TOKYO, May 25 (Xinhua) — Iidate Village, about 40 kilometers from Japan‘s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, is now almost a ghost town.
Few human traces can be spotted, weeds are spreading, dirty water flows everywhere, and no living sounds can be heard except for a few raven’s croaks.
Japanese photographer Hida Shinsyuu has visited the nuclear contaminated zone more than 30 times. Looking through his camera, he often cannot hold back his tears.
Even more so, when he sees “nuclear refugees” suffering from diseases such as thyroid cancer yet having no one to turn to, he feels a lot of anger.
“In Fukushima, families who have thyroid cancer sufferers are experiencing loneliness and pain, as they are unwilling to reveal the “scars” to their relatives or friends, nor do they want to tell their children about the nuclear radiation,” said Shinsyuu.
In June 2015, Shinsyuu met a girl in Fukushima who had thyroid cancer. When the Fukushima nuclear accident broke out, the girl was at her junior high graduation ceremony.
The following year, she was diagnosed as thyroid cancer, and had surgery to remove the right part of her thyroid. In her third year of senior high part of her lymph nodes were removed.
However, the thyroid cancer returned after she entered college, and she had to quit school to remove her whole thyroid.
The girl told Shinsyuu that she had a dream of becoming a designer one day. Quitting school has made that dream distant.
Her parents are angry. No one has claimed responsibility for their child’s suffering. They were told her sickness had nothing to do with Fukushima.
The girl is just one of 166 teenagers who has been diagnosed with or suspected of having thyroid cancer, among whom 116 have undergone surgeries.
Five years following the nuclear crisis, the parents of children diagnosed with thyroid cancer in Fukushima have formed a group demanding the government provide convincing evidence that their children’s suffering is not related to the nuclear accident.
Sato Satiko, a mother living in Fukushima, complained about a governmental press conference to Spanish newspaper El Mundo in February.”Fukushima mothers were not allowed to ask even one question, all questioners were asked by pro-government press. The Japanese government and media are neglecting and humiliating us on purpose.”
Toshihide Tsuda, a professor of environmental epidemiology at Japan’s Okayama University, found that the incidence of thyroid cancer among children in Fukushima Prefecture was 20 to 50 times higher than the national average in 2014, three years after the disaster hit.
His findings, however, have fallen on deaf ears. The Fukushima prefectural government insists that the incidents of cancer and nuclear radiation are not related.
“The Japanese government hasn’t given any countermeasures against the children’s health problems in Fukushima,” said Tsuda. He says the government should learn from Chelnobyl and deal with the aftermath of the nuclear disaster seriously.
Nursing facilities to help reduce residual nuclear radiation are also lacking, according to Korobe Shinichi, a pediatrician and consultant for the Chernobyl Children’s Foundation.
“After getting treatment at the nursing facility for only four weeks, 30 percent of residual radioactive cesium in human bodies will be reduced,” said Shinichi.
However, such sanitariums set up after the accident are far less than those established after Chernobyl.
Based on the Japanese government’s approach, the long-term harm will probably be more serious than Chernobyl, Shinichi said.
He also pointed out that some families affected by the accident have become broken. Single mothers are suffering great mental stress and in urgent need of help.
Kanna Mitsuta, director of Japanese environmental protection organization “the Friend of the Earth Japan,” feels distressed about the Japanese government’s new policy of expediting the return of displaced Fukushima nuclear refugees.
The move actually means abandoning nuclear refugees in the name of reconstruction. Furthermore, the cause of the nuclear disaster has not been clarified and radioactive risks remain high in the refugees’ hometown, said Mitsuta.
