minutes.)
He refused to back down. Ultimately, the reader was published without the sticker, helping to turn national attention on the official curriculum. That attention reverberated to the ministry of education; when the official readers were revised again in 2014, they included more information on the Fukushima disaster, and an acknowledgement that scientists hold “various views” on the impacts of low-level radiation. Still, a startling array of terms were missing: “meltdown,” “Nuclear Accident Child Victim’s Law,” “hotspot,” “thyroid cancer,” and “radioactive waste” among them.
Kokubun and Sato say most teachers in Fukushima don’t venture beyond the official curriculum, which allots just two hours a year for radiation education, partly because they are too busy, and partly because they’re pressured not to.
Sato, an elementary school teacher in Fukushima City, has experienced this pressure directly. “Some high-level board-of-education staff observed one of my classes [on radiation in 2013], and afterwards they said to me, Don’t you think today’s class might worry the children?” The content was purely science based: Sato had shown the kids a graph of the relationship between radiation and cancer, and pointed out that high levels of exposure can be deadly. (In lessons, he also explains that the current degree of contamination in Fukushima City carries a relatively low risk of cancer.)
Fukushima’s Board of Education tells me later that teachers are permitted to share science-based radiation material as long as it is widely accepted. “Our goal,” a staff member writes in an email, “is to teach children to make appropriate decisions based on correct knowledge and understanding of radiation.” However, Sato says he’s been told to avoid the topic by his principal, vice-principal, and other teachers.
Like Goto, he has not bowed to this pressure. Yet both he and Kokubun seem worn down by their lonely struggle. The government defends its interests tenaciously, and the public – with the exception of a determined minority – is all too eager to assist by turning away from the painful past. “People need to be angrier,” Kokubun says. “I’m sad that more people haven’t spoken out with us.”
Outside Goto’s office, the sky is growing dark. Kokubun and Sato need to head home. After they leave, I ask Goto how much hope he has that things will change. He says he feels like he is gasping for breath. The pace of progress is slow, and public interest in the disaster’s ongoing impact is dwindling. Still, he says, he is determined to continue his work.
Later, after he drops me off at the train station, I leaf through some papers he has given me, among them an essay he wrote for his hometown newspaper concluding with the following lines: “They say that history is written by the victors. I will be watching and acting to make sure the lessons of the Fukushima nuclear accident are not written to suit the interests of the perpetrators of this unprecedented man-made disaster.”
In that, and in the commitment of many others to do the same, there lies a glimmer of hope.
The pace of reconstruction after the powerful earthquake and tsunami that hit parts of northeastern Japan in March 2011, and the subsequent nuclear disaster, differs from community to community, with a delay forecast in Fukushima municipalities affected by radiation from the accident, a Jiji Press survey has revealed.
The survey was conducted in January and February in a total of 42 municipalities along the Pacific coast in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, and around Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power station, where an unprecedented triple reactor meltdown occurred following the natural disasters.
Of the 42, 12 are in Iwate, and 15 each in Miyagi and Fukushima.
Of the total, 15 municipalities said that post-disaster reconstruction will be completed by the end of fiscal 2020 in March 2021, the final year of the reconstruction period designated by the government.
Three municipalities said reconstruction will finish by the end of fiscal 2016, one by the end of fiscal 2017, six by the end of fiscal 2018 and five by the end of fiscal 2019.
The city of Soma in Fukushima said it is difficult to say exactly when the construction projects will be completed.
Meanwhile, 11 municipalities, including nine in Fukushima, noted that post-disaster reconstruction will end in fiscal 2021 or later.
Many of the nine Fukushima towns and villages cited delays in work to decontaminate areas polluted with radiation and dispose of radiation-tainted soil, and the restoration of agriculture, forestry and fishery industries.
This suggests that industry reconstruction has been tardy, affected by shipment restrictions and misinformation about radiation.
The two other municipalities projecting the completion of reconstruction after fiscal 2020 are Sendai, the prefectural capital of Miyagi, and the Miyagi town of Minamisanriku.
Sendai faces a delay in land procurement for reconstruction projects, including one for elevating roads. The central district of Minamisanriku was devastated by the tsunami.
In Iwate, nearly 50 percent of the planned public housing for people who lost their homes in the quake and tsunami has been completed. The proportion stands at about 50 percent in Miyagi and 40 percent in Fukushima.
Of the 12 Fukushima municipalities where evacuation advisories were issued after the nuclear accident, six, including the towns of Tomioka and Okuma, said that their populations at the end of 2025 are expected to decrease by 20 percent or more from current levels.
Among other municipalities in Fukushima and the two other prefectures, five, including Minamisanriku, project drops of 15-20 percent and eight foresee declines of 10-15 percent.
An official of Minamisanriku said, “The population decrease in our town will likely accelerate, because the number of children is falling and some of the residents who have been evacuated to other areas have found new homes and jobs there and therefore opted not to return to Minamisanriku.”
