Umi Asaka moved to Aotearoa at 14 years old after the 2011 nuclear power station accident in Fukushima.
Asaka told Te Ao Māori News about the continuing impacts of the disaster - radiation fears, the disproportionate burden on rural locals and controversial wastewater release.
Although the nuclear accident was caused by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, Asaka said the disaster really came from human error.
The nuclear reactors were 40 years old and professionals warned they were no longer safe but the government and Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) ignored the warnings.
Yuho Asaka, Umi’s mother, comes from Fukushima, and while Umi was born and raised in Tokyo, she spent a lot of her childhood there and has many family still in Fukushima.
They lived in Tokyo at the time, five hours away from Fukushima. The radiation levels also rose in Tokyo and people there experienced nosebleeds and dizziness.
The mother and daughter moved to New Zealand as Yuho thought they could be potentially more prone to impacts as wheelchair users.
Yuho has been an anti-nuclear power station activist since the 1980s. When the Chernobyl nuclear power disaster occurred in Ukraine in 1986, Yuho thought the same could happen in Japan due to it being an earthquake-prone country.
About 20 per cent of global earthquakes happen in Japan, and Te Ao Māori News interviewed Umi Asaka on August 9 after the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that hit Japan the night before and triggered tsunami warnings.
A 5.3 magnitude earthquake followed and the Japan Meteorological Agency continues to urge people to be alert for a possible mega-quake in the Nankai Trough along the Pacific coast.
Fukushima’s treated nuclear wastewater dumping
The dumping of treated nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima plant has been happening for nearly a year now and has been controversial.
Asaka said she was concerned about it and people including local municipal governments had been trying to stop this long before it happened.
She said the Fishermen’s Association in Fukushima was suing the government to try to stop the nuclear wastewater dumping because of the impacts on fish.
Since the disaster, Tepco has begun pumping in water to cool the nuclear reactors and the contaminated water has been stored in over 1000 tanks.
As a victim of the nuclear power stations accident, we don’t want to become the perpetrator of further harm to the Pacific Ocean.
— Mūto Ruiko
This water is filtered through an advanced liquid processing system, which reduces radioactive substances to acceptable safety standards - apart from tritium and carbon 14.
These radioactive forms of hydrogen and carbon are difficult to separate from water. The filtered water is treated again and is diluted in seawater before being released into the ocean, a process that will happen over 30 years.
Recently Te Ao Māori News interviewed David Krofcheck - an American pro-nuclear power professor at the University of Auckland who said Japan made the right move.
He reasoned that radioactive forms were present in the natural environment and the levels met World Health Organisation standards.
While the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has endorsed the process, other UN-appointed human rights experts have opposed the plan.
Robert Richmond, the director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory at the University of Hawaii and research professor said concerns remain on the efficacy of the ALPS treatment.
He criticised the monitoring programme as inadequate and poorly designed.
“The long-term effects of this discharge on Pacific marine ecosystems and those who depend on them are still unknown. Even small doses of radiation can cause cancer or genetic damage,” Richmond said in a statement to BenarNews.
“The discharge, planned to continue for decades is irreversible. Radionuclides bioaccumulate in marine organisms and can be passed up the food web, affecting marine life and humans who consume affected seafood.”
Despite concerns, Pacific leaders in Japan agreed on the continuation of the release as it complied with international safety standards.
Fukushima - the fruit basket of Japan
“Fukushima unfortunately has become known to the international world for the nuclear power stations accident,” Asaka said.
Fukushima is located in the northeast countryside of Japan and it is the third largest of 47 prefectures in Japan.
Asaka said Fukushima was abundant with natural beauty surrounded by mountains and the presence of rivers, lakes and the ocean.
“The land is very fertile and was known to be a fruit basket to Japan.”
The region was famous for apples, pears, peaches and persimmons, and also grew many vegetables and was famous for its beautiful rice fields.
The nuclear accident impacted the food chains and livelihood of people dependent on food farming as well as the lives of citizens of Fukushima who, after the accident, added many safety measures to make sure the food was safe.
