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Fukushima (Page 4)

Google to Photograph Street Views of Evacuated Town in Fukushima

It wasn’t just the earthquake or tsunami of March 11, 2011 that shattered the town of Namie in Fukushima Prefecture, it was the subsequent radiation. Slowly creeping across the once fertile land, it ripped families from their homes and banished them to evacuation centers elsewhere. Today, nearly two years after the worse nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, the entire 86 square miles of Namie have been declared uninhabitable due to high levels of radioactive cesium. Even if families wanted to return, they can’t.

Amid this tragic loss, Google Street View is giving the people of Namie a chance to visit the town they were forced to flee.

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Paying Just $11 a Day, Subcontractors Ripping Off Fukushima Nuclear Accident Decontamination Workers


The Tokyo Shimbun has discovered that workers involved with national government controlled cleanup projects resulting from the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant are being ripped off by subcontractors.

Despite being able to rent lodging facilities from the government and others for free or for very little money, contractors forcibly deduct inflated accommodation and meal charges from workers’ pay. When the 10,000 yen (US$111) a day “danger pay” provided to contractors by the government (read: taxpayers) is taken into consideration, it means the contractors themselves end up forking out a measly 1,000 yen (US$11) a day per worker.
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Recent tapes released have sent ripples across Japan’s news programs showing first-hand Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) handling of the Fukushima Disaster.  Many were outraged over TEPCO management’s muddled communications with plant director, an increasingly frustrated Masao Yoshida.

Among the hours and hours of footage there’s one particularly odd incident in which one of the largest electric companies in Japan couldn’t seem to get their hands on a battery.  In fact, it took about a 24 hours and trip to the hardware store to buy it while on the brink of meltdown.

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Softbank Releases World’s First Radiation-Detecting Phone

This week, Softbank Mobile presented the newest iteration of its popular Pantone phones, and these are some pretty smart smartphones. So smart, in fact, that they can double as a Geiger counter. Read More


The recruitment poster for the Fukushima police force is moving, to say the least. It definitely singles out only the most dedicated, most driven potential recruits. The poster features a person wearing an anti-radiation suit, walking through some desolate, post-tsunami wasteland, with text saying hauntingly, “There is work here that only I can do…”. Japanese posters often omit words and thus have implied messages, but this recruitment poster is relatively explicit. And it has gained some attention for its darkness and severity. It’s pretty plain that you should be looking forward to working in hazardous conditions.

A police spokesperson confirmed that they were seeking people with strong mettle precisely because of the still-dire situation in Fukushima. The photo is from May 2011 (the disaster was in March), shows the main damaged nuclear reactor in the background, and was unanimously selected for the poster in February this year. The desire for driven new officers who won’t give up on the work or come for the job thinking about it too casually is understandable, but there could also be a subtext, which is that they don’t just want anybody either.

source: Asahi via Jin (Japanese)

Fukushima Refugees Rather Gamble than Work, Claims Iwaki City Mayor

The city of Iwaki lies 30km south of the Fukushima Daiichi just outside of the evacuation zone created after the nuclear disaster struck.  As such it has become home to approximately 25,000 displaced people from Futaba District, where the Daiichi reactor is located.

On 9 April, Iwaki Mayor Takao Watanabe had this to say about the evacuees: “With the compensation money they received from TEPCO, most people are choosing not to work.  The pachinko parlors, however, are packed every day.”  Pachinko is a highly popular game similar to pinball that is often used for gambling much like slots or video poker in other parts of the world.

Although this may sound like another case of a Japanese politician putting his foot in his mouth, it appears Mayor Watanabe is not alone with his opinion.

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Algae Found Capable of Removing Radioactive Matter from Water

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the damaged created by the Tohoku earthquake and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi disaster has created an urgent need for solutions to the environmental problems Japan faces.

Working with various universities across Japan, the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, better known as RIKEN have developed a new method of decontaminating water containing radioactive materials.  It uses a type of algae that has been shown to “eat” radioactive cesium.

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Energy Companies Make Move Toward Massive Geothermal Development in Fukushima

Idemitsu Kosan, INPEX and other energy corporations began speaking with locals on April 3 about building a geothermal power plant inside Bandai-Asahi National Park in Fukushima Prefecture. If locals agree with the plan, research would begin this year with operation commencing in about 10 years. The area is expected to produce 270,000 kilowatts of geothermal energy, higher than anywhere else in Japan.

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JAXA Invents Camera That Measures Radiation

On March 29th, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency announced that they have developed a prototype camera which detects gamma-ray emitting radioactive material such as cesium and shows the exposure distribution over an image. They hope that it can be used to make clean-up of contaminated areas around Fukushima Daiichi more efficient by locating places where radioactive matter has accumulated.
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  • Mar 30, 2012

Since the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant following the terrible East Japan Earthquake in March last year, radiation has unfortunately been a topic of concern for everyone in Japan. It is therefore not surprising that a team of scientists at Tokyo University, where some of the top minds of Japan can be found, conducted a study on how radiation in seafood can be reduced. However, the results which have been reported in the media recently are not what you may expect from Japan’s premier academic institution.