In Miyagi, Sendai and three nearby municipalities expect increases in their populations, on the back of inflows of evacuees from other areas and the establishment of operational hubs by construction companies.
In Fukushima, population growth is forecast in the town of Shinchi, where a liquefied natural gas storage facility is planned to be constructed.
Many of the surveyed municipalities said that they want the central government to continue securing enough reconstruction budgets and providing personnel support, and to increase flexibility in subsidy programs.
The earthquake and tsunami killed more than 15,800 people and left over 2,500 others unaccounted for. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/02/28/national/social-issues/survey-finds-post-disaster-reconstruction-slow-tohoku-prefectures/#.VtMsmubzN_l
Disaster tourism can be an unsettling descent into voyeurism as visitors ghoulishly gawk at, and photograph, those caught up in catastrophe as if they’re at a petting zoo. The concept has prompted widespread condemnation of insensitive tourists and travel companies exploiting disasters as marketing opportunities.
In the years following the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, opponents of disaster tourism have claimed that its economic benefits are overstated while the ethical shortcomings are legion. Advocates counter that the economic benefits can be significant, crucial to regional recovery, and that there are important lessons to be learned.
There is no longer much to gawk at along the Tohoku region’s tsunami-ravaged coast, however, save for some shattered buildings preserved to memorialize the tragedy. Bus companies and hotel operators pocket profits, but they also generate jobs and expose outsiders to a region that has always been a neglected backwater.
Recently I witnessed large buses from one local tour company disgorging dozens of sightseers for snapshots of the skeletal disaster management center and the derelict Takano Kaikan hall in Minamisanriku, Miyagi Prefecture. These tourists are spending money in local shops and restaurants in a remote place that has poor transport links and is in the middle of a noisy, messy all-encompassing rebuilding phase. What used to be the center of town is now a vast construction site dominated by giant berms of earth that will raise the town by about five meters.
I met a young man from Osaka who came as a volunteer and then decided to remain in the area. He pointed out that for devastated local businesses, disaster tourism is a welcome lifeline. Elsewhere, a big-screen TV in a hotel lobby features a 3-D video of the tsunami that allows guests to don special glasses and watch the unfolding tragedy. I suppose this could be educational, but the prevailing holiday atmosphere dissuaded me.
Denunciation of disaster tourism in Tohoku is grounded in sympathy for the victims and concerns that devastation is an unseemly attraction, but Australia National University’s Simon Avenell, author of “Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement,” says he is not a purist in this regard.
“From a financial perspective, I’m generally supportive of disaster tourism, certainly because it brings people and some money into the region, but also because it offers local people a chance to express their feelings directly (rather than mediated through the press or TV),” he says. “As time goes by, 3/11 becomes less and less of a news item, so tourism can be at least a small communication pipeline for locals.”
However, Avenell also has qualms about the potential for masking serious unresolved issues, because by promoting a sense of normalization “it could actually hamper fundamental change (and) … its political benefits might be limited or even deleterious in the long run.”
The infamous Kyushu port of Minamata, which put mercury poisoning on the global radar in the 1970s, is now perhaps the most visited sight for school excursions by Kyushu students after Nagasaki’s atomic bomb park and museum. Chris McMorran, a senior lecturer in Japanese studies at the National University of Singapore, takes his students there. He says tourism officials from Tohoku visited Minamata to learn about the city’s educational disaster tourism initiatives and the role of kataribe (storytellers) in them.
“Using an itinerary to create an opening for reflection and communication has long fit the learning objectives of overseas field learning experiences,” he says. There are “packages that continue to attract visitors to Tohoku who want to hear from survivors, witness the destruction and (most intriguingly to me) view (and photograph) disaster monuments. In some areas, there are also new shopping areas targeted at tourists, which feature locally handmade products and restaurants. It seems like these places are actively promoted by locals trying to start businesses in the absence of other major economic activity.”
McMorran posits there are phases in Tohoku’s disaster tourism.
“First, through volunteerism, then volunteer tourism (or ‘voluntourism’), then disaster (recovery/support) tourism. It’s a fascinating evolution that has effectively controlled the potential anarchy of large-scale volunteerism and steered it into consumption (via tourism and the purchase of local goods) as the preferred disaster recovery response from citizens.”
The media has played a significant role in this latter phase. Philip Seaton, a professor of modern Japanese studies at Hokkaido University, has studied the role “contents tourism” has played in Tohoku’s recovery. This is where television shows, films and anime promote an area specifically by featuring it.
Producers chose sites “in disaster zones in the hope that the ‘contents tourism’ induced by popular culture would help in the more general economic revitalization efforts of disaster areas,” Seaton says. Prime examples include NHK dramas “Yae no Sakura,” set in Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, and “Amachan,” set in Kuji, Iwate Prefecture. It is estimated that the latter generated ¥30 billion in economic benefits for Tohoku as fans of the series flocked to the gorgeous coastal location to sample local delicacies from the show.
