Kaku no Hizumi 核の歪み —Nuclear Distortion in Japan
/By Maggie Gundersen
In Japanese, the words Kaku no Hizumi 核の歪み translate to Nuclear Distortion. For Arnie and me, Kaku no Hizumi 核の歪み / Nuclear Distortion is the absolute truth about the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima Meltdowns – 10 Years After.
Today, we publish this seventh installment of the Fairewinds Nuclear Spring Series, in which we look at all the atomic power meltdowns that have occurred during springtime. It gives a whole new image to springtime when all species and plant life on the planet are reborn. The impact of such massive amounts of radioactivity on earth has changed our lives on this planet forever, and will continue to do so.
This video, hosted by the Windham World Affairs Council (WWAC) in Vermont, is long, yet I ask you to watch it and learn first-hand. This interview is not just about the facts, but how Japan’s Fukushima tragedy has impacted its people. Norma Field and Chiho Kaneko speak openly and honestly about their heritage and lives in Japan and the U.S. and how they each reached out to people in Japan during the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdowns. Please see their bios at the end of this post.
How do people heal, how long will it take? When is this massive disaster over? As Norma noted when talking about Fukushima's delayed effects, it will be years and decades before illnesses [induced by radiation] reveal themselves.
On Sunday, March 21, Windham World Affairs Council (WWAC) hosted a Zoom conversation with two women with close ties to Fukushima. Chiho Kaneko and Norma Field share their perspectives on the ‘distortions’ inherent in the accident's ongoing environmental, social and economic impacts in an attempt to clarify the Fukushima reality and lessons it contains. WWAC board member Lissa Weinmann, a citizen appointee to the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel, moderates.
Video Highlights
This entire video is chock full of facts conveyed with the whole experience of the impact of the triple meltdowns on real people who live in these now dire circumstances.
For example, early in her presentation, Norma, born and raised in Japan, tells us about her experience of radiation and Japan’s attitude toward it while growing up. As a college student at the University of Chicago, Norma studied radiation more thoroughly and learned how it was to grow up knowing the dangers of nuclear power. A man she knows in Japan, a retired nuclear engineering professor and researcher, has spent half a century putting his knowledge to work warning others about the dangers of nuclear power. He said to Norma, “None of us who is alive today, even a baby borne today, will live to see the Fukushima Disaster truly under control,” due to the length of radionuclides, the half-lives we are left to deal with.
When Chiho begins speaking, she speaks about traveling almost immediately after the earthquake and tsunami to “share this most traumatic event of our lifetime with family and friends”. It was nearly one month before she even knew that the meltdowns had occurred, and there was a radiation disaster. She was already wearing a mask to protect herself from the contamination everywhere due to the “seawater that had carried household items, sewage, and industrial waste” far and wide.
As we reflect upon these calamities, it is vital to our species' very survival to determine what it means for us as individuals, as communities, and as countries to face all these human-made calamities daily. These are worldwide calamities, like the plastics that are choking fish in oceans throughout the world, or cities so loaded with smog, that people must not go outdoors for any length of time. During Pandemic 2020, people around the globe experienced the wrath of the spread and mutation of COVID-19. The long reach of the COVID-19 virus has spared no ethnic group, no country, and no community.
The same is valid for nuclear meltdowns and other lethal covert or covered-up community exposures to radiation releases on our planet. As we often say at Fairewinds: Radiation Knows No Borders, the same is true for the toxic soup of chemicals, plastics, burning fuel, or garbage incinerators spewing vile substances into our lungs and pores every day.
Chiho grew up 150-miles away from the site of the meltdown, yet the plume did not migrate in concentric circles and instead blew directly in the path of many of the evacuees. Look at the evacuation zone map and the levels of exposure in different areas. While coping with the earthquake-induced tsunami's significant natural disasters, the government officials did not have the appropriate information to send the evacuees away from the wind-directed radioactive plume.
Click map to enlarge.
For all of you reading this post and hopefully listening to this fantastic interview, we want you to remember that Japan is not a third-world country. Japan is highly organized to deal with catastrophes – natural and human-made. No other country in the world could have handled such an event. Just envision disaster management in your country or state. People in the U.S., for example, seldom fully evacuate for hurricanes, tornadoes, floods… what would you and your family do if you faced such a crisis? Hizumi [Distortion] is the human perspective that governments are not meeting, and industries impact by contamination of every kind.
Here is where the words Kaku no Hizumi 核の歪み / Nuclear Distortion enter the picture. Hizumi [Distortion] is a significant disturbance in our state of existence; it is a state of squeeze. The Tokyo Olympics slogan is the title Recovery Olympics. People have been forced to falsely rally to build new Olympic facilities when none of this life is normal or healthy. Radioactively contaminated people and workers used the J-Village site for an evacuation dormitory. How can people feel safe? Why is the government falsely calling these areas safe with radioactive contamination that will last for thousands of years?
