Japan in a nutshell

   
     This semester, I've been fortunate enough to have so much to write about in regards to Japan. Unfortunately, it came at the cost of thousands of peoples' lives and displacement of countless others due to the historic tsunami that ripped through the northeast provinces of the country on March 11. However, it did reveal a lot of the media process that takes place in the country and how big of a hand the government plays into it.

      Although Japan ranks in at number 11 in the press freedom index there seemed to be many obstacles stemming from government involvement when it came to reporter's access to information. Not only was obtaining facts from TEPCO and government officials a difficult task, often times the statements made by both bodies were vague or loosely based on the truth, to put it kindly. At one point, the government took the approach of blocking press releases of the unfolding situation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant because they felt that TEPCO had better things to do than inform the media of what was happening at the plant.

     More recently, since TEPCO has started has resumed press releases, they've initiated the practice of compounding several press release sessions into one, drawn out, almost unbearable session where reporters are bombarded with statistics and offered little to no clarification to the technical terminology spewed by the speakers. In a recent Japan Times article, the cultural customs and how it relates to domestic reporters covering the event:

But even the conduct of the reporters reflects Japanese reverence for cooperation and respect. The journalists patiently endure the long news conferences, filled with detail but scarce on poignancy. A defiant question comes up maybe onchttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8389714855227338900e during the entire four hours.

     As much as the culture of "community before individual" has been ingrained into the public's mindset, even the Japanese were outraged with the lack of information being shared by the government after the tsunami. The normally docile and compliant public took to the streets with their disapproval of how things were being handled, especially after the United States released numbers implicating that the Japanese had either miscalculated the initial levels of contamination being put out by the damaged reactors or had just plainly concealed the truth.

     In light of the accusations made by governments across the globe and the outrage by its own citizens, one should wonder if the press freedom ranking for Japan is accurate. How can a free country, in regards to press, be so vague or closed off when it comes to reporting on a national disaster that affects the entire globe. The Japanese government and their claims of providing an atmosphere conducive to press freedom definitely took a major hit during the events stemming from the partial meltdown at the Fukashima Daiichi power plant.

     Although Japan's media system is comparable to that of the United States and other western countries in infrastructure and relative access to facts, the past three months have exposed the extent that the government can and will take when push comes to shove. Even though its not unprecedented for governments, even that of the United States, to withhold information for public safety (Osama bin laden death photos), it's hard to believe that the same lack of sharing of basic information would have occurred if the reactor in San Onofre would've melted down. 
     

Artistic Reflections

     From April 23-May 6, Japan's Nuclear Film festival showed nuclear themed films to commemorate the 25 year anniversary of the disaster at Chernobyl. Ironically enough, the festival took place just a few months after their own country was thrust into a nuclear disaster on par with the one that took place in Ukraine.

     Many of the films, including that of Japanese documentary film maker Seiichi Motohashi, focused on the dangers of nuclear power and trying to establish a precedent for changes to the energy policies of all countries to avoid future disasters.

     
     Motohashi, who has traveled to Budische, Belarus, one of the hardest hit towns during the Chernobyl disaster, over 30 times since 1991. During his travels, he produced two films, Naja no Mura (Nadya's Village, 1997) and 2002's "Arekusei to Izumi (Alexei and the Spring). Both have garnered acclaim at film festivals both home and abroad and were shown during the festival along with 15 other films targeted at nuclear power. Along with the films, an art exhibition of Chernobyl themed paintings by Heroshi Kaihara were on display throughout the event. Motohashi spoke to the Japan Times about his projects that he completed in Belarus:  

"I wanted to make 'Nadya's Village' to give energy to the audience," says Motohashi at his office in Higashi-Nakano. "I wanted to show how people who had experienced this terrible disaster had come back. At the time, I didn't really think it had something to do with me personally. Now I know that that sort of accident can happen anywhere, especially in this country. ... There's no way to make a nuclear plant totally safe. It's a kind of human arrogance to think otherwise — nature is always more powerful. Human beings ought to be more humble in their dealings with it."

     The festival's sentiment mirrors that of the public of Japan following the fallout from the tsunami that struck and disabled the reactors at Fukashima Daiichi. Reliance on nuclear power is not the safe way to go for the future of Japan is a common theme in both the films and the outcries from displaced citizens. However, the government addressed the public and the world this week and stated that Japan will continue to rely on nuclear power. This release came the same week that the government also pressured one of its energy companies to shut down their nuclear facility just south of Tokyo because of fears that an impending earthquake on the fault line the facility rests on could produce a larger disaster than that on March 11.