It is also clear that a variety of organizations, ranging from religious and education institutions to NPOs and activist groups, are conducting study tours in the region that are explicitly educational. As I wrote two weeks ago, the ruins of Okawa Elementary School in Miyagi Prefecture are now a site for school tours that aim to improve disaster preparation. Universities are also running study tours in the region.
Hiroko Aihara, a journalist with Japan Perspective News, notes that the Japan NGO Center for International Cooperation has issued guidelines for responsible disaster tourism but remains ambivalent over “dark tourism,” which involves places associated with death and suffering. She is concerned about a lingering radiation risk in Fukushima and worries that if tours don’t involve local residents and the evacuees, visitors might get a skewed impression that downplays the nuclear disaster — which could be “converted to political propaganda by the ‘nuclear village,’” she says, referring to pro-nuclear interests. She also cautions that schools and teachers should disclose information about the dangers of radiation exposure near the stricken nuclear plant and suggests bringing individual measurement devices. If properly led, she agrees that educational tours can be beneficial, but she is not in favor of mere casual observation.
Fukushima Prefecture is sponsoring trips to Namie, an abandoned town just 9 kilometers away from Tepco’s three nuclear meltdowns, that convey a powerful message to visitors about the hubris of nuclear safety — underscored by the continuing ban on overnight stays. Nearby Futaba, however, has taken down the iconic pro-nuclear energy welcome sign that spanned the entryway into that ghost town because it had become a favored photo op for tourists. Some disgruntled locals feel it should have been preserved for posterity to help future generations learn the lessons of Fukushima, but abashed town officials claim the aging sign had become a safety hazard. At least that’s their story, and they’re sticking to it. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2016/02/27/commentary/tohokus-disaster-tourism-exploit-educate/#.VtLKBubzN_l
Numerous organisms have shown an ability to survive and reproduce under low-dose ionizing radiation arising from natural background radiation or from nuclear accidents. In a literature review, we found a total of 17 supposed cases of adaptation, mostly based on common garden experiments with organisms only deriving from typically two or three sampling locations. We only found one experimental study showing evidence of improved resistance to radiation. Finally, we examined studies for the presence of hormesis (i.e., superior fitness at low levels of radiation compared with controls and high levels of radiation), but found no evidence to support its existence. We conclude that rigorous experiments based on extensive sampling from multiple sites are required.
Here is the video made by Masa in Fukushima and his group. The video is available in English. This is the reality of 5 years after the nuclear accident. The area in the video is going to be “de-contaminated” in this coming spring, 2016.
Despite that there are numerous hot spots in school routes and parks, Masa says that in Fukushima, nobody talks about radiation anymore.
In the 5th year since the Fukushima nuclear accident, we found hotspots on the riverbed in Fukushima city. They exceeded 20μSv/h. We examine the present FUKUSHIMA which is facing the micro-hot-spots phenomena.
According to preliminary figures of a simplified 2015 census released Friday, Japan’s population dropped to 127.11 million — the first confirmed census decline since the government started conducting such surveys in 1920.
The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry said the latest census shows that Japan’s population as of Oct. 1, 2015, was 127,110,047. This represents a decline of 947,305, or 0.7 percent, since the last census conducted in 2010. In the 2015 census, men accounted for 61,829,237 of the population, and women 65,280,810.
The population of Fukushima Prefecture, where many residents are still being forced to live away from home due to damage caused to their hometowns by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, decreased by 115,458, a 5.7 percent decline from the last census. The two other prefectures hit hardest by the disaster — Iwate and Miyagi — also saw population declines.
The ministry had estimated that the nation’s population had been declining for four straight years since 2011. The latest results are the first confirmation via a census that the national population has gone down since the government began conducting them.
A ministry official said Japan’s population decline seems to be largely due to the natural factor of deaths outnumbering births. The government conducts a census every five years, and this is the first since the 2011 disaster.
Out of 47 prefectures nationwide, populations declined in 39, including Hokkaido and Aomori. Of the three prefectures hit hardest by the disaster, Miyagi’s population dropped by 13,950, or 0.6 percent; and Iwate’s by 50,333, or 3.8 percent. The decline in Miyagi Prefecture was small, probably due to the inflow of people working on reconstruction projects. The population increased in eight prefectures, including Okinawa, Tokyo and Aichi.
The census found the number of households in the country was a record high 53,403,226, but the average number of people per household was a record low of 2.38.
A large-scale census is conducted every 10 years, and a simplified census is carried out every five years after a large census. The 2015 census was a simplified one.
Disparity seen widening
The vote-value gap between the most and least populated single-seat constituencies of the House of Representatives is estimated to widen to 2.334-to-1, according to trial calculations based on preliminary figures from the latest census released Friday.
This represents an expansion of the disparity from 1.998-to-1 calculated based on the 2010 census.
Selected for comparison were Tokyo Constituency No. 1, which has the largest population per its lower house member, and Miyagi Constituency No. 5, which has the lowest such ratio.
The disparity when compared to the least-populated constituency is estimated to expand to 2-to-1 or more in 37 electoral districts.