How are these areas safe for Olympic athletes and children and families who may be participating and watching?
It is impossible to clean the mountains and forests.
The radioactive isotopes emanating from the Fukushima meltdowns will take thousands of years and up to 250,000 years to decay away and make the land safe again in many places near the reactor site and the path of the plume.
Now TEPCO [Fukushima Dai-ichi’s owner] and Japan’s government officials want their people to suck it up and pretend that everything is ok and Japan should once again be considered safe and happy throughout the world.
In the concept of the Hizuma [the Distortion], the government “will tell people to live normally under a continuing state of emergency procedures, a series of distortions” Ruiko Muto, representative of the voices of the victims of Fukushima and the Chief Plaintiff of the class-action lawsuit against TEPCO and its senior managers.
As you listen to and watch this video, we ask that you imagine how you, your family and friends, and your community would deal with and live through a disaster of this magnitude.
The perspective that Chiho and Norma raise throughout the discussion really resonated with Arnie and me. We have always been anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons. When each of us went into the atomic power industry, it was to use the atom in peaceful ways, never envisioning or learning the truths we know now. The nuclear power and atomic weapons industries are deeply intertwined. These industries work together hand in hand, and continuing these policies will destroy the planet and all species. For insight on what is happening right now with nuke weapons and atomic power please read Fairewinds previous post entitled: Nuclear Alert: Iran & Israel Playing High-Stakes Poker with Nuclear Power & Nuclear Weapons.
Finally, at the end of the interview, prior to Q&A, Chiho and Norma quote from Dr. Yasuo Nakagawa, a scholar of Technology and Science who died at a very young age. Dr. Dr. Yasuo Nakagawa was a doctor of engineering, who lived from 1943 – 1991. After studying the meltdown at TMI, Dr. Dr. Yasuo Nakagawa came out against atomic power and nuclear weapons. His book A History of Radiation Exposure was published posthumously in Japanese.
Norma and Chiho bring our attention to this powerful quote from Dr. Yasuo Nakagawa:
“The current standards of radiological protection have been devised by those who impose radiation exposure on others for the purpose of promoting atomic weapons and energy. Their purpose is to persuade the public that exposure cannot be helped and must therefore be endured. They are social standards painstakingly presented in the guise of science, and they are the administrative means for supporting the development of atomic energy politically and economically.”
Please remember two things from this post and film. First, as Norma said earlier in the film, “none of us today will be alive to see the end of this disaster.” And, as we say repeatedly on the site and in social media: Radiation Knows No Borders!
About Norma & Chiho
Norma Field grew up in Tokyo, Japan, with an American father and Japanese mother. Listening to her parents’ conflicting views on Pacific nuclear weapons testing turned out to be her introduction to the atomic age. The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster occurred just as she was preparing to retire from thirty years’ of teaching at the University of Chicago. That disaster brought together questions that have always been important to her : what are people able and willing to understand, given economic, social, and political constraints, in such a crisis? How do taboos get set in place, silencing people and alienating them from profound anxieties about themselves and their children because of radiation, the invisible intruder? How do these reverberate with the still unresolved history of atomic bombing?
Until the pandemic, Field traveled on average twice a year to Fukushima. She has organized symposia, translated and written on Fukushima. Recent publications include Fukushima Radiation: Will You Still Say No Crime Has Been Committed? (editor and co-translator, 2015) and “This will still be true tomorrow: ‘Fukushima ain’t got the time for Olympic Games’” (2020).
Chiho Kaneko maintains close ties to family and friends in Iwate prefecture, 150 miles from Fukushima Dai-ichi, which continues to suffer from the effects of the nuclear disaster. She interpreted for former Japanese Prime Minister Kan on his trip to the United States following the Fukushima disaster and has served as an interpreter for atomic bomb survivors in various international venues.
Chiho was born in Japan’s Iwate Prefecture and graduated from Hokkaido University with a degree in agronomy. She attended University of Massachusetts at Amherst as a graduate student in its Landscape Architecture program, when she realized she wanted to take her life’s path to a different direction. Influenced by Kenji Miyazawa (1896 – 1933), a writer and poet from Iwate, Chiho has dedicated her life to exploring the conditions for universal happiness and peace through her work as a visual artist, as a language translator and interpreter, as a newspaper columnist, and as a vocalist. In the last twenty years, she and her husband have lived in Hartland, Vermont, growing most of the vegetables they eat year-round. She is a board member of Fairewinds Energy Education.
