新月研究所ブログ

SNA (Tokyo) -- Fukushima residents are increasingly facing the necessity of gathering information to protect themselves against radiation. One major facet involves a reevaluation of just what people are eating and drinking. Internal radiation exposure is a grave concern.

Within this context, the SNA has learned that many are turning to folk remedies for radiation sickness; that is, a macrobiotic diet such as consuming miso, brown rice, seaweed.

Indeed, this is thought by many Japanese to be a lesson learned an earlier encounter with deadly radiation―at Nagasaki.

The main protagonist of this movement is the late Dr. Tatsuichiro Akitsuki, who was the director of the Department of Internal Medicine at Urakami Daiichi Hospital (now St. Francis Hospital) in Nagasaki when A-Bomb was dropped in August 1945.

His book Shi no Doshinen (Concentric Circles of Death) was published in 1972 by the Kodan Publishing Company, and purports to explain how the doctor saved his patients from radiation back in the old days.

The “Dr. Akitsuki Treatment” ordered his patients not to eat sugar, but to have a healthy intake of miso, brown rice, seaweed, and salt.

His hospital was located only about a mile from the epicenter of the atomic bombing, and before long many of his patients were suffering from symptoms of radiation sickness.

A key passage in the book reads:

All of Akitsuki’s patients survived even as others in all the surrounding neighborhoods were perishing.

The Roman Catholic Church and the residents of Nagasaki called it a miracle of the modern day.

Some scientists maintain that miso, in particular, guards the body against radiation.

Whether or not the “Dr. Akitsuki Treatment” is valid from a medical point of view is something that must be resolved by doctors and scientists, but the growing popularity of this man and his ideas in Fukushima is already clear.

Hiroyasu Sasai, a president of a private publishing company called "Malkosh" in Minami-Soma City, enthusiastically supports Dr. Akitsuki’s method. He has established a “Healthy Life Promotion” section in his monthly magazine that lists “foods that combat radiation.”

Sasai writes that, “As long as we stay in Japan, we cannot avoid internal radiation exposure, not to mention external exposure. In order to fight internal radiation exposure, I would like to introduce to the people foods that works against radioactive substances as discovered by Dr. Akitsuki.”

Aya Marumori, an executive member of the Fukushima Children’s Information Center and a resident of Fukushima City, notes that consuming miso and brown rice to ward off radiation is a widely accepted idea among her neighbors.

The staff at the Safety of Our Foods and Life Foundation, an NGO group which has been promoting consumption of miso and other traditional Japanese foods, is persuaded that “radioactive materials in the body can be reduced by the intake of minerals.”

She asserts, for instance, that “by taking lots of natural potassium from miso, it reduces radioactive potassium. So it is basically the same principal as taking iodine pills to stop the entry of radioactive iodine.”

For the people of Fukushima, remedies like that propounded by Dr. Akitsuki seem to be only the hope they have left to protect themselves and their families from both the fear and the reality of deadly radiation.

SNA (Tokyo) -- With China's emerging economy and its growing military role, Japan, while exhausted in tackling the great tsunami and nuclear disasters, has to put the defense policy back on its agenda once again.

This was the perspective presented by Masayuki Masuda, a Senior Fellow of the Research Department at the National Institute of Defense Studies, in a wide-ranging press conference held at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan on Thursday.

Masuda suggested that Japan’s triple disaster of March 11 has reinforced the nation’s tendency to look inwards, and that the Chinese government may take this as “a window of opportunity” to push its own regional agenda, particularly in regard to the disputed Senkaku-Daioyu Islands.

Masuda says that, from a Chinese point of view, Beijing showed an immense degree of goodwill in trying to help Japan recover from its disaster, but that the hand of friendship was to some degree rebuffed. This means that some in the Chinese navy who were willing to show forbearance on territorial disagreements in the immediate wake of 3.11 now believe that military exercises “cannot be postponed any longer.”

Masuda is also concerned about the trends in military budgeting.

While the US military budget is still higher than the rest of the world combined, China’s economic growth and its commitment to upgrade its military power indicate that this situation will not continue much longer.

He says that the Japanese Ministry of Defense currently projects that in the year 2030 Beijing’s military budget will be twelve times higher than that of Tokyo.

Few analysts believe that the United States will be able to maintain its massive military expenditures in future decades either.