The law on the establishment of the Council on the House of Representatives Electoral Districts calls for limiting the gap to less than 2-to-1.
Since 2011, the Supreme Court has ruled that three lower house elections, conducted when a national disparity of more than 2-to-1 existed, were held in a “state of unconstitutionality.”
A research council on the lower house electoral system also demanded that the gap be brought to within 2-to-1. The council is an advisory panel to the lower house speaker.
Up 9, down 15
The allocated number of seats in the lower house will increase by a total of nine across five prefectures, but one seat will be eliminated in each of 15 prefectures, according to an estimate made by The Yomiuri Shimbun based on the latest census results and using the Adams’ method, which is recommended by an advisory panel to the House of Representatives speaker.
Under the current allocation of lower house seats, vote-value disparities between prefectures are 1.885-to-1 or less. But if the increase of nine seats with a reduction of 15 seats is realized, the disparities will drop to 1.668-to-1 and remain lower than the current figure for a while, even if populations in prefectures change in the future.
Though the Democratic Party of Japan, Komeito, the Japan Innovation Party and others intend to accept a report made by the advisory panel recommending the Adams’ method, the Liberal Democratic Party is wary of introducing it. The LDP says vote-value disparities should initially be dealt with by trimming six seats and not adding any.
However, according to an estimate based on the latest census results made with the LDP reform plan to eliminate six seats, one seat each will be eliminated in six prefectures — Aomori, Iwate, Mie, Nara, Kumamoto and Kagoshima. But the largest vote-value disparity between prefectures will remain unchanged at 1.885-to-1. This might require complicated changes to the demarcation of electoral districts, observers said.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has already expressed his desire to enact a bill to revise the Public Offices Election Law and other legislation by the end of the current Diet session.
Workers dismantle a tank that once contained water contaminated with radiation in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture.
Futaba Mayor Shiro Izawa was taken aback when the president of Tokyo Electric Power Co. paid a visit in early January.
Izawa has been working out of a temporary government office in the town of Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, since the disaster at TEPCO’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant forced all residents to evacuate Futaba in 2011.
“Have you perhaps forgotten that TEPCO is the perpetrator that has driven Futaba into the situation it finds itself?” Izawa grumbled at TEPCO President Naomi Hirose. “I am beyond furious.”
But within minutes, Izawa was peppering Hirose with requests to rebuild life in his community.
Residents and government leaders around the still stricken nuclear plant continue to vilify the plant’s operator, but they are increasingly aware that economic survival depends largely on the very entity that turned their communities upside down.
Before the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, the host and surrounding communities depended largely on nuclear power plants for government subsidies and employment.
They are resigned to having again depend on TEPCO for the billions of yen that will be sunk into the prefecture for work to decommission the reactors at the utility’s No. 1 plant as well as its No. 2 plant in Fukushima Prefecture.
Every day, about 7,000 workers pass through the gates of the Fukushima No. 1 plant for the decommissioning process that is expected to take decades to complete.
Some say the nuclear plant has been a source of income than crosses generations.
A 61-year-old man who was part of the team that constructed the No. 6 reactor at the plant now dismantles tanks that once contained radiation-contaminated water there.
“The nuclear plant remains unchanged as a stable workplace from before the accident,” he said.
His father was also involved in construction of the nuclear plant, which started operating in 1971.
After the 2011 disaster, relatives beseeched the man to cut all ties with the plant. But he has no intention of ending his work there.
The effects of the accident indeed sparked anger and distrust of TEPCO and nuclear power in general.
The Fukushima prefectural government decided to end its dependence on nuclear plants and supply all electricity through renewable energy sources. It has asked for the decommissioning of all reactors in the prefecture.
However, the prefectural government faces the difficult task of revitalizing the local economy because about 70,000 residents remain in evacuation close to five years after the accident.
Decommissioning work is now one of the only realistic large-scale options to support the local economy.
The central and prefectural governments are placing high hopes on research and development related to decommissioning the reactors.
In September 2015, after the evacuation order was lifted for the town of Naraha, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency built a facility in the municipality to conduct experiments on remote-control use of robots in the decommissioning work.
An international joint research center is planned for Tomioka, which lies immediately north of Naraha.
“Community development will not proceed unless there is a core structure,” a government source said. “It would be perfectly all right if money was injected through the decommissioning business.”
TEPCO has been constructing bases for decommissioning work in municipalities where evacuation orders are still in place.
In Okuma, a community that co-hosts the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, TEPCO has built a facility to prepare 2,000 meals a day for workers at the plant. There are also plans to construct dormitories that can house 750 employees.
By the end of March, TEPCO’s Fukushima Revitalization Headquarters, now based at the J-Village training center about 20 kilometers from the Fukushima No. 1 plant, will move to Tomioka.
“It is the responsibility of the central and other governments as well as TEPCO to create a situation where those who want to return can do so,” said Yoshiyuki Ishizaki, chief of the headquarters.
