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85-year-old Teruo Yasukawa has an organic farm on the edge of the nuclear exclusion zone.
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Last year Yasukawa challenged city officials for the right to grow rice for personal consumption.
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Yasukawa irrigates his farm with well water and fertilizes it with his cows' manure, thus avoiding new contamination. Most of his rice tested below 20 becquerels per kg last year.
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Teruo's son Hiroshi Yasukawa was an engineer for TEPCO, the owner of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. His hat has TEPCO and GE logos.
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Hiroshi Yasukawa has been exposed to more that 400 millisieverts of radiation.
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Because of his high exposure level, he can no longer work at the power plant. He's been transferred to work on decontamination, but he's not optimistic about the prospects for success.
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Hiroshi Yasukawa points toward the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant where he used to work, just beyond the horizon.
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Hiroshi Yasukawa has had this geiger counter/watch for 10 years.
Eating Fukushima
by Ed M. Koziarski
North Avenue Magazine
Jan. 28, 2012
When does a victim become a perpetrator? That’s the question that kept coming up as we made our way across the irradiated landscape.
Many foreigners fled Japan after the tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant last March. My wife Junko Kajino and I went the opposite way, spending five months inside the U.S.-declared 50-mile no-go radius for our in-progress documentary Uncanny Terrain.
Harvest Time in Fukushima
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"Yes we can support local produce." A rice field in Iitatemura, uncultivated by government order.
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Fukushima City Lantern Festival
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Fukushima City Lantern Festival
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Fukushima City Lantern Festival
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Sugeno's rice harvest team: Serbian volunteer Milo, daughter Mizuho, and Owada and his grandparents, evacuated from Namie.
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84-year-old rice farmer Yasukawa is defying a government order to burn his rice harvest.
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Yasukawa shows conflicting government orders regarding his rice.
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Watanabe turns over his field in hopes of burying radioactive cesium deeper than his vegetables' roots will reach.
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Mt. Azuma, Fukushima
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Mt. Azuma, Fukushima
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Sunset over Mt. Shinobu, Fukushima City.
Just as the U.S. State Department announces that it’s safe to be here, it’s time for us to leave. We conclude our 20 weeks living and working among the organic farmers and food producers of Fukushima, a week after the State Department narrowed its travel advisory against visiting the area around the power plant from 80 kilometers to the Japanese government’s 20-kilometer evacuation zone.
Seven months since the beginning of the crisis, Japan stumbles toward recovery. Evacuated communities are being reopened near the nuclear plant, even as many efforts to decontaminate land are proving ineffective. With a number of notable exceptions, testing of rice and vegetables is showing much less contamination than was expected based on results in Chernobyl. Researchers investigate the reasons for these levels, considering the differing composition of Japanese soil, particularly certain minerals and bacteria that may remove radioactive cesium or prevent plants from absorbing it—bacteria that may thrive in organically cultivated land.
But the food testing regime is still sporadic, and no amount of lower test results will be sufficient to convince much of the public that Fukushima food is safe to eat. The organic farmers here toil to repair their land using natural methods (land that many of their families have tilled since before the U.S. was a country), to grow their food as free as possible of radionuclides, and to accurately communicate the condition of their produce to consumers. Constantly exposed to background radiation and inhaled particles in their fields, as well as from food and water, the farmers rank with cleanup workers in the groups at greatest risk of suffering health damage.
We will edit the film in Chicago through the fall and winter, and return to Japan next March to cover how the farmers weathered the seasons and how they fare as they prepare to plant again, a year after the disaster. In the meantime, we still need your support to cover the costs of postproduction. Please spread the word and if you can please make a tax-deductible donation to the project.
Yoshizawa gets his radiation results and partial compensation
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Yoshizawa at evacuated Namie's city hall-in-exile in Nihonmatsu, awaiting the results of his full-body radiation scan.