The bottom line is that China can be expected to grow in stature as a regional military power in coming years and that Japan needs to “change its way of thinking” which has been “predicated on the assumption that the US military forces are overwhelmingly more powerful than any other military force in this region.”

Japanese defense strategies need to be reviewed with these trends in mind, he says.

Should the rise of Chinese military power be seen as a threat?

Masuda is concerned, but he also points out some positive aspects.

On the one hand, Beijing’s attitudes seem to be hardening towards neighboring countries with which it has territorial disputes. He perceives a situation in which “China is using its military power in order to back up diplomatic activities.”

But on the other side of the ledger is that China shares many common interests with the rest of the world’s states, and so, for example, the Chinese navy has been responsible for protecting over 4,000 ships from Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden.

Overall, Masuda believes that Japan should endeavor that its relationship with China not be entirely confrontational, but that areas of potential cooperation should also be explored.

“It is important to develop a relationship of trust between the military forces in Japan and China.”

Shingetsu News Agency

SNA (Tokyo) -- “It is simply a national humiliation.”

He spoke the words “national humiliation” in English to give them special emphasis.

The scene took place at a café near JR Iwaki Station in Fukushima Prefecture last month. The speaker was a 50-year-old engineer who is now working at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Since the company he works for prohibits its employees to speak to the media, we are withholding his name, but he agreed to tell his story to the SNA.

What is making this engineer angry is media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear crisis― specifically the reports that there is still the possibility of recriticality at the trouble nuclear plant.

“What the media has being presenting is just baseless gossip,” he said, temper flaring.

The “national humiliation” he perceives relates to the notion that Japanese engineers are being presented as incompetents to the world for not knowing how to do their own jobs.

“Regarding recriticality, you could understand that it is absolutely impossible if you had basic knowledge of nuclear reactors… You had better study,” he added.

A few days after the conversation at the café in Iwaki, he sent a follow-up message imploring the SNA to “please convey the truth.” Again he could not hide his disgust: “There is so much stupid media.”

This time, he also took strong issue with a Tokyo University professor who said that recriticality was possible at Fukushima Daiichi. The professor even alleged that TEPCO was trying to hide this fact.

Our informant responded, “If such a cover-up really came out, TEPCO and all of its partner companies would fall into bankruptcy.”

“Thinking of the families of the workers who are racked by fear,” he concluded, “I cannot deny my feeling that I’d like to beat up this scholar.”

The SNA was later able to communicate with a second man who is said to be one of those in charge of safety management of the radiation control section at Fukushima Daiichi.

He expressed opinions very similar to the engineer.

He pointed out that over 2,000 workers struggling 24 hours a day to contain the disaster, and neither they nor their families want to turn on the television and hear unfounded reports predicting major new explosions.

He also offered the following analogy: “It’s like a commercial airline pilot announcing over the intercom to his passengers at the beginning of a flight that he cannot guarantee that they will all reach their destination alive because the force of gravity creates a chance that the airplane may fall from the skies.”

The bottom line is that he agrees that there is no realistic danger of recriticality.

But a contrary perspective is offered to the SNA by Hiroaki Koide, associate professor at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute.

While he concedes that “the possibility of recriticality is extremely low” because the shape of the reactor cores have become deformed, he believes it wrong to dismiss the potential danger.

“I cannot say the chance is 0% when I consider some very rare cases in which a once-scattered mass amount of uranium has gathered in one place near a pool of water. If this occurs, then recriticality cannot be ruled out.”

When Koide was acquainted with the Fukushima engineer’s comment to the SNA that recriticality was “absolutely impossible” and that media like us should study basic knowledge about nuclear reactors in order to inform the public correctly, he scoffed.

“If they are the engineers, they shouldn’t say that the possibility of recriticality is zero. It is they―not you―who have to study nuclear plant structure.”

Shingetsu News Agency

SNA (Minami-Soma) -- One of the curious points about the massive release of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is that the health threat is portrayed in a radically different manner depending in part upon one’s physical location.

From afar, it is taken as common sense that the populations living near the nuclear disaster will suffer horrible health effects in future years as the real toll gradually reveals itself. Outside of Japan, these predictions can sometimes be rather breathless, but inside the country the more alarming views are held only by a minority.

But those who actually venture to the affected communities will be struck by just how insistently the opposite view is propounded―that the radiation contamination is quite weak and there is little cause to get worried.