Kazuyuki Shima, 37, who has lived in temporary housing in Iwaki since evacuating from Okuma, believes that creating jobs will lead to a revitalized local community.
He now works at the TEPCO facility that prepares meals for workers.
“If people gather for decommissioning, the restart of supermarkets and hospitals will also be accelerated,” Shima said. “That will make it easier for local residents to return. If that happens, I believe this community will not be forgotten.”
At the same time, the decommissioning plans have led to unusual demographics.
Often, the number of workers involved in decommissioning exceeds the number of residents who have returned to their homes.
That is the case in Hirono, a town within a 30-kilometer radius of the Fukushima No. 1 plant. The town also has nearly twice as many men as women.
To prevent housing facilities from sprouting up all over the town, the local government plans to adopt an ordinance requiring prior notification of construction plans of such buildings.
About 1,300 workers involved in decommissioning and decontamination work around the plant now reside in Naraha, about triple the number of residents who have returned home.
The Naraha town government is encouraging the construction of housing for the workers at a golf course away from the residential area.
“Residents might be concerned about the large number of strangers in their community and will be hesitant about returning home,” a high-ranking town official said.
In Mayor Izawa’s deserted town of Futaba, there are no signs of when residents can return home.
After lambasting the TEPCO president, Izawa asked for help in persuading companies involved in decommissioning R&D to build offices in Futaba.
“I do feel the contradiction, and I am in quite a dilemma,” Izawa said. “But without that, can a local government that never had any other major industry ever think of surviving?” http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/recovery/AJ201602260069
This 2013 photo shows radioactive materials on a slipper from the Fukushima Prefecture town of Namie, which was evacuated after the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant disaster. The white spots in the photo indicate the presence of radioactive cesium and other materials, visualized on large-format film after the slipper was exposed to it for two months. (Photo by Takashi Morizumi)
A photo exhibition on the theme of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake will be held in Tokyo beginning on March 1, and will aim to convey the scars left by the disaster ahead of its fifth anniversary on March 11.
About 100 photos taken by 39 photographers will be on display during the exhibit, which will be held at the Bengoshi Kaikan building in Chiyoda Ward.
Specifically, photos featuring Fukushima Prefecture will provide visitors with opportunities to think about the matter of how to recover from the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant disaster.
The exhibition, which is being put together by organizations including the Tokyo Bar Association, will run through March 10, except for March 6, when it will be closed. Admission is free.
A gathering for disaster evacuees will be held at the same building on March 5. For more information, call the Tokyo Bar Association at 03-3581-2251.
Five years ago the Rainbow Warrior was in Fukushima and now we’re back to test the mess from the 2011 nuclear disaster.
Nearly a 100,000 people STILL can’t return back to their homes…It’s time to end this nuclear nightmare. Let’s switch on renewable
Five years on, Greenpeace assessing marine contamination off Fukushima
ONAHAMA, FUKUSHIMA PREF. – Fish market vendor Satoshi Nakano thinks he knows which fish caught in the radiation-tainted sea off the Fukushima coast should be kept away from dinner tables.
Yet five years after the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl there is still no consensus on the true extent of the damage — exacerbating consumer fears about what is safe to eat.
Environmentalists are at odds with authorities, warning that the huge amounts of radiation that seeped into coastal waters after the disaster in 2011 could cause problems for decades.
The government is confident it has stemmed the flow of radioactive water, but campaigners insist contaminated ground water has continued to seep into the Pacific Ocean, and the situation needs further investigation.
“It was the single largest release of radioactivity to the marine environment in history,” Greenpeace nuclear expert Shaun Burnie said, speaking aboard the campaign group’s Rainbow Warrior ship, which has sailed in to support a three-week marine survey of the area the environmental watchdog is conducting.
Fukushima is facing an “enormous nuclear water crisis,” Burnie said.
“The whole idea that this accident happened five years ago and that Fukushima and Japan have moved on is completely wrong.”
Fishermen are banned from operating only within 20 kilometers of the plant.
Although there are no figures for attitudes on seafood alone, the latest official survey by the government’s Consumer Affairs Agency showed in September that more than 17 percent of Japanese are reluctant to eat food from Fukushima.
Nakano knows it is best for business to consider carefully the type of seafood he sells, in the hope it will quell consumer fears.
“High levels of radioactivity are usually detected in fish that move little and stick to the seabed. I am not an expert, but I think those kinds of fish suck up the dirt of the ocean floor,” he said in his coastal hometown of Onahama.
Greenpeace is surveying waters near the Fukushima plant, dredging up sediment from the ocean floor to check both for radiation hot spots as well as places that are not contaminated.
On Monday, the Rainbow Warrior sailed within 1.6 kilometers of the Fukushima coast as part of the project — the third such test it has conducted, but the closest to the plant since the nuclear accident.
Researchers Tuesday sent down a remote-controlled vehicle attached with a camera and scoop in order to take samples from the seabed, which will then be analyzed in independent laboratories in Japan and France.
