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Japan’s Meltdown Moves From
Reactors To Rice Bowls
Fukushima Nuclear Plant
EMF Computer Protection
Magnetic Field Detector
By Paul Blustein, Special
March 04, 2012
Our
family has feasted on two Gambaru Pakku (“Hang in there!”
packs) — boxes of fruit, vegetables and miso from
Fukushima Prefecture — and my wife has just ordered a
third. We have bought several cartons of crisp Fukushima
apples, too, and almost all of the rice we have consumed
since the earthquake last March has also come from the part
of Japan known worldwide for its cripple d nuclear reactors.
Since we
are convinced it’s safe, shifting our consumption to
Fukushima food is our small way of helping people from a
devastated area, whose products suffer from an unjust taint.
Lately,
though, this sort of gesture is starting to feel futile.
After an initial groundswell of sympathy and support for the
stricken northeast coast, a vocal segment of the public
obsessed with avoiding even insignificant levels of
radioactivity seems to be turning its back on the region.
A few
weeks ago, for instance, residents of Kanagawa Prefecture on
Tokyo’s southwest border belligerently confronted the
governor over his proposal to allow burial of some of the
debris left by the tsunami for fear that radiation might be
lurking within. Among the opponents shown on television news
was one woman who huffed that the governor couldn’t offer
100 percent assurance about the safety of the garbage — as
if a smidgen less would be unacceptable.
Similar
scenes have played out around the country; as a result of
such citizen pressure, few local governments — Tokyo is a
big exception — have agreed to take a share of the 22
million tons of smashed buildings, vehicles and other refuse
that must be cleared before reconstruction can begin. Even
though the junk comes from Miyagi and Iwate prefectures,
which are well to the north of the nuclear facilities, and
even though officials have vowed to test it and incinerate
it using special radiation-capturing filters, compassion has
lost out to a Japanese version of “not in my backyard.”
The news
has also been full of stories about people (mostly mothers
of young children in the Tokyo area) searching for food
produced far from the northeast. As for tourism, even Nikko,
a city whose historic shrines and spectacular scenery rank
among the most popular destinations in Japan, is coming
under bombardment from parents fearful about school outings
there — because Fukushima Dai-ichi is about 90 miles away.
So a mea
culpa is in order. In an article last March, I contrasted
the “relative calm” of the Japanese with the “hysterical”
behavior of foreigners, who were fleeing the country and
canceling visits. My chief explanation for the Japanese
reaction was the way in which public television was carrying
almost nightly interviews with nuclear and medical experts —
the general message being that, for people living some
distance from the plants, the threat was minuscule. That
jibed with what I was finding on the Internet in articles by
science writers and information posted by reputable
scientists.
Well, I
was wrong — about the Japanese, that is. A people who had
impressed me as literate, sensible and above all public-
spirited are proving that a substantial number of them can
act just like “fly-jin,” the term derisively applied to the
foreigners, or gaijin, who abandoned jobs and other
responsibilities in their rush to the airports.
Let me
explain why my wife and I have no reservations about eating
Fukushima food and feeding it to our sons, who are 8 and 10.
(We’re hardly reckless parents, by the way; we won’t even
let our boys ride their bikes around our town, although
their friends do, because the streets are narrow and clogged
with traffic and pedestrians.)
The
amounts of radiation that would endanger one’s health, we’ve
come to realize, are way above the levels that anyone living
a normal life in the Tokyo area could plausibly encounter
from Fukushima-related causes. About a third of Japanese die
of some form of cancer — roughly the same as in other
advanced countries — and the chances increase by 0.5 percent
for people exposed to an annual cumulative total of 100
millisieverts, according to widely accepted calculations by
scientists.
That
calculation is based on studies of groups such as
nuclear-plant workers and the survivors of the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — whose cancer rates, we
were surprised to learn, haven’t been that much higher than
those of the general population. (Small exposures occur in
all kinds of unexpected ways; a round-trip flight between
Tokyo and New York typically exposes you to 0.2 millisievert.)
A
half-percentage point of extra risk isn’t terrifying; nor is
it trivial. The main point is, to get anywhere close to 100
millisieverts of exposure, a person would have to eat
ridiculously large amounts of food contaminated with
radiation above government standards over a prolonged
period, or stay for months in one of the hot spots that have
been detected in gutters and other isolated p atches around
Tokyo. At exposures below 100 millisieverts, some increased
cancer risk may occur, but it is so small that scientists
can’t detect it amid the welter of other possible causes,
such as smoking or poor diet.
It’s
distressing that visceral fear is trumping rational thought,
especially since such attitudes could dash hopes for
recovery among the hundreds of thousands of disaster
victims. Saddest of all are signs that people in the
northeast may be cracking under the strain.
An
education official in Fukushima recently told my wife that
teachers there are swamped with demands from parents to keep
their kids away from playgrounds, or allow their kids to
forgo school lunches in favor of home-prepared meals with no
local ingredients. That sounds like the kind of behavior
that, after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, generated an
increase in depression, stress, alcoholism and other
mental-health problems among people living in that part of
Ukraine; studies showed that the greatest damage to public
health was in the psychological realm rather than the
physiological.
Some see
Japan’s growing anti-nuclear sentiment as a heartening sign
that a quiescent public is starting to take power back from
political and corporate elites. Maybe that is a silver
lining in the Fukushima cloud. No doubt, the government and
Tokyo Electric Power Co. deserve much of the opprobrium that
has been heaped on them.
I just
wish the most effective civic activism here wasn’t a classic
manifestation of Know-nothingism. I wish, too, that the
millions of Japanese who see the radiation issue more or
less as my wife and I do — the majority here, I suspect —
would begin organizing themselves. They could start by
beseeching their local governments to take some of that
debris. That would be a healthy step toward rekindling the
spirit of concerted action for which the Japanese are justly
famous.
Paul Blustein, a former Tokyo correspondent for the
Washington Post, is an author and researcher affiliated with
the Brookings Institution and the Centre for International
Governance Innovation.
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