A joint opinion poll conducted by national daily The Asahi Shimbun and the Fukushima local press in 2015 showed that over 70 percent of Fukushima residents were unsatisfied with the government’s countermeasures in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster. But for a government bent on putting the issue to rest, public opinion matters little.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-05/25/c_135387620.htm
May 25, 2016
Posted by dunrenard |
Fukushima 2016 | Disaster, Fukushima continuing, Fukushima Daiichi, Victims |
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The Tokyo District Court on April 27 ordered Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) to pay a total of around 31 million yen to the families of two former patients at a local hospital who died following the 2011 crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant.
The families of the two elderly men had demanded the operator of the crippled nuclear plant pay a total of about 66 million yen, claiming that they died after being forced to evacuate from Futaba Hospital located approximately 4.6 kilometers from the power plant in the Fukushima Prefecture town of Okuma.
Of some 50 patients at Futaba Hospital who died following the nuclear disaster, the families of a then 98-year-old dementia patient and a then 73-year-old schizophrenia patient filed the lawsuit. While there have been two cases of settlement between the families of former Futaba Hospital patients and TEPCO at Chiba and Fukushima district courts, this is the first court ruling to have been delivered over deaths of patients at the hospital.
TEPCO had acknowledged the causal relationship between evacuation and the deaths of the two patients. The trial, therefore, had focused on the amount of damages.
According to the ruling, the conditions of the two patients had been severe and they required assistance with eating and other daily tasks. An evacuation order was issued on March 12, 2011, the following day of the disaster, and the patients left the hospital on March 14 and 16, respectively. However, unable to receive appropriate medical care, the pair died of dehydration and hypothermia.
The court determined the amount of damages at 20 million yen for each patient and judged that their existing conditions had affected the development of additional illnesses. It then reduced the amount demanded by the families by 40 percent for the dementia patient and by 20 percent for the schizophrenia patient.
An attorney representing the plaintiffs said it was unfortunate that circumstances particular to a nuclear plant disaster was not taken into consideration in the ruling.
Meanwhile, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. released a comment stating that the utility will go through the ruling and sincerely handle the situation.
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160428/p2a/00m/0na/010000c
April 30, 2016
Posted by dunrenard |
Fukushima 2016 | Court Order, Damages, Fukushima Daiichi, Victims |
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By Sue Prent
It’s been a while since we last discussed the Fukushima Daiichi triple meltdown. That is not for lack of issues; it is primarily for lack of any meaningful progress in the ongoingdisaster.
We have just passed the fifth observance of the first catastrophic day, March 11, 2011 and pretty much all of nuclear safety expert Arnie Gundersen’s grim predictions of what we would learn in the aftermath have come to pass.
What Arnie could not have predicted iin 2011 is how unwilling both TEPCO and Japan’s government officials have been to learn from this disaster, and how persistent the effort would be to suppress important radiological and epidemiological information.
Without accountability, deaths of citizens who lived near the doomed reactors following the triple meltdown have simply been attributed to the stress of evacuation, and supposedly no one has been harmed by radiation. In an unbelievable extrapolation of a convenient myth, there has been a major government effort, supported by the atomic power industry, to increase allowable levels of radiation exposure and dismiss the need for future costly evacuations as harmful and unnecessary.
It was only a little over a week ago, that anyone in an official position at TEPCO was finally held accountable under the law. I find it unbelievable that only three individuals can be held responsible for the cascade of unaddressed design flaws, corruption, lax regulation, human error and human arrogance that all contributed to making a bad situation much, much worse.
Now we are learning of an even more egregious breach of the public trust and social justice at Fukushima.
Individuals who have exhibited symptoms of radiation poisoning and other illnesses are apparently being shunned by some of their neighbors and dismissed by the medical establishment without appropriate care and without acknowledgment in their medical records.
This mistreatment specific to radiation victims is apparently not without precedent in Japanese history.
On his current speaking tour of Japan, Arnie Gundersen has had the privilege of speaking with a small group of survivors of the 1945 bombing at Hiroshima who share a unique perspective on what may lie ahead for the people of Fukushima
Hiroshima survivor, Tomiko Matsumoto, 85, recalls being a schoolgirl following that inhuman bombing. Of the 80 students at her school, only thirty survived the blast. Tomiko could be said to have been one of the “lucky” ones, but mere survival is a pretty poor kind of ‘luck.’
