Fukushima - relevant recent articles

Is the tuna radioactive:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/03/us/fukushima-tuna/index.html

Stopping the spread of contaminated groundwater:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/world/asia/radioactive-water-imperils-fukushima-plant.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/world/asia/operator-of-fukushima-plant-criticized-for-delaying-disclosures-on-leaks.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/05/fukushima-leak-emergency_n_3707075.html
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/07/world/asia/japan-fukushima/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Man Who Battled Disaster Dies:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/10/world/asia/japan-yoshida-death/index.html

People Begin Beaching in Fukushima Again:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/beach-near-fukushima-nuclear-plant-is-a-sliver-of-normalcy/2013/07/31/7b9cc9f4-f5db-11e2-81fa-8e83b3864c36_story.html

3.11, Fukushima, and "Stigma Damage"

Japan, with Fukushima prefecture highlighted in yellow

The cities squared off in black are the places I visited in the prefecture

The first time I told a friend I was going to be visiting Fukushima on my Japan Educator's Tour, she gave me kind of an askance look and said, "Whoa, are you sure about that?" Another friend made a joke about Hazmat suits. I started second guessing myself--wait, should I be worried about radiation? Am I being too cavalier about this? I actually didn't know anything about the situation in Fukushima--but I figured that Japan Society wouldn't be taking us somewhere dangerous, so I wasn't really overly concerned. Of course when I actually arrived in Fukushima I realized that both this hyped-up image of scary Fukushima as well as my own complete lack of information about the situation were typical mindsets of people outside of the 3.11 disaster. Neither mindset is particularly logical or well-informed. The biggest subject of learning here ended up being the power that perception can have over people and the possibly far-reaching consequences of those perceptions. 

I'm going to cut right to the chase here and address everyone's question: Is Fukushima all screwed up and soaking in mutant-fruit inducing, cancer-causing radiation? I'm just an observer, hardly an authority, but I'm going to go ahead and say...no. Most of Fukushima prefecture seems to have resumed normalcy; however, their lives will be significantly altered for the next 30 years as they adjust to a reality of constant monitoring for radiation levels. The biggest concern is revitalizing industry in the prefecture, particularly tourism and the agricultural sector, both of which have suffered greatly due to "stigma damage," a false perception that Fukushima remains dangerous. Because of this "stigma damage," people outside of Fukushima are afraid to go on vacation there and are even more afraid to purchase food grown there.

During our time in the prefecture, we visited Fukushima City, Date City, a small town called Hirono, Iwaki City, and drove along the coast where the tsunami hit. We visited schools, city halls, farmers, and even had a special information meeting with reps from TepCo (Tokyo Electric Power Company, who own the nuclear plant that had the accident). We had a dinner in Fukushima City with residents who are members of a local English club. In all, we had a number of both formal information sessions as well as opportunities for more casual interactions with locals to gain various perspectives of how the disaster affected the region. From these multiple sources we've been able to really put together a big picture of what happened during and immediately after the disaster, and what the process has been since then. I had some pressing "fact" questions at the beginning of my trip and I'll lay out my conclusions to these first:

What's the Damage?

Quick summary: On March 11, 2011 the Great East Japan Earthquake (also known as the Tohoku Earthquake) occurred underwater about 40 miles off the eastern coast of Japan. It triggered a huge tsunami. Many nuclear power plants automatically shut down, but at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant, this process failed due to the tsunami, resulting in a big nuclear meltdown. This incident revealed that many of Japan's power plants are not up to international code when it comes to tsunami precautions.