“It’s very important (to see) where is more contaminated and where is less or even almost not contaminated,” Greenpeace’s Jan Vande Putte said, stressing the importance of such findings for the fishing industry.
Local fishermen have put coastal catches on the market after thorough testing, which includes placing certain specimens seen as high risk through radiation screening — a program Greenpeace lauds as one of the most advanced in the world.
The tests make sure no fish containing more than half of the government safety standard for radiation goes onto the market.
The 2011 disaster was caused by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake off Japan’s northeastern coast, which sparked a massive tsunami that swamped cooling systems and triggered reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, run by operator Tokyo Electric Power Co.
Today, about 1,000 huge tanks for storing contaminated water occupy large parts of the site, but as 400 tons of groundwater a day flows into the damaged reactor buildings, many more will be needed.
Tepco’s measures to reduce the water influx include building an underground wall, freezing the land itself and siphoning underground water.
The government, too, insists the situation is under control.
“The impact of the contaminated water is completely contained inside the port of the Fukushima plant,” Tsuyoshi Takagi, the Cabinet minister in charge of disaster reconstruction, told reporters on Tuesday.
But Greenpeace’s Burnie says stopping the groundwater flow is crucial to protecting the region.
“What impact is this having on the local ecology and the marine life, which is going on over years, decades?” Burnie asked.
“We can come back in 50 years and still be talking about radiological problems” at the nuclear plant as well as along the coast, he said. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/02/26/national/five-years-greenpeace-assessing-marine-contamination-off-fukushima/#.VtBtWObzN_l
Given the option of leaving their hometowns or risking radiation poisoning five years ago, families living near the Fukushima radiation disaster are falling apart, facing divorce, suicide, and cancer. The breakdown of Fukushima families comes as Japan faces a dwindling population it continues to struggle to replenish.
Mothers desperate to save their children from cancer or other side effects of radiation poisoning have been forced to choose between their husbands and their children, an in-depth report in Japan’s Asahi Shimbun notes. Many men stayed in the radiation-affected areas, unable to find jobs elsewhere. The mothers who moved as far from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant as they could afford say they made the decision to save their children from radiation, but have lost their husbands and families.
One woman tells the Asahi Shimbun that her husband mailed her divorce papers in 2014 after she fled the area in 2011. “I cannot send money to my family whom I cannot see,” he said in a letter. She has not told her two children their parents are divorced. She made the choice to risk her marriage, she said, because she “could not trust the data released by the central government.” She laments, “My family has collapsed.”
Residents of Fukushima were forced to evacuate the area after a March 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The plant’s operators expect it to take up to 40 years for the site to be fully safe and usable again.
The new Asahi profile of Fukushima mothers reflects similar fears the Japan Times found in speaking to others who had fled and refuse to trust the government’s assurances that their hometowns are safe. In September 2015, the newspaper spoke to mothers who said on the condition of anonymity that their families – especially their husbands’ families – were pressuring them to risk exposing their children to radiation to keep families together. “Consciously or subconsciously, women are aware of the role we are expected to play in a family. After the earthquake and nuclear disaster, however, everything changed. … I can’t live up to those expectations any more, and society judges me,” a woman identified with the pseudonym Yukiko said. “Some were accused of abandoning or running away from their families, particularly those they married into. Relatives labeled the wives disloyal and overly sensitive,” The Japan Times noted of others who fled. Those judged harshest are the ones fleeing areas for which the government issued only a voluntary evacuation order.
Those who stayed face the opposite fear. “Sometimes when I’m alone in the house, I start to cry, imagining the future of my children,” a woman identified as Hiroko said. “I fear my children may become sick, and the ones who I love most will hold a grudge against me for failing to protect them. That is my biggest fear.”
Those who fled to neighboring towns fear radiation so much they refuse to allow their children to eat food they know has been produced in any part of Fukushima prefecture. The Asahi report highlights one mother who sends her 11-year-old to school with a specially made bento box, refusing to allow the school to feed her Fukushima-produced rice and vegetables. The girl has been bullied as a result, her mother mocked for being “neurotic.” A school official noted that other mothers make their children “wear surgical masks when they participate in footraces during outdoor school athletic meets.”
Asahi estimates that 70,000 people remain prohibited from returning home due to the Fukushima disaster, and another 18,000 have voluntarily chosen not to return.
Those who stay must live with the fear of radiation and the absence of those who do not return. Officials have marked a surge in suicides directly tied to the Fukushima disaster. Asahi reported in December 2015 that police confirmed 19 suicides in 2015 related to the disaster, up from 15 in 2014. A total of 154 people are believed to have resorted to suicide as a result of the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster.
Masaharu Maeda, a professor of disaster psychiatry at Fukushima Medical University, says torn families can account for many of these suicides and a significant rise in depression and other psychological problems in these communities. “The elderly may return to their homes, but the generation who are still raising children do not return, meaning families are torn apart,” he noted.