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Yoshizawa displays the results of his radiation scan, which indicate he's been exposed to only .3 millisieverts since March. He's dubious of this figure, considering he was within earshot of the reactor explosion and has been returning to the evacuation zone weekly to care for his cows.
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Iwaki hula girls perform at Nihonmatsu Candle Festival.
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Giant dragonfly in Nihonmatsu castle park.
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Bug in a well at Nihonmatsu castle.
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Yoshizawa and Murata throw a barbecue to celebrate receiving half of their substantial compensation claim from Tokyo Electric Power Company for losses due to radioactive contamination of their cattle ranch.
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A mother feeds her son at Yoshizawa's compensation party.
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Revelers were eating this Wagyu beef raw at Yoshizawa's compensation party.
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When the town of Towa was absorbed into Nihonmatsu City, they formed a nonprofit organization to preserve local culture and farming practices. A transplant from Osaka, Ebisawa is director of the group. He's been resurrecting Towa's ancient mulberry industry, and now he's running an active radiation measurement program.
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Ebisawa demonstrates Towa's "healthy food" independent organic certification.
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A diorama in Ebisawa's grocery store depicts traditional fertilizer production.
Into the evacuation zone
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Hidden under a tarp, wedged between 50-gallon sacks of steaming bean sprouts on a flatbed trailer, we passed unnoticed through the checkpoint into the 30km evacuation zone around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Permits to enter the zone are closely guarded and the review process is slow, so we stowed away with the evacuated dairy farmer Yoshizawa as he made his weekly trip to feed his 300 irradiated cows, which he's keeping alive in defiance of a government order.
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This field in Minami-Soma is still littered with boats, four months after the tsunami.
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Yoshizawa painted "save them or die trying" on the roof of the barn, the shovel of the back hoe that blocks the road to the ranch, and on signposts all along the road.
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Junko Kajino interviews Yoshizawa at his ranch. The rain suits we bought as a cheaper alternative to tyvek safety suits were not a good idea in the heat and sun. We were pouring with hot sweat within minutes.
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The cows were intimidated by my camera shoulder mount at first, but they became friendly very quickly.
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It was 2 microsieverts per hour at this ice cream stand on the way to the evacuation zone.
Evacuated farmer Yoshizawa wants to stand up to Japanese government and nuclear power company
After the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, Yoshizawa cared for his 300 dairy cows without water or electricity. He could hear the explosions as the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, 14 km away.
After days of heavy radiation exposure, Yoshizawa was evacuated with the rest of Namie on March 17. He spraypainted “save them or die trying” on the roof of the barn, and went to Tokyo. He talked his way in to see the chairman of Tokyo Electric Power Company. Both men cried as Yoshizawa begged the chairman to do something to stop the disaster.
Yoshizawa slept outside in Tokyo for a week, keeping vigil and waiting to see government ministers, calling on them for action. Now he travels Japan in his speaker van, proclaiming his refusal of a government order to kill his 300 cows.
Uncanny Terrain is a documentary about organic farmers facing Japan’s nuclear crisis, and an online community fostering dialogue on food safety, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy and disaster response. Please keep the conversation going by making a donation.
Fukushima City Nuclear Protest Video
People from across Japan gather in Fukushima City on 6/26/11 to protest the ongoing danger of nuclear power and to call for accountability in the nuclear disaster.
Ruiko Mutou of the Fukushima Network Against Nuclear Power has been opposing the plants since the Chernobyl disaster.
Sachiko Soto of the Fukushima Network to Protect Children From Radiation says that families need support to evacuate children, who are most at risk from radiation.
A representative of the Tokyo Association to Protect the Victims of TEPCO says that Tokyo must take responsibility for the nuclear crisis.
One woman calls on the skeptical crowd to trust their fate to God.
And a 25-year old farmer in western Fukushima chooses to stay and do what she can to help rather than return home to Nagano.
Uncanny Terrain is a documentary about organic farmers facing Japan’s nuclear crisis, and an online community fostering dialogue on food safety, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy and disaster response. Please keep the conversation going by making a donation.