In total, this event caused about 15,000 deaths and incredible damage to buildings, infrastructure, etc. My focus here is the radiation, however. Everyone within about 12 miles of the plant was evacuated. In a few cases, that meant entire towns were evacuated until things were stabilized. Most of these people have since returned, but a lot haven't. In terms of radiation, apparently there are different types of radiation involved, each with their own half life counts. So one type of radiation that was emitted only had a half-life of 2 years--that type is gone. The type people are still worried about is the one with a half-life of 30 years. Now, there's not enough radiation in places where people live to cause the scary type of immediate effects we saw after the atom bomb in Hiroshima or Nagasaki--what people are more concerned about is that the long-term exposure can increase your risk of cancers. What is the real risk of this? The World Health Organization has published its inquiry into this topic here: http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/78218/1/9789241505130_eng.pdf 
It's really long--if you're looking for a short, undetailed answer, try reading the Findings on page 12. These risks seem minimal to me--certainly not worth worrying about if you're just breezing through on vacation.

Damage from the earthquake

Damage from the tsunami

Foundations of buildings destroyed by the tsunami

This building used to be a middle school

Evacuees bedding down in a gym

Decontamination
Just how the hell do you decontaminate a city? Radiation is in the air. If it gets into the groundwater, it can spread throughout the water supply. It can get sucked up and come back down as rain. To me, one of my biggest questions was, how does one even begin to clean it all up? Well, the process actually is just as crazy as you'd imagine. For the general ground, 5 inches of dirt are scraped off the top and carted away to be isolated and stored. For the houses, you spray pressurized water onto the roofs and walls, then take the contaminated water + clear the ground of several inches of dirt and cart it away to be stored. One farmer we spoke to described the intense and painful work of scraping layers of bark off of his persimmon trees! Decontamination is a long process that is still happening. It's caused thousands of migrant workers to come to Fukushima to complete this work (something that obviously somewhat affects the local hotel and restaurant economies in a positive way). What's more, although we're slowing cleaning the contamination from places where people live, we now have the big question of what to do with the contaminated dirt and debris. So far, it doesn't sound like there's been a solution to this. We were told that many garbage dumps do not want to accept this contaminated material. TepCo has built some special tanks for contaminated water, but a lot of the stuff is being buried far away (this does not strike me as an ideal solution, since dirt is permeable!).

Monitoring
Now that the immediate aftermath of the disaster and first period of decontamination is over, how do we keep an eye on what's happening with the radiation in Fukushima? There's actually a lot of monitoring taking place by various parties. UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on Effects of Atomic Radiation) is one of them, as you can see here: http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/fukushima.html  The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is another big one. TepCo is also doing its own monitoring, as is the Japanese government. What surprised me was the high degree of monitoring taking place in every aspect of daily life. For example, the schools we visited all had Geiger Counters on school grounds that take readings every 30 seconds. We were informed that most public places had similar setups. These readings are published in local newspapers and online. That's for general radiation in the air.

Measuring radiation in the school field

Newspaper reportings of pubic testings. Note how different the scores seem to be. I spot one as high as 16.09 on this page

But this point, just walking around in Fukushima isn't going to expose you to tons of radiation; the larger concern is internal radiation, radiation absorbed from drinking contaminated water or foods with high radiation levels. One school we visited tested their school lunches daily. They also publish their readings online. Testing is even more intense at the agricultural level. Many farms were unable to sell their produce for the first year and some remain unable to sell. The farms that are back to producing test their products themselves, but these products actually undergo monitoring from a number of decentralized agents: the prefecture monitors to make sure produce is meeting standards, the companies selling the produce monitors, and the distributors monitor to ensure the quality of their goods. Rice is monitored an average of 5 times, we were told by one elementary school principal.

Machine used to test school lunches

Testing bags of rice

These charts were provided in a brochure printed by the prefecture. Interesting that Japan's standards would be so much higher than any other country. 