     Japan is caught in quite the dilemma. They're a country with minimal natural resources and are supremely reliant on nuclear power. With 14 new plants proposed to be built, the events at Fukushima have severely crippled this nation that gets nearly a quarter of its energy supply from nuclear power. What's even more troubling is the surfacing of diplomatic cables from the United States  that question not only the preparedness for a future natural disaster, but basic security to prevent terrorist attacks.

     The environmental and economic affects of the disaster are being felt not only in Japan, but globally, demonstrating how close knit a planet we are despite our differences. It's time that we, as a planet, reassess our energy sources and a safer way of facilitating them. Namely, not letting the builders of nuclear power plants also be the governing body.

    

Mandatory Evacuation

     Japan officially announced a no-go zone for the affected provinces surrounding the damaged nuclear reactor at Fukushima. What was once a suggested evacuation zone has been changed to an imposed one with residents of the areas given no timetable when, if ever, they'll be able to return to their homes.

     People living in the affected zone were allowed by the government to take shuttles to their neighborhoods that were destroyed by the tsunami to gather whatever they could in a few hours before the government locked down the area with imposed fines of up to 10,000 yen or detainment for up to 30 days as outlined in a new nuclear emergency law.

"If people continue to live in the area, the cumulative radiation level may exceed 20 millisieverts a year," said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano. "Considering the effect it may have on people's health, we would like those people to evacuate to a different location in an orderly manner."

      Initially, the people living within the affected area were asked to remain indoors during the first few days of the disaster at the plant. But early this week, it was disclosed that during those first few days the Japanese government had miscalculated the amount of contaminants being emitted by the reactors, with the level of pollution being more on par with that of Chernobyl instead of the lesser incident that occurred at Three Mile Island.

     With those revelations coming to light and the newly imposed no access zone by the Japanese government, it raises the question of how much radiation were those roughly 70,000 residents in the contaminated area actually exposed to? And now that there is no timetable set for those people being allowed to return to their homes, where will an already crowded country fit all their displaced citizens?

     Will the northeast coast of Japan be relegated to ghost towns and a grim reminder of the perils of nuclear power gone awry like the area surrounding the Chernobyl meltdown? When residents returned to gather belongings they got a brief taste of what their former towns might turn into during the coming years if contamination levels prevent them from returning in the immediate future. Cows still chained to their posts lay dead and rotting. Cars strewn about, displaced by the force of the tsunami and houses reduced to piles of mud and debris.

     “It feels like my house is burning down, so I want to take as much as possible,” said Michiko Koyama, a resident of the affected area. “I don’t know how many years it will be before we can come back.”

   

Unskilled workers and a nuclear disaster

 

     In the wake of the disaster unfolding at Japans Fukushima Daiichi plant, many secrets of the way business was conducted at the embattled plant have surfaced. Namely, the use of unskilled workers to carry out the tasks that the plant's operators, Tokyo Electric, didn't want to subject their trained and highly skilled workers to. In their place, unskilled workers, or what are commonly referred to as day layborers, were employed for high daily wages in return for being exposed to harsh working conditions and dangerous levels of radiation.

     “This is the hidden world of nuclear power,” said Yuko Fujita, a former physics professor at Keio University in Tokyo and a longtime campaigner for improved labor conditions in the nuclear industry. “Wherever there are hazardous conditions, these laborers are told to go. It is dangerous for them, and it is dangerous for nuclear safety.”

     The use of these unskilled laborers to carry out more dangerous and undesirable jobs displays the two tiered labor force not only in Japan, but many countries outside the US. The skilled and elite level workers are not subjected to the high risk jobs that the lower, working class people must take on to provide for their families. Combining unskilled labor in a setting that requires the utmost care and attention to detail has proven to very dangerous in the case of their nuclear facilities.

     Workers are encouraged to keep injuries unreported because of the fear of losing their jobs. However, since the coverage of the unfolding drama at the battered power plant, many of the workers being reported to have been injured in news reports have been the untrained day laborers. Since the beginning of their nuclear program in the 1970's, Japan has paid out benefits to 50 such workers due to the development of cancers such as leukemia that are linked to exposure to high levels of radiation. However, many cases are not granted settlements because it's hard to prove the link between their time spent at the plants and the disease.