According to reports, the team at Tokyo University, headed by Professor Shugo Watabe, concluded from their experiments that up to 95% of the radioactive cesium contained in fish can be removed by reducing the fish into very small pieces, close to paste form, and washing it repeatedly with water. Read More

The Heartwarming Story of a Nepali Curry Shop That Won Over the Hearts and Twitter Followers of Japan

Arguably the most famous Nepali curry shop in Japan is Daisuki Nippon (I Love Japan) in Itabashi-ku, Tokyo.  Since its opening in 2010, this tiny, independently-run restaurant has managed to get attention from all corners of the country in a story that plays out eerily similar to the plot of a Seinfeld episode.

The story begins with shop owner Pradahan Vikas struggling to get anyone to come to his store.  Sometimes he would go the entire day without serving a meal.  Faced with such hard times, Mr. Vikas turned to Twitter to chronicle his worries, unbeknownst to him that they would be the key to his success.

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Possibly Korean, Definitely Effeminate Young Man has Some Choice Words to Share with Japan: “Please Die Quickly.”

A young man who is assumed to be Korean has decided to share his feelings to the world on YouTube and as a result ignited a powder keg of tensions between Koreans and Japanese internet users.

In broken Japanese, the boy gave a minute and a half speech about his take on the post-Tohoku Earthquake situation which, as one Japanese commenter said, “crossed the line.”  He then gives a glimpse into his own homicidal fantasies before politely asking all Japanese people to “die quickly.”

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Possible Debris From Tohoku Earthquake Reaches American Shores

As we quickly approach the one year anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake the have been signs that debris from the massive tsunami has finally touched down on American shores.

Recently residents of northwest Washington state have been finding more and more fishing gear and garbage with Japanese writing on it since last weekend.  In fact, in the past two months one man found 15 pieces of Japanese debris has been reported which is a sharp increase from the only 4 pieces found in the previous 46 years.

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1 Year After Tōhoku Earthquake FujiFilm Reports Over 1,000,000 Photos Rescued and Cleaned

Like with many natural disasters, governments and large corporations throw money and supplies in relief efforts.  Although the aid is greatly appreciated and needed by the victims, there is always this lingering cynicism that these donations were done out of self-serving motives.  Especially when said company releases an ad tooting their own horn about the contributions they made.

However, a largely unsung gesture by FujiFilm has recently celebrated its milestone of restoring over 1,000,000 photos recovered from earthquake devastated areas.  The cynic in you may ask what the big deal is about cleaning some photos when these people need food and shelter.

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Tokyo Clinic to Test Internal Radiation Exposure

On January 16th, a clinic was opened in Tokyo’s Shinagawa Ward to check the levels of internal radiation exposure. The clinic, loosely translated as Radioactivity Premium Dock, offers a complete body scan for radiation levels, among other services, which the general public can access for a fee. The company hopes to reduce anxiety resulting from the Fukushima Daiichi disaster and to help the public manage their health.
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The city of Koriyama in Fukushima Prefection announced on January 11th that it was setting up a free program to test the levels of radiation in private homes. The program is part of a measure to help evacuees maintain ties to their communities by creating jobs called the Cultivating Bonds Assistance Project. Around 20 people will be hired to conduct the tests.
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About 70km from Fukushima Daiichi, on the boarder of Fukushima and Tochigi prefectures lies the city of Shirakawa. It’s was a pleasant city with lots of green space that was mentioned by Basho in his famous poem The Narrow Road to Oku. Every year they hold the Daruma Ichi festival that celebrates Daruma dolls, traditional toys that symbolize perseverance and good luck.

However now the background radiation is at times 0.60μSv which is about three times the average dose of radiation we receive during our daily lives. Here, a tearful mother of two confesses to reporter investigating financial compensation something that a mother should never have to say: “I wish my daughters were never born.”

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Ever since the Great Tohoku Earthquake led to one of the worst nuclear disasters at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant people have been left with a lot of uncertainty. Information has not been coming from places of authority in a free and timely fashion. News broadcasts often tell stories of contaminated food and radioactive puddles near schools. Still, these stories are after the fact and often hard to process given the complex nature of radiation.

Luckily, on 27 December, Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute (KURRI) announced they are working with Fukushima Transportation Inc. to begin testing a system to monitor radiation in Fukushima City that is in real time and is accessible by anyone over the internet.

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According to a book recently published by Tomohiko Suzuki, a freelance journalist who went undercover as a laborer at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant for two months this year, people who were unable to repay loans from yakuza gangs were forced to work at the site as a means of repaying their debts. Tokyo Electric issued a refutal, calling the claim that organized crime would be allowed to influence the recruitment process “groundless”.
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On November 15, Japanese electronics manufacturer Sanwa Denshi unveiled a radiation-measuring device that can connect to iPhones and serve as an affordable Geiger counter.

It is 14 cm long and five cm wide and displays radiation dosages on the screens of iPhones equipped with GeigerBot and other such applications.

The retail price is 9,800 yen, and it will go on sale in a few days.

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