On Wednesday afternoon, Japanese national television stations aired the sensational news that thirty-four points in some six towns and villages―Okuma, Futaba, Tomioka, Iitate, and Minami-Soma―produced radioactive cesium measurements that exceeded the standard used in the case of Chernobyl to order forced evacuations.

But many local doctors in Fukushima Prefecture continue to insist that the actual degree of threat is modest.

The city of Minami-Soma is said to be the first and only local government to begin internal radiation screenings for ordinary citizens. Since July 11 when the program was launched, about 7,000 people have been screened with a special focus on elementary and middle school children.

Tatsuo Hanai, 49, an engineer in the Radiation Department of the Minami-Soma City General Hospital says that his institution alone has so far checked about one thousand local children and expects to see about 3,000 more by next March.

He tells the SNA, “Until now, only one elementary schoolgirl has shown elevated levels of internal cesium, and even that was only a couple of times above the normal level.”

Even in this one case, he says that he feels no alarm since the measuring equipment could very well have just been picking up external radiation from the background.

Currently, Minami-Soma City General Hospital possesses only two Whole Body Counters― one was donated by lawmakers from Tottori Prefecture and other was transported from a hospital inside the 10 km exclusion zone right after the explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors.

Hanai admits, however, that both devices are somewhat antiquated and the hospital is trying to obtain a state-of-the-art, French-made “Canberra” radiation monitor.

The Canberra devices can detect cesium even in amounts well below 100 becquerels, as their current machines cannot.

A more serious problem may be that the hospital’s Whole Body Counters were designed for adults, not children, and so Hanai says he cannot be sure whether the machines are actually reading the internal cesium intake of the children or just pulling external radiation readings from the empty space.

He says that he been trying to adjust the readings by subtracting the amounts he estimates are coming from background radiation.

“It is too large for them,” Hanai notes ruefully.

Seiji Yasumura, 49, a director at the Fukushima Medical University Health Center, also downplays the risk of both internal and external radiation exposure.

“Since the radiation dose is very low,” he says, “there might be less thyroid cancer in Fukushima than was seen at Chernobyl. Indeed, it is hard to see how any type of disease will be produced by such low doses of radiation.”

But Seiichi Nakate, 50, a director of the Fukushima Network for Saving Children isn’t buying the message from the local medical authorities.

“The reason why the doctors in Fukushima Prefecture are likely to underestimate the risk of radioactive disease is that they only have their eye on thyroid cancer.” He contends that, “They should look into other diseases as well.”

Hisako Sakiyama, a doctor and researcher at the Takagi School of Radiological Medicine, is blunt in her judgment about the medical care being provided: “The purpose of the medical examinations for people in Fukushima is to reduce their worry and make them feel relief,” she says.

Shingetsu News Agency

SNA (Taoyuan) -- The recent trip to Russia by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has attracted a good deal of interest in the media, but much of that attention focused on odd details and questionable characterizations.

The Daily Telegraph, for example, emphasized that the trip was “bizarre and obsessively secret,” apparently in order to correspond with the media’s usual description of the North Korean regime.

Other mainstream media outlets have been too quick to dismiss Kim’s visit to Russia as yet another trick by the reclusive leader of a rogue regime threatened by floods and sanctions.

What there has been precious little of in most of the articles that have appeared to date is serious consideration about what the latest moves may signify in terms of the crucial triangular relationship between North Korea, Russia, and China.

Few would challenge the fact that the North Korean regime is responsible for the deaths and suffering of millions of its own people. But abhorrence at the nature of the regime alone is not a sufficient policy if one hopes to ameliorate and, eventually, resolve the tragedy.

In the strategic sense, not much has actually changed since the close of the Korean War: No American or allied leader will do anything in the Korean Peninsula which may risk nuclear war; the North Korean regime’s first priority is survival; and China wants to keep a buffer state in that region.

But there is at least one key difference in context between the 1950s and today. Then, China was just emerging from a long civil war and Japanese occupation; now, it is a rising regional power with apparent aspirations to global leadership.

Softening the links between Beijing and Pyongyang is now seen by many analysts as a way to increase the chances for a gradual evolution of the North Korean regime.

But the Russian role also needs to be considered here.

Although Russian leaders like to boast of their excellent relations with their Chinese counterparts, they can hardly disguise the fact that they are also worried by China’s rise. They may be interested in selling more oil and gas to Beijing, but they don’t want China to monopolize energy exports to the Far East or to feel free to turn their attention to Central Asia.