    
Mr. Ishizawa, the only one who allowed his name to be used, said, “I might go back to a nuclear plant one day, but I’d have to be starving.” In addition to his jobs at Daiichi, he has worked at thermal power plants and on highway construction sites in the region. For now, he said, he will stay away from the nuclear industry.

      With safety obviously being a major concern with the lack of transparency by the Japanese government in the actual levels of radiation surrounding the plant, some workers find it hard to resist the money. With the company being battered economically by the disaster that struck in March, some see exposure to radiation for upward of $1,000 a day as a necessary evil.

     Before the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that followed, the Fukushima plant was already littered with safety issues. Whether it's a cultural problem that leads to the skilled workers not feeling obligated to carry out dangerous tasks or the Tokyo Electric Group exploiting local impoverished people to do their dirty work, this practice needs to stop. The breakdown of a nuclear power plant and the pollution that it causes affects people globally and stricter enforcement is needed to ensure the safety of all people that call this planet home. If that means investing money and training the people that are working on the facilities, then Japan and it's energy companies need to step up and ensure that from here on out their nuclear facilities run not only efficiently, but ethically as well.

Chernobyl Status

The nuclear plant at Chernobyl pictured left and the battered

Fukashima Daiichi plant in Japan are now reported to both be

level 7 nuclear disasters.

     When the Fuakshima Daiichi reactor first fell victim to the ravages of the tsunami that has crippled Japan, Tokyo Electric and the Japanese government maintained that the fallout from the nuclear disaster facing the country would be contained and not reach the level 7 status of the disaster in Ukraine in 1986. However, their tune has changed significantly this week as new assessments of the levels of nuclear contaminents released both by radioactive water and the multiple explosions that occured at several of the reactors at the plant have reached the levels of Chernobyl.

     Japanese officilas have stated that although the disaster in Japan has reached a level 7 on the international nuclear crisis scale, the level of radioactivity released is only about a tenth of that put into the atmosphere after the Chernobyl meltdown. However, the level was first reported at 5, putting it on par with the accident occurred at Three Mile Island and now the officials are stating that initially the accident at Fukashima Daiichi was in fact a 7 and now has been downgraded to a 5.

     This is just part of a perplexing string of events that has been unfolding since the tsunami struck March 11, leaving the Japanese government to look either uninformed about the actions taking place at the plant or trying to conceal the facts. Seiji Shiroya, a commissioner of Japan's Nuclear Safety Committee said that the intial decision to not label it a level 7 disaster was due to the fear that the statistics at the time may have had too large of a margin of error to make such a drastic decision. However, he also hinted at a more plausable agenda:

“Some foreigners fled the country even when there appeared to be little risk,” he said. “If we immediately decided to label the situation as Level 7, we could have triggered a panicked reaction.”

Shiroya later went on to say:

  “At first, the calculations could have been off by digits,” Mr. Shiroya said. “It was only when there was certainty that the margin of error was within two to three times that we made an announcement,” he said, later adding, “I do not think that there was any delay.”

     Scientists and coutnries abroad have been critical of the Japanese for their handling of the situation since the disaster began to unfold in mid March. Even though Japanese officials are stating that they errored on the side of caution in waiting to upgrade the level of the disaster, wouldn't you do so to protect lives rather than prevent a mass exodus? This logic underscores the differences in culture from Amercia to Japan. Japan, being a more collectivist culture is more about the whole rather than the individual, so, in that line of reasoning it might be persmissable to sacrifice a few to save the majority from harm.

     With that being said, many peole involved in the energy business have been hearing whispers that the numbers the Japanese had been disclosing to the pubic were not at all accurate. A senior executive said in a telephone interview on April 4 that he had been told that the Speedi model suggested that radioactive materials escaping the Daiichi complex were much higher than Japanese officials had publicly acknowledged, and perhaps as high as half of the releases from Chernobyl. -The New York Times


    
     Because the numbers on Chernobyl are skewed, mostly because experts believe the Russians also weren't forthcoming with the level of radioactive releases from their plant, the comparison between Japan and Chernobyl are fuzzy at best. The Japanese calculations proposing that the damage is only about 20% of the Chernobyl accident are based on the assumption that the reported statistics from the 1986 disaster were underreported by about 2 times what they actually were. If the Chernobyl accident was found to be more credible than believed, the Japanese disaster would then be raised to about 40-50 % of that in the Ukraine.