In one of the most prominent suicide cases related to Fukushima, a 102-year-old man hung himself after being told he would have to evacuate his home in 2011. The family sued the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), which runs the plant, for 60 million yen ($485,000).
Mothers who fear radiation poisoning have been vindicated by a number of tragedies following the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor. Doctors in the region have found that children living in the area are 20 to 50 times more likely to develop thyroid cancer. The government confirmed the first cancer case related to the plant’s collapse in October 2015, a former nuclear plant worker who was diagnosed with leukemia.
The combination of family collapse and surging cancer cases is threatening an already dwindling Japanese population. Japanese officials have estimated that the population will diminish from 100 million to 80 million by 2065, leaving the nation without a reliable workforce. While some legislators have suggested making immigration to Japan easier, most appear reluctant to take that avenue. Raising the native birth rate would require significant cultural changes, many speculate, because of a Japanese work culture that pushes women to forego family life if they intend to keep their careers. Twenty percent of young mothers report experiencing harassment in the workplace, and many who wish to be mothers are encouraged to avoid pregnancy or abort.
Dr. Tetsunari Iida is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies (ISEP) in Japan. As such, one might have expected a recent presentation he gave in the UK within the hallowed halls of the House of Commons, to have focused on Japan’s capacity to replace the electricity once generated by its now mainly shuttered nuclear power plants, with renewable energy.
But Dr lida’s passionate polemic was not about the power of the sun, but the power of propaganda. March 11, 2011 might have been the day the Great East Japan Earthquake struck. But it was also the beginning of the Great Japan Cover-Up.
On the ISEP website, Iida extols the coming of the Fourth Revolution, following on from those in agriculture, industry and IT. “This fourth revolution will be an energy revolution, a green industrial revolution, and a decentralized network revolution”, he writes.
But in person, Iida was most interested in conveying the extent to which the Japanese people were lied to before, during and after the devastating nuclear disaster at Fukushima-Daiichi, precipitated on that same fateful day and by the deadly duo of earthquake and tsunami.
“Shinzo Abe says ‘everything is under control’”, said Iida, speaking at an event hosted by Nuclear Free Local Authorities, Green Cross, and Nuclear Consulting Group in late January. It was headlined by the former Japan Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, who was at the helm when the triple disasters struck. “Yes – under the control of the media!”
A trial for Tepco like post-war Tokyo Trials
The media may have played the willing government handmaiden in reassuring the public with falsehoods, but in July 2012, the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission concluded that the disaster was really no accident but “man-made“. It came about, the researchers said, as a result of “collusion” between the government, regulators and the nuclear industry, in this case, Tepco.
“There should be a Tepco trial like the post-war Tokyo Trials”, Iida said, referring to the post World War II war crimes trial in which 28 Japanese were tried, seven of whom were subsequently executed by hanging.
Hope for such accountability – without advocating hanging – is fleeting at best. In 2011, while addressing a conference in Berlin hosted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, I suggested the Tepco officials should be sent to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, (a body the US still conveniently refuses to recognize) to answer for what clearly amounts to crimes against humanity.
The remark caused a bit of a stir and earnest questions about the mechanism by which Tepco could be brought there. Needless to say, nothing of the kind ever happened, or is likely to.
Instead, the Abe’s government’s preferred tactic is to go full out to restart reactors and move everybody back home as soon as possible, as if nothing serious had happened. Just scoop off a little topsoil, cart it away somewhere else and, Abracadabra! Everything is clean and safe again!
Normalizing radiation, a policy and now a practice
Of course radiological decontamination is not that easy. Nor is it reliable. It is more like “pushing contamination from one spot to the next”, as independent nuclear expert, Mycle Schneider describes it. And radiation does not remain obediently in one place, either.
“The mountains and forests that cannot even be vaguely decontaminated, will serve as a permanent source of new contamination, each rainfall washing out radiation and bringing it down from the mountains to the flat lands”, Schneider explained. Birds move around. Animals eat and excrete radioactive plant life. Radiation gets swept out to sea. It is a cycle with no end.
Nevertheless, efforts are underway to repopulate stricken areas, particularly in Fukushima Prefecture. It’s a policy, and now a practice, of ‘normalizing’ radiation standards, to tell people that everything is alright, when clearly, there is no medical or scientific evidence to support this. And it was an approach already firmly and institutionally in place, even on March 11, 2011 as the Fukushima disaster first struck and much of the decision-making was left to individual judgement.
“We were told that evacuating poses a greater risk than radiation,” recalls Hasegawa Kenji, a farmer from Iitate, a village situated 45 kilometers from the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Featured in the Vice documentary ‘Alone In The Zone‘, Hasegawa criticizedIitate’s mayor for making what he called a terrible mistake.
“Even when the scientists told the mayor that Iitate was dangerous, he ignored them all. He brought in experts from around the country who preached about how safe it was here. They said we had nothing to worry about. They kept telling us that. Eventually the villagers fell for it and began to relax. And the mayor rejected the idea of evacuating even more. That’s why nobody left, even though the radiation levels were so high.”