Moscow’s interests therefore overlap to some extent with those of Tokyo and Seoul, as well as with Washington and its other allies and partners.

These Russian objectives also open a window of opportunity, since this is precisely the same policy that many governments, from Japan to Vietnam, from Mongolia to India, are also following: engagement with China, including more trade and investment, but within a multidirectional framework to prevent the emergence of a too-strong, imperial-minded Chinese polity.

We should also ask ourselves what Kim Jong-Il may have intended through his visit to Russia.

Pyongyang may be also be interested in diversifying its diplomacy and economic relations away from China, retaining it as a key partner but no longer seeing it as the only gateway to the world.

As a caveat, however, we should bear in mind that ambitious plans for a diversification of North Korea’s external economic relations are unlikely to move decisively forward in the absence of some sort of security guarantee, however implicit.

Kim Jong-Il’s visit to Russia hints at the establishment of a more complex web of relations in Northeast Asia. This tendency should be encouraged as it increases the chances of a “soft landing” whenever North Korea makes its inevitable change of character.

Shingetsu News Agency

SNA (Minami-Soma) -- Communities have been divided and the people are angry.

The government announced on July 21 the existence of radiation “hot spots” in some parts of Minami-Soma City. The people whose homes lie within these hot spots―now defined as areas where radiation levels rise above 20 mSv per year, have been advised to evacuate.

But local residents cannot hide their annoyance at this new directive, not only because of the major disruption it is causing to their lives, but also because it has taken the national and city governments five months since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster to figure out what to do.

According to Minami-Soma City’s official announcement dated on August 3, seventy-two households in seven areas near the mountains have been designated as evacuation areas.

This announcement is based on the results of a radiation survey conducted between July 13 and 21. Each household has been sent a letter informing them of the situation.

Minami-Soma Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai, 55, tells the SNA that his administration recognizes the local discontent: “In spite of the letter, about 50% of the residents remain in those areas and I am caught in a very difficult position between city's authority and the national government's sovereignty. Naturally, the residents are very angry about the new designation.”

The SNA visited a couple of newly-designated radiation hot spots to find out directly how the local residents are coping.

Shinkichi Ishikawa, 88, and his wife Umeyo, 81, grow eggplant and cucumbers in their home garden and freely consume them every day. They have been informed that the radiation measurements at the entrance of their home as well as their garden are above 3.2 microsieverts per hour, but they feel no alarm at all.

“Since we are so old, we have nothing to worry about in terms of radiation effect on our health,” they declare.

However, Umeyo Ishikawa adds that the family of her son escaped to Niigata Prefecture together with their small children because of the fear of radiation.

“In our neighborhood,” she says, “most people choose to stay―except for the children and young people.”

Makiko Hayashi, 62, another resident of a radiation hot spot, told the SNA that she plans to move to a temporary house in Soma City to the north out of concern for her 15-year-old son, Kohei.

Trembling with anger, she said, “I am completely mortified. The government and city hid the information from us even though they knew much earlier that the radiation level is very high around here. I cannot believe how late they were to notify us!”

Hayashi received the letter recommending evacuation on July 22. She said that 17 out of 33 households in her local community decided to evacuate. She does not have a clear idea about how much and when she can receive monetary compensation and public assistance for her evacuation to Soma, but expects about 100,000 yen monthly from TEPCO.

Hayashi also has serious doubts about the reliability of the government’s radiation monitoring. Those households where measurements are above 3.2 microsieverts per hour have been asked to evacuate. She believes, however, that the radiation readings in the local area have only been taken one time to determine this policy.

She complains: “Some of my neighbors whose radiation level was 3.1 microsieverts can choose to remain. Our community has been split into pieces because of this strange assessment. In Itate village, for example, all residents were told to leave their area. Why is it being handled so differently here? It’s bizarre.”

When the SNA spotted a temporary worker from the Minami-Soma City Office who has engaged in radiation measurement, we asked him insistently to explain why the evacuation orders have come so belatedly.

Reluctantly, the following answer was finally given: “The reason why it took so long is because we simply had no standard in place to know if, for example, 5 microsieverts per hour was dangerous or not. But if you want to know more than that, please visit the disaster management department at the City Hall.”

Shingetsu News Agency

SNA (Tokyo) -- The SNA has managed to get its hands on the textbook that TEPCO uses to train its nuclear workers and found that it contained a number of problematic assertions.