Still traumatized by the mental and physical horrors of the blast experience, she recalls that there was no proper care provided for the injured who were regarded with suspicion and hostility by their neighbors and callous indifference or unfeeling curiosity by their occupiers, upon whom they depended for any care that they could get.
The discrimination must have been the hardest for a young girl with no surviving family to bear:
“I was shocked because I was discriminated against by Hiroshima people. We lived together in the same place and Hiroshima people know what happened but they discriminated against each other. ..I was shocked.”
“There were so many different kinds of discrimination. People said that girls who survived the bomb shouldn’t get married. Also they refused to hire the survivors, not only because of the scars, but because they were so weak. Survivors did not have 100 percent energy.”
“There was a survivor’s certificate and medical treatment was free. But the other people were jealous. Jealous people, mentally discriminated. So, I didn’t want to show the health book sometimes, so I paid. Some of the people, even though they had the health book, were afraid of discrimination, so they didn’t even apply for the health book. They thought discrimination was worse than paying for health care.”
The mistreatment and insensitivity experienced by survivors continued into Tomiko’s adulthood. She was the victim of employment discrimination and personal shame.
Though she was lucky enough to bear children, both of her daughters are sterile and one suffers from anemia. Doctors have dismissed the possibility that the family’s health issues might be linked to her exposure to radiation from the atomic bomb blast.
It may be precisely because of their uniquely traumatic history of nuclear attack that modern Japanese society is ill-prepared to challenge the current meme being promoted by TEPCO and the Abe government, that no one was harmed by the triple meltdown at Fukushima and there is no cause for concern about using atomic power as an energy source.
Having emerged from beneath the cloud of WWII, they want to view themselves under the lens of success and progress, not to revisit the shameful legacy of nuclear radiation sickness that they had hoped to leave behind.
Sadly, neither TEPCO nor the Abe government and functionaries right down to the regional level can be trusted to reveal the truth about radiation from Fukushima Daiichi and how it’s shadow has now been irreversibly cast over the Prefecture, marring the future of Japan.
So survivors of Fukushima, like those of Hiroshima before them are left to face unfolding health issues and despair in the friendless vacuum of their own thoughts and care.
(I am pleased to be a non-technical member of the Fairewinds Energy Education crew, but my posts on GMD are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Fairewinds.)
Fukushima’s invisible victims
March 26, 2016
Posted by dunrenard |
Fukushima 2016 | Disaster, Fukushima continuing, Fukushima Daiichi, radiation, Victims |
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The grandmother, left, and mother of a female high school student
who underwent thyroid surgery talk about their concerns
in Fukushima Prefecture on March 5
Families of young thyroid cancer patients from Fukushima Prefecture diagnosed after the 3/11 disaster have formed a support group that also aims to pressure doctors and authorities for better policies.
The 311 Thyroid Cancer Family Group hopes to share the concerns people have felt over the health of their loved ones in the five years since the onset of the nuclear crisis.
“We want the Fukushima prefectural government and doctors to demonstrate a better understanding of patients,” one member said.
The group was established by seven parents and relatives of five young people from the prefecture’s central Nakadori and eastern Hamadori areas who underwent thyroid surgery following the triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
Hiroyuki Kawai, a lawyer from the Daini Tokyo Bar Association, will lead the group as its representative. Others will help manage the association, including Motomi Ushiyama, a doctor who has served as a physician in Fukushima Prefecture and also conducted an investigation on residents of areas contaminated in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
“Our aim is to create a place where patients, who remain separated and are unable to even talk of their anxieties or doubts, can meet and talk to one another,” Kawai said. “By having the patients and their families unite and cry out as one, it makes it easier for us to make policy suggestions to the government.”
