Posted on 07/28/2011 5:28:49 PM PDT by ransomnote
An article appeared in the local (Ishikawa Prefecture) version of Mainichi Shinbun on July 25. The article was about the anti-nuke demonstration in Kanazawa City SNIP Among the participants was Mr. Takumi Aizawa, a school worker at Kusano Elementary School in Iitate-mura in Fukushima Prefecture, which has been designated as "planned evacuation zone" by the national government. Mr. Aizawa told the demonstrators, "After the earthquake there was no information. Then a university professor sent by the government came to the village and said, "You can eat vegetables harvested in the village if you wash them". Children, who had been evacuated, then started to come back [on that reassuring word] and they got irradiated."
What? And who was this professor? I suspected Dr. "100 millisieverts" Yamashita, but it turned out to be his younger sidekick, Dr. Noboru Takamura of Nagasaki University. The powerful duo was all over Fukushima Prefecture in March and early April, preaching "safety" of radiation and radioactive fallout to the worried residents of Fukushima as the official radiation advisors for the prefecture.
Dr. Takamura went to Iitate-mura on March 25, and told the concerned villagers these soothing words (from Iitate-mura flyer on March 30, in Japanese):
Thyroid cancer from radioactive iodine only affects children and young mothers. People over 40 do not need to worry. Wear a mask outside, and wash your hands when you come home, and you'll be OK. There will be no ill effect on health living in the village as long as you observe basic hygiene.
Then, he went back to Iitate-mura on April 6, and apparently told the villagers this (from a tweet by @rainbow3342):
Nagasaki University Graduate School Professor Noboru Takamura said during the April 6 meeting in Iitate-mura to explain the risk of radiation, "Rain and typhoon will quickly wash away the radioactive materials. If the radiation is below 10 microsieverts/hour, it's safe even for children."
So what else this good doctor and his boss Dr. Yamashita were saying back in March? The collection of tweets were found on this Japanese blog, and they paint a propaganda effort by the Japanese government that would make Goebbels and Edward Bernays proud.
Right after the disaster, the professor who was probably asked by the Fukushima prefectural government said in the lecture in Fukushima City, "it's safe up to 100 millisieverts". People in Fukushima were relieved. No one doubted the professor. The recording of the lecture was played everywhere endlessly - radio, inside the buildings, on the street. There must be many in the countryside who still believe him. They don't have enough information.
I returned to Fukushima on March 21, the day of that lecture. I spoke with friends on the phone, and they had gone to that lecture, looking for any information. He spoke in a reassuring manner, and the lecture was dotted with loud applause. The recording was played every single day at the building where our recovery support group is located.
Outside Fukushima City, after Professor Yamashita's safety lecture, the content of the lecture was re-printed in the local PR pamphlet. There were also handouts distributed in the neighborhood, in schools..
The message was played by USTREAM 24 hours a day during March. Just like Professor Yamashita's lecture, it's safe and secure. Also, you can eat vegetables if you wash them. There are many people who still believe the message and eat vegetables after washing them. I worry about internal radiation for them.
Professor Shunichi Yamashita of Nagasaki University appeared on an NHK program last night and said "Now the lessons from Chernobyl are about to be applied", as if Iitate-mura is his experiment. We're not his guinea pigs!
Iitate villagers are tired. Increasing number of them now only listen to the words of the scholars who insists it's safe and secure. The villagers are weak. They want to find comfort in the words of the national government and the prefectural government that pushes safety. The price to pay for the safety without fact [truth] will be high.
24/7 streaming message of the duo that it's safe, it's safe, it's safe, trust us, just wash your hands and vegetables. Repeat the same message over and over again, and never mind that the message is not based on reality. Tell them what they want to hear. The subjects will get tired anyway and won't remember the details, but they will remember the message.
Well, it has worked.
I cut out the Japanese text interspersed in the article above in order to fit it all in. This may make it read a little strange but the missing pieces are in Japanese and are available at the link.
I guess the issue I have with this is that the article does not give any proof that the government’s message wasn’t valid.
You make it sound like everyone is going to die from radiation there, when, in fact, we really don’t see people dying, nor do we hear reports that Geiger counters are going off because people are now inherently radioactive.
Thanks for this article.
It goes to show the government lies like they lied during the gulf oil spill. Obama stood up on his hind legs and told everyone to come swim in the corexit oil. They are more worried about the economy and their political future than they are about human life. Lots of “experts” in the gulf states backed our government up, too, and many are now admitting a lot of people go sick because of the insane reassurance it was safe to swim in concentrated oil and corexit. My family knew it was not safe! I did not care what the idiots said on teee veeee.