The title of the March 2007 textbook is Nuclear Reactor Facility: Special Education Text for Pre-Entry to the Controlled Zone. Sources at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have confirmed to the SNA that the same textbook continues to be used even now in spite of the nuclear disaster.

The textbook indicates that the candidates to become nuclear workers are obliged to receive about five hours of lectures focused on basic and practical knowledge about nuclear power plants and radiation.

The education program is divided into five categories: nuclear fuel and radioactive contamination; work procedures at nuclear power facilities; the equipment available at nuclear power plants; the effects of radiation on the human body; and the laws which apply to the industry.

After the offsite orientation, there is a further educational program at the nuclear plant itself which lasts about ten days.

The word “safety” appears many times in the text in a variety of senses.

One of the most striking passages reads, “Even if there is a major earthquake, safety will be preserved. If any sort of malfunction occurs, measures can be put in place to immediately halt operations.”

The manual clearly suggests that a major earthquake does not pose a risk of a catastrophic accident because the plant’s equipment guarantees the ability to safely halt the reactors.

The section describing the effects of radiation on the human body also tries to reassure the fresh-faced rookie nuclear workers, speaking of how “radiation beams tend to weaken as time goes by.”

It also suggests that most nuclear workers are exposed to external gamma rays only, which don’t move to the interior of one’s body.

When speaking of the possible genetic effects of exposure to large amounts of radiation, the textbook concludes that, “currently―and including such events as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki―there is not even a single case in which genetic mutations caused by radiation have been passed on to the following generations.”

The textbook also cites the former upper limit of radiation exposure per worker: 5 mSv for females; 50 mSv for males; and 100 mSv in times of emergency.

After the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, of course, the government raised the limit to 250 mSv for the duration of the crisis.

In fact, six workers have reportedly exceeded even the new upper limit and about one hundred workers are above the old emergency limit of 100 mSv.

Between 2,500 and 3,000 workers are still battling to cool the Fukushima Daiichi reactors, of which about six hundred are direct employees of TEPCO and the rest are affiliated with subcontractors.

When the SNA contacted TEPCO spokesman Yoshimi Hitosugi, he said that no worker has shown any ill effects from exposure to radiation at the troubled nuclear plant.

He emphasized that doctors are now stationed inside the plant itself, there is regular radiation screening, and full body exam equipment which checks internal radiation exposure is available at the J-Village base camp.

Workers receive external radiation exams on a daily basis and internal radiation exams on a monthly basis.

TEPCO is also trying to increase its full body exam equipment from the current six units up to thirteen units in the near future.

When asked if there was not concern for the workers’ health after, say, ten years, Hitosugi replied that “nothing can be said at present.”

But he did concede that in the long run internal radiation exposure would be more of a worry than external exposure.

“Unlike the external exposure, the internal radiation remains in the body for a decade or more.”

Shingetsu News Agency

Today he spoke at several public events, including a major press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (FCCJ), and he plans to visit the Japan's tsunami victims as part of an apparent attempt to rebuild his international reputation.

Justice Minister Satsuki Eda said on August 15 that his ministry would approve Thaksin’s visit as a special case under the immigration control law, which normally bans entry of convicted criminals.

After the 2004 tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia, Thaksin received global sympathy and his party won a disputed election which opposition parties boycotted.

Some analysts have questioned Thaksin’s timing in light of the fact that his sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, has only very recently become prime minister and is still in the process of consolidating her authority.

In his FCCJ press conference, Thaksin was candid about the fact that he is extremely close to his younger sister, whom he views as a sort of “eldest daughter.”

He described Yingluck very clearly as a protégé, even saying that he “sent her” to graduate school in the West and “trained her” to become the president of a company he owns.

He said, “When she needs my advice she calls me. I give her advice, that’s all. I act like an encyclopedia. Whenever she wants to open the encyclopedia she can feel free to open it. And she can close it anytime. That’s it.”

Thaksin also said that he hasn’t yet decided whether or not to return to his homeland, saying that he would not return if he would only become “part of the problem,” but that he would immediately return if that could form “part of the solution.”

Thaksin’s visit to Japan has proven divisive in Thailand, where the opposition Democrat Party said that they would seek to impeach and file criminal charges against new Foreign Minister Surapong Tovichakchaikul for ignoring the arrest warrant against Thaksin.

On the 17th about fifty people protested in front of the Japanese embassy in Bangkok after it became known that Thaksin would be granted the visa.

Shingetsu News Agency