Fuhyohigai - reputational damage or harmful rumour
Since the accident, ‘fuhyohigai’ has been used to describe a ‘social problem’, which translates to harmful rumour or reputational damage.
The term was created in response to people’s fears of radiation contamination. Japanese scientist Shunichi Yamashita has said “radiation’s real danger” is fear.
People’s concerns have been described as a psychosocial impact and an “information disaster”.
Antinuclear activist Mūto Ruiko said, “’Reputational damage’ is meant to refer to damage caused by false rumours stirred up about something without any basis, but in the case of Fukushima, it’s not just some fabricated rumour. Some products actually show high levels of contamination.”
The consumption of radioactively contaminated food has been proven to lead to increases in cancer. The World Health Organisation has said the ingestion of radioactive iodine in food, drink or by inhaling contaminated air accumulates in thyroid glands and increases the risk of thyroid cancer, particularly in children.
Asaka said after the nuclear accident more than 300 children had thyroid cancer but the government denied the link between the high occurrences of cancer with the radiation.
She said one of the hardest experiences for people was the difficulty of tracing back and proving their health issues were caused by radiation.
Japanese scientist Dr Toru Takano said the “over-diagnosis” of thyroid cancer in children was a result of mass screening rather than a result of the nuclear accident. And Dr Shunichi Yamashita, who is influential in Japan’s Thyroid Association, has advocated scaling down thyroid screenings.
Yamashita has been commonly ridiculed for telling Fukushima residents after the nuclear accident that “radiation does not affect people who are happy and smiling. The effects of radiation come to you if you worry about it. This theory has been proven by experiments on animals”.
Asaka laughed when retelling this story: “They basically said that you are getting sick because you are being negative”.
“That’s the amount of trust that we can give to the Japanese government and the scientists that it hires.”
Grassroots radiation monitoring
Asaka said there was a difficult dynamic when discussing the risks of radiation “because the government is all about pretending nothing has happened”.
She said the farmers worried and cared whether people would be harmed by consuming their food.
“When the government was completely denying the risk of nuclear power station contamination, there were many people who gathered to establish citizen radiation measuring centres across Japan.”
The community-made centres combined funds to buy measuring equipment.
This allowed citizens to measure the radiation levels of the food to see if it was safe, and to test whether soil was safe for planting in. It also helped identify which regions had higher levels of contamination.
They basically said that you are getting sick because you are being negative... That’s the amount of trust that we can give to the Japanese government and the scientists that it hires.
— Umi Asaka
There were more than 30 of these and to this day, Asaka said there are still nine measuring centres in operation.
She said these were completely funded by those running the spaces and so many had shut down due to lack of funding. However, Asaka said the work went on and there was a website people could use to educate themselves, which she recommends as a tool for those travelling to Japan.
The citizens were ridiculed for not being scientists or experts but others had praised the grassroots bottom-up citizen science.
The impacts on Fukushima locals
Asaka said Fukushima hadn’t been respected in the same way Tokyo had been.
She said there was a “lack of care for the rural community” and a power imbalance between Tokyo City and rural Fukushima.
“None of the energy or electricity generated was used in Fukushima,” she said.
The energy was used to “sustain the city life in Tokyo” and meanwhile the locals of Fukushima carried the risk of radiation. Asaka said the rural community was taken for granted and exploited by the bigger city.
The impact of the nuclear accident had been the silencing of the people, Asaka said, as many felt they couldn’t talk about their experience.
She said the accident hadn’t ended and, after 13 years, not much had changed.
She said she hoped the wastewater dumping stopped and the government accepted the damage it had caused, “I would love to see a better future for my cousins’ children”.
“I don’t know what closure would look like but I would love to have the closure where we can talk about it and reflect and can heal from that.”
Concerns on harm to Pacific Ocean
Asaka quoted anti-nuclear activist Mūto Ruiko who said, “as a victim of the nuclear power stations accident, we don’t want to become the perpetrator of further harm to the Pacific Ocean”.
Asaka said it was an important message because, while the Japanese government had decided to release the wastewater, many people in Japan didn’t want to harm the Pacific Ocean, which connects many countries, islands and lives.
