Three years after the Fukushima earthquake and nuclear catastrophe, it appears that people who lived near the disaster zone are being ignored by Japan’s government, as it rushes to declare the region safe again. This editorial from Japan’s Chunichi Shimbun compares the victims of Fukushima to the survivors of the Battle of Okinawa in terms of the damage done and the way they have been treated, and castigates Tokyo for ‘relaxing its criteria’ on radiation safety and cutting support payments to the people of Fukushima in a superficial attempt to show that things are back to normal.
The Chunichi Shimbun editorial says in part:
The emotional scars suffered during the war are undeniable. Isolated from the mainland and under U.S. occupation, Okinawans had their human rights trampled on and had to endure poverty and lives marred by being forced to live alongside military bases. Psychiatrist Dr. Ryoji Aritsuka is of the opinion that these harsh experiences triggered the onset of mental illness.
The emotional scars of Okinawa overlap with the pain of Fukushima, which was so damaged by the nuclear accident. The importance of psychological care after such a disaster was learned after the Kobe and Niigata earthquakes. Last spring, due to his experience in Okinawa, Dr. Aritsuka was invited to head a mental health clinic opened by volunteers after the Great East Japan Earthquake.
Nagomi Mental Health Clinic accepts 50 new patients per month, and has examined between 500 and 600 patients in total so far, of which 10 percent exhibit signs of delayed onset PTSD. A man who was swept up by the tsunami as he was driving now has flashbacks of an overturned fire engine and people buried in the mud. He becomes irritable due to lack of sleep and yells at his wife. A mother who fled Fukushima with her son fears she was exposed to radiation and suffers sudden panic attacks.
The medical consequences are not limited to PTSD. There is a surge of people who have become depressive or alcohol dependent after prolonged stays in temporary housing. The stress of living with strangers has taken its toll. Many evacuees feel they have suddenly become unimportant and have impulsive thoughts like, “I may as well be dead.”
We must also remember that in Fukushima, 1,671 people died of earthquake-related causes after the fact. That is more that the 1,603 deaths that took place during the disaster. Cases of suicide are also prevalent. Fukushima is sending signals that sound a lot like a scream.
The government has averted its gaze from the problem of low dose radiation exposure. It has relaxed its criteria on acceptable radiation exposure from 1 millisievert to 20 milliseiverts in an attempt to encourage local authorities near the nuclear plant to make an early return. Every time the evacuation areas have been redefined, TEPCO has discontinued compensation payouts to residents. It certainly looks like a superficial recovery effort – and a premature rush to rebuild.
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