What's almost more important than the monitoring, though, is that everyone remains transparent about what they see. As mentioned above, all kinds of test results are widely available online and in the newspaper. Here's a website giving readings for different kinds of produce (the 3 buttons in the middle are for vegetables, grains, and fruit): https://fukumegu.org/ok/mieru/   and here a website about the monitoring in general. Apparently there's a way to search for testing by location: http://www.new-fukushima.jp/  There are even places that you can bring things grown in your own garden to be tested. Despite all of this, the prefecture is still suffering from very low sales in their agricultural sector, particularly sales to outside of the prefecture (in other words, people outside the prefecture are afraid to buy anything from Fukushima, while people inside kind of know what the story is and are ok with it). I guess there will always be a little voice in some people's heads insisting that the government is lying to you. OR, people don't bother checking the numbers and just panic based on no information at all. OR...people aren't sure they understand the numbers? I could definitely fall into this category. I mean, I do have some perspective. I know that at any given place there will always be some background radiation, so even if we stuck a Geiger Counter in my living room the number certainly wouldn't be 0. I know that every time you get on a place, you're exposing yourself to some radiation. And certainly, we expose ourselves to radiation every time we get an X-ray or MRI or whatever. With this understanding, I can accept some low numbers on the test results in Fukushima and not freak out. Even so, the classic aphorism goes that we fear that which we do not understand. Which brings us to....

Radiation Education & Research
One of the things the prefectural government has implemented since 3.11 is a mandatory curriculum of radiation education throughout the 12 years of schooling. It's not a separate class, just a certain number of hours of education following the set curriculum. The subject matter includes some science about what radiation is and how it can hurt us, as well as the teaching of practical behaviors to avoid radiation contact.

 

The government and TepCo have also set up research centers to further the study of radiation and its effects on humans, such as the Fukushima Prefecture Medical Device Development and Safety Assessment Center, and the Fukushima International Medical and Science Center, both of which also offer healthcare related to radiology. Monitoring extends also to the watching of people and their general health, of course. People in the prefecture have access to small radiation detectors, but there's also larger machines that have been made available ("Hard Body Counters"?). At the elementary school we visited, this large machine was bussed to the school in the previous year to examine every single student.

Finances
TepCo must first of all, deal with keeping the destroyed nuclear reactor at the Daiichi plant under control. They have to constantly cool it with water then store that contaminated water in tanks. They also have to upgrade all their other plants to ensure that they are definitely up to code. They have to spend money to build the new research facilities and to monitor radiation levels. They have to pay workers to decontaminate. Most of all, they have to pay compensation to people affected by the nuclear disaster, and this is no small number (according to the reps, 2 trillion yen to date). Fukushima prefecture had 154,285 evacuees, according to the prefectural office. TepCo was responsible for building temporary housing for them, paying compensation for damages and lost work time, etc. In addition, we spoke to a farmer who has not been able to sell off a crop since the disaster due to radiation levels being above the limit. He's been getting compensation for nearly 2 and a half years, which he says has allowed him to live without any financial burdens at all.

One of my biggest questions before our meeting the with the TepCo representatives was, How is TepCo footing the bill for all of this? The answer is that they aren't. TepCo was already one of those big companies that was constantly borrowing money from other people to stay afloat. It can't take out any more private loans, obviously, because no one is willing. In our meeting the TepCo rep said that the national government is "supporting the company" but that "we will have to return our profits to the government for many years." So....essentially, the Japanese government owns TepCo now. This has become almost like a bank-bailout issue, in which TepCo is far too large and important of a company to let fail, in part because they provide most of Japan with its power, in part because they employ a huge percentage of the Japanese population. What to do? The government is basically bankrolling all of TepCo's payouts.

My Visit
None of the facts above give a real sense of what people who live in Fukushima are still going through, and that is the part of my experience that I found most valuable. Many times while we were in Fukushima, we heard expressed in various ways the desire to return to normal and forgo this label of "special." But the fact is, even in places of the prefecture that were, in physical terms, scarcely affected at all are still perceived as part and parcel of Fukushima, a place that is getting special treatment, Fukushima, a place that needs to be treated with rubber gloves to avoid contamination. The prefecture has been stigmatized as unsafe, and despite the intangible nature of this fear, it has had