The nuclear industry did not tell the public the truth
The confusion surrounding evacuation was so profound that, as Zhang et al. noted in a September 11, 2014 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health: “Unclear evacuation instructions caused numerous residents to flee to the northwestern zone where radiation levels were even higher.”
All par for the course, said Iida. “I must emphasize, the people in the nuclear industry did not tell the public the truth and keep us informed.”
Next in the ‘normalization’ process came the decision to raise allowable radiation exposure standards to 20 millisieverts of radiation a year, up from the prior level of 2 mSv a year. The globally-accepted limit for radiation absorption is 1 mSv a year.
This meant that children were potentially being exposed to the same levels of radiation that are permitted for adult nuclear power plant workers in Europe. Some officials even argued that zones where rates were as high as 100 mSv a year should be considered ‘safe’. Writing on his blog, anti-pollution New Orleans-based attorney, Stuart Smith, observed wryly:
“Instead of taking corrective measures to protect its people, Japan has simply increased internationally recognized exposure limits. It seems that the priority – as we’ve seen in so many other industrial disasters in so many other countries – is to protect industry and limit its liability rather than to ensure the long-term health and well being of the masses. Go figure.”
The great repatriation lie
All of this set the perfect stage for the Great Repatriation Lie. “It’s the big cover-up,” Iida told his Westminster audience. “People are being told it’s quite safe to have a little [radiation] exposure.”
Indeed, at a recent conferences of prefectural governors, young people in particular were urged to return to Fukushima. “If you come to live with us in Fukushima and work there, that will facilitate its post-disaster reconstruction and help you lead a meaningful life”, said Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori.
Young people in Japan, however, appear not to be cooperating. Where evacuees are returning, the majority are senior citizens, who have less to lose from a health perspectiveand are more traditionally tied to the land and their ancestral burial grounds.
“They want to die where they were born and not in an unfamiliar place”, said Yoshiko Aoki, an evacuee herself who now works with others, and who also spoke at the London conference.
All of this impacts revenue from the inhabitants’ tax which constitutes 24.3% of all local tax sources and is collected by both prefectures and municipalities. It is levied on both individuals and corporations but with the bulk of revenue coming from individuals.
Senior citizens who have retired do not contribute to income tax, so the onus is on governors and mayors to lure as many working people as possible back to their towns and regions in order to effectively finance local public services.
Radioactive areas are hardest hit economically
Late last year, the Asahi Shimbun looked at tax revenues in the 42 municipalities affected by the triple 2011 disasters of earthquake, tsunami and the Fukushima meltdowns.
Unsurprisingly, the areas hardest hit by radiological contamination had suffered the biggest economic blows. Those areas free from radioactive fallout could simply rebuild after the tsunami and earthquake, and had consequently recovered economically, some even to better than pre-3/11 levels.
“On the other end of the scale, Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, marked the biggest decreasing rate – 72.9 percent – in tax revenues for fiscal 2014”, the Asahi Shimbunreported. “All residents of the town near the crippled nuclear plant remain in evacuation. Although tax payments from companies increased from decontamination work and other public works projects, income taxes paid by residents and fixed asset taxes have declined.”
To return or not to return is the question of the hour – or it will be come March 2017, when the Abe government has announced it will revoke many evacuation orders. At that point, government compensation to evacuees would be lifted, putting them under financial pressure to return. Cue more confusion.
People are confronted, said Iida, with “two extreme views, either that it’s very dangerous or quite safe. So it’s very difficult to decide which is the truth and it has been left up to individuals.”
One of those towns that could be declared ‘safe’ is Tomioka, Japan’s Pripyat, formerly home to close to 16,000 people but now uninhabited.
“It’s like a human experiment, that’s how we feel,” said Aoki in London, herself a former Tomioka resident. “The Governor of Fukushima spoke about a safe Fukushima. We want it to become safe, but our thoughts and reality are not one and the same.”
Observes Kyoto University professor of nuclear physics, Koide Hiroaki, in the Vice film, who has been outspoken for decades against the continued use of nuclear energy:
“Once you enter a radiation controlled area, you aren’t supposed to drink water, let alone eat anything. The idea that somebody”, he pauses, ” … is living in a place like that is unimaginable.”
In the third installment of Fairewinds’ Japan Speaking Tour Series, Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen recounts his visit to a resettlement community of displaced refugees from the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi. Meeting with 22 women, ages 17 to 60, Arnie is the first person who has met with them to talk about the effects of radiation during the 5-years that they have been evacuees. Nuclear industry reports from TEPCO and the local newspaper have been the only information available to the isolated groups of victims from the atomic disaster.
A woman introduced herself to Arnie, “I am 6A.” Stigmatized and reduced to a numbered identity, these women have suffered radiation poisoning, and been told that their symptoms are simply due to stress. Their homes destroyed, their health in jeopardy, and their future unknown – this is the outcome of nuclear risk.
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