     A major fact that is being overlooked in the grand scheme of tyring to assess the level of damage is that Chernobyl only lasted for about 10 days while the ongoing drama in Japan has continued for well over a month with no end in sight. The question that should be on everyone's mind is that even if Japan surpassed the Chernobyl accident would the Japanese government and Tepco let us know?

Lesser of Two Toxins?

     Since the quake on March 11 that turned Japan's Fukashima Daiichi nuclear plant into a national hazard, Japanese officials and Tokyo Electric have had their hands forced by the potential of a full nuclear meltdown that could rival that of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

     The chain of bad luck started when the backup generators were washed away by the tsunami which left the reactors without a cooling system to hydrate the fuel cores to prevent them from catching fire and melting down. Tokyo electric was then forced to utilize fire fighting equipment to combat the problem, pumping tons of ocean water per hour onto the fuel rods to keep them from releasing radioactive elements into the atmosphere.

     However, they're now stuck with the dubious task of disposing of the accumulated water that wasn't vaporized by the heat of fuel rods. Tanks used to collect accumulated radioactive water have reached their capacity so now contaminated water is being released into the ocean to make way for water with higher levels of radiation. The water being released, according to Tokyo Electric, contains levels of radiation 100 times the legal limit, where as the water that is taking its place in storage containers is 10,000 times the legal limit.

“Unfortunately, the water contains a certain amount of radiation,” Mr. Edano said. “This is an unavoidable measure to prevent even higher amounts of radiation from reaching the sea.”-Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano

 

         Iodine-131 and other radioactive elements being spewed in to the ocean by the ton have half lives that are relatively short (Iodine-131 has a half life of 8 days), however, more dangerous elements like Cesium137 has a half life of 30 years. This will pose long term problems to the sealife and economy of Japan as these elements saturate the water and start to collect in sea life. 

      To add to the woes of past few weeks, the Japanese have also started to pump nitrogen into the damaged reactors to combat the build up of hydrogen, the byproduct of spraying the fuel rods with ocean water. The nitrogen is said to be neutralizing the hydrogen and should prevent another explosion like the ones that compromised the containment structures in late March. However, this action will also release more radioactive gas into the atmosphere as the nitrogen and hydrogen interact. 

     Is there a way to remedy the catastrophe in Japan without releasing some form of radioactivity? It appears to be the case that in order to prevent the worst case scenario the world might have to live with a little more radiation in the food chain. In what is estimated to take several more weeks to months to gain containment on, the situation in Japan is ruffling the feathers of diplomats across the globe in the debate over whether nuclear power is a viable option for the future. Tokyo Electric might say why not sacrifice a little to gain a lot in the long run?

Burying the Dead

     The crisis in Japan caused by massive earthquake and devastating tsunami that followed has started to affect more than just economics and day to day life in Japan. With so many dead bodies being uncovered in the debris from the massive wave that struck it's eastern coast, the question now is how to lay the dead to rest.

      Japan is a predominantly Buddhist culture and in the teachings of that doctrine the body is to be burned after death to help with the release of the spirit in the first of three stages that the soul must go through before it can be reborn. However, with the death toll in surpassing 10,000 and still growing the crematoriums in Japan have been overrun with bodies and simply cannot accommodate them all.

 “If we burned all the bodies, it would take a very long time,” said the city spokesman, Takashi Takayama. “The bodies are being kept now in two places, and we’re concerned that they might decompose."

     The storage problem facing Japanese officials has prompted something that is being viewed as necessary but sacrilegious at the same time. The dead are being buried in mass graves in an effort to prevent a stockpile of decomposing corpses due to the growing Que at Japanese crematoriums.

 

    

     Still, the citizens, as with every other aspect of their life right now, have made do with what they have and tried to make the best of things. Much like American funerals where the body is interned to the ground, grievers placed gifts and supplies that the dead would need on their long journey to the afterlife. That being an effort to keep alive some sort of normalcy as these gifts would normally be offered up at a Buddhist shrine as the body was burned. 

     Tragedy's of this magnitude and the coverage the receive tend to focus on the socioeconomic and global implications of such a large player in the world market taking this big of a blow. However, past the initial destruction, the survivors are left behind to make difficult choices of not only self preservation but picking up and starting over. In this instance, the people of the affected areas had to go against their cultural beliefs because the facilities either weren't available or it wasn't practical to carry out a suitable funeral for a Buddhist.