Fukushima update - 03/21/2014

Japanese Journalist: Fukushima workers die suddenly but it’s not reported, says nurse at plant

Gov’t agents following me for surveillance

ENENews

21 March, 2014

Fukushima Voice, Mar. 21, 2014: On March 4-7, 2014 [...] an international conference was held, 25 minutes outside of Frankfurt, on “Effects of Nuclear Disasters on Natural Environment and Human Health,” co-organized by the German chapter of the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau.  Mako Oshidori, a Japanese comedienne and a freelance journalist, was part of the press conference on March 6, 2014. The Ustream video in Japanese can be found here [...] Mako Oshidori was enrolled in the School of Life Sciences at Tottori University Faculty of Medicine for three years [...] Mako Oshidori herself discovered a TEPCO memo telling officials to “cut Mako-chan(‘s question) short appropriately.”

Transcript of Oshidori’s presentation by Fukushima Voice, Transcription by Takashi Mizuno/Translation by @YuriHiranuma, Mar. 21, 2014: [...] government agents began following me for surveillance. I heard about it from researchers who were my friends as well as some government officials. I will show you a photo I secretly took of the agent, so you know what sort of surveillance I mean. When I would talk to someone, a surveillance agent from the central government’s public police force would come very close, trying to eavesdrop on the conversation. [...] I would like to talk a little about my interview of a nurse who used to work at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (NPP) after the accident. [...] He was a nurse at Fukushima Daiichi NPP in 2012. He quit his job with TEPCO in 2013, and that’s when I interviewed him.  As of now, there are multiple NPP workers who have died, but only the ones who died on the job are reported publicly. Some of them have died suddenly while off work, for instance, during the weekend or in their sleep, but none of their deaths are reported. Not only that, they are not included in the worker death count. For example, there are some workers who quit the job after a lot of radiation exposure, such as 50, 60 to 70 mSv, and end up dying a month later, but none of these deaths are either reported, or included in the death toll. This is the reality of the NPP workers.

Watch Oshidori’s presentation here (Japanese only)

(CC)Fukushima Fallout: Ailing U.S. Sailors Sue TEPCO After Exposure to Radiation P1-2

Fukushima Fallout: Ailing U.S. Sailors Sue TEPCO After Exposure to Radiation 30x Higher Than Normal

Three years after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, scores of U.S. sailors and marines are suing the plant's operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, for allegedly misleading the Navy about the level of radioactive contamination. Many of the servicemembers who provided humanitarian relief during the disaster have experienced devastating health ailments since returning from Japan, ranging from leukemia to blindness to infertility to birth defects. We are joined by three guests: Lieutenant Steve Simmons, a U.S. Navy sailor who served on board the USS Ronald Reagan and joined in the class action lawsuit against TEPCO after suffering health problems; Charles Bonner, an attorney for the sailors; and Kyle Cleveland, sociology professor and associate director of the Institute for Contemporary Asian Studies at Temple University's Japan campus in Tokyo. Cleveland recently published transcripts of the Navy's phone conversations about Fukushima that took place at the time of the disaster, which suggest commanders were also aware of the risk faced by sailors on the USS Ronald Reagan.

Part one

Part two