The group is considering filing lawsuits in the future against the central and prefectural governments, along with Tokyo Electric Power Co., the Fukushima plant’s operator, but at the moment, its main purpose is to provide direct help to the patients and their families.
The Fukushima prefectural government continues to examine the thyroid glands of residents who were 18 or under at the time of the 2011 nuclear disaster and those born following the event, which accounted for around 380,000 people. A total of 166 cases of thyroid cancer or suspected signs of the condition were found before the end of 2015.
However, the prefecture’s expert panel assessing the statistics deemed it was “unlikely the cases were caused by radiation.”
Unsurprisingly, members of the group viewed this official statement with unease and skepticism.
One high school student from Nakadori had her thyroid gland removed by a doctor at Fukushima Medical University Hospital last spring. But with the cancer cells having spread more than expected, she now has a large scar across her neck that she feels she must cover with a scarf even in summer.
Her mother, in her 40s, said: “My daughter became more prone to fatigue after the surgery. Falling asleep while playing her video games, which she loves to do, was something that never happened before.”
A nodule was found on the student’s thyroid about two years ago. At the hospital, her surgeon told her: “We will examine the tissue believed to be formed of cancer cells by sticking a needle in your neck. It’s very painful, so it’s up to you to decide. Make up your mind within a month.”
The student and mother talked it over and decided to opt for the test. But when they returned to the hospital to get the results, the mother was shocked, as the doctor just blurted out the results in front of the young patient, saying: “It was a malignant tumor.”
The doctor did, however, explain it was nothing to worry about and said: “It’s not a big deal. Thyroid cancers can be left as they are for six months or a year, and they still won’t be anything life-threatening.”
But when the student underwent surgery six months later, her mother was reprimanded by the same doctor who said: “The tumor was bigger than we had expected. Who in the world told you that you can leave it for six months?”
The doctor also warned her of the possibilities of recurrence.
After her daughter’s surgery, the mother joined an event organized by the hospital for thyroid cancer patients to meet one another. But it was nothing like what she had envisioned.
“We only heard one-sided stories, and it was not a forum that would answer any of the doubts I had,” she said. “It was completely useless.”
The father of a man who was a high school student in 2011 was disturbed by the attitude of the same doctor who also operated on his son’s thyroid.
The father said: “After the surgery, I repeatedly asked the doctor if the cancer had anything to do with the nuclear power plant, but he just flat-out rejected it saying, ‘There’s no correlation.’
Furthermore, the doctor told him: “Don’t say anything to the media even if they learn about your son’s surgery. You know there’s no necessity for you to answer them.”
“My son fears recurrence and metastasis every day,” the father said.
However, the doctor told The Asahi Shimbun through the institution’s public relations department that he had been misunderstood.
“We have been paying the utmost attention to establishing an environment where patients can talk about their worries and doubts, having mental health care specialists getting involved with them at an early stage of their treatments. Such efforts continue well into the post-surgery period,” he said in writing.
“The diagnosis of cancer is something we take extreme care when we are letting the patients know about it. But now having been confronted by interpretations that were not at all my intentions, I strongly realize the difficulty of conveying the message to patients. When we give the notice to patients who are minors, we consult their guardians and check with them before giving them the word.”
Meanwhile, the 311 Thyroid Cancer Family Group will be holding events to promote networking between patients’ families and where they can seek advice, encouraging more people to join the group.
The members said: “We first want to encourage the patients to meet each other, share information and demand improvement of their medical environments.”
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201603240025
March 24, 2016
Posted by dunrenard |
Fukushima 2016 | Fukushima continuing, Thyroid Cancer, Victims |
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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.
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/02/24/five-years-after-fukushima-families-remain-torn-apart-by-evacuation/
February 26, 2016
Posted by dunrenard |
Fukushima 2016 | children, Evacuees, Families, Fukushima continuing, Refugees, Victims |
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