Anyone faced with a disaster like this has to use their own common sense and ignore the elite. You just have to trust what you know from the time before total amoral materialism took over the world. The elite would just as soon kill you as look at you when under the pressure of business and government authorities. Everyone has to know this.
The insane precautions that we go through for radiation fears completely ignores the environment we live in. We have radiation, it comes from the ground, it is in the soil, it streams down from the sun. Wash your hands, wash your vegetables, and you're fine. Every prediction of tens of thousands of radiation deaths in Europe after the Chernobyl meltdown has proved false. Every prediction involving thousands of fatalities from the 3 Mile Island accident has proved false.
And just like global warming, when the statistics fail to support the hypothesis, they claim that the real numbers are actually hidden. That doctors have banded together to bury the actual cause of death with other health issues.
Enough is enough. The only reason why these delusional paranoid predictions of dire consequences continues to come forward is that it's being used by the 'Green' movement to avoid using cheap nuclear power, and they're betting that if they can delay long enough the construction of new plants, that enough of the old ones who have doubled or sometimes tripled their life expectancy will have horrible accidents they can exploit and put the final nail in the nuclear coffin.
One of my best friends is a nuclear physicist (PhD Edinburgh, Scotland). He lives closer to Fukushima than I do. When he starts getting worried, I will. Until then, I am going to ignore the Cassandras.
I am surprised that you wrote ‘you make it sound like...’ when I believe it’s obvious I did not write the article but linked to it.
You also wrote:
“You make it sound like everyone is going to die from radiation there...’ when neither I nor the person who actually wrote the article or even the article that he translated said anything like that at all.
“Chernobyl, which dwarfs the accident in Japan, has according to at least the United Nations (pdf), resulted in 62 deaths. “
No this number is tragically wrong - it is the result of the combination of efforts of the nuke industry and Soviet government to distort the truth beyond all recognition. May I recommend the video series (or find the hour long compilation) on YOUTUBE called ‘The Battle For Chernobyl’. In it - the people who lived through it tell the story themselves and you can see that the damage was far worse than reported and that it continues to destroy lives today.
For the ‘destory lives today’ I recommend the comprehensive report created by 3 scientists who compiled hundreds of reseearch studies and medical records from the affected region in Chernobyl - the results are shattering and I found it quite suprising to learn just how many different health ailments are caused outside of the ones we normally hear about. Shattering, really. The report is a PDF and I’ll also include a wikipedia description (link) of the report if you’d like more information before deciding if you want to read it.
Description of the report -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_Catastrophe_for_People_and_the_Environment
The report itself - http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf
In that report - the authors excerpted information from the trials held after Chernobyl wherein the officials were forced to admit to many of the lies, distortion etc. and that document states that for the first 3 years it was illegal in Soviet Russia for a doctor to report a human death as being related to radiation. This helped obscure the real toll. But the damage continues to this day - more death, disease and suffering and large unlivable regions. And it will stay this way for...well who knows how long.
The National Academy of Sciences BEIR VII report has this to say:
|
http://dels-old.nas.edu/dels/rpt_briefs/beir_vii_final.pdf
“A comprehensive review of available biological
and biophysical data supports a “linear-no-threshold” (LNT) risk model—that the risk of cancer
proceeds in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and that the smallest dose has the potential
to cause a small increase in risk to humans.”
Okay, so the blog post wasn’t yours, but this writer you posted believes the government’s message was a lie that used brain washing techniques.
So apparently this guy DOES believe the radiation was a real concern. Apparently the exclusion zone did not satisfy him.
What was the point of the blog post?
I work in the nuclear industry.
We were provided with some advice in dealing with the public on the issue of Fukushima.
One of those points of advice was not to bother to try to explain what a safe level of radiation is. The public is ignorant of health physics and has the irrational mindset that ANY radiation is bad at ANY level.
This article is a good example of that ignorance.
So, since you’ve seen the documentary, was the overall death toll appreciably higher for the first three years after the accident? I mean, we can assume that the doctors gave some other reason, like “helium balloon inhalation” or “Nigerian cat fungus,” right, when “radiation” was not allowed?
This is how the nuclear royalty deigns to speak about it’s vassals. Perfect example - treat the public like ignorant cattle, continue to abuse them because you can get away with it...for now. But the internet is causing the nuclear monarchy some trouble....
It is now obvious that you and your sources have no validity.
Well, I work in the healthcare field and I’ve documented deaths from late effects of Chernobyl in patients who have emigrated to the US years after the initial exposure—I’m talking cancers here that are a direct result of radiation exposure. There is no comprehensive way to document these deaths accurately unless there was a study done of everyone exposed, which has not been done. Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence.
Well why aren’t oncologists and radiation therapists concerned about all the exposure endured by cancer patients causing more cancer than it detects or prevents?
You’re an idiot.
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