Temporary return to japan

Here I will write what I felt about the terrible earthquake crisis when I went back to Japan.

Since the end of December, I had returned to Japan temporarily for 2 weeks. This was first time since the horrible biggest earthquake hit Japan last March. This left us terrible disasters. One of those is devastation of tohoku area, and second of those is nuclear radiation problem around the sea side of Fukushima prefecture which Japanese people have to live with it for more than 30 years because the half life of Cs, main radio material, is around 30 years. Due to the former crisis, many people died unfortunately and many places were broken totally. As our ancestors fully restored devastated area in World War II, I strongly believe that people in Tohoku are sure to restore their loving place over time. However second crisis continue to be issue for long time, which even our descents will have to deal with.

So I was wondering what people think about it and how people live with it in Tokyo. My home town is almost Tokyo and the side of Fukushima prefecture, so amount of accumulated Cs is not negligible according to published results.  So I am really concerning my friends living there and having small children because nuclear radiation effects on a body is more effective for small children. Regarding my family, if I say I do not worry them, it is not true but it is partly true because they are already old enough to be less influenced. As we know from Chernobyl case, most awful thing about nuclear exposed effects is that results will come out later as cancers, like 5 or 10 years later.

When I got to my home town and spent a few days, I surprisingly realized that nobody cares about it on the surface, and nobody shows his/her feeling seemingly. At first before I returned, I was thinking that there are a lot of signs for helping Tohoku, and activities for financial support, but it was not so. I was feeling like that all most people forget the earthquake and nuclear radiation, and think that it is already the past event. One of reasons would be that nuclear radiation effects never come out a the moment as I mentioned above. However, as a minimum action, people do not try to eat any foods from Fukushima to avoid internal exposure. This is right action but I am really sorry for people involved in food industry around Fukushima, This can not be helped any more. We do not have anything about that.

 I did not visit at this time, but people behavior would have changed if I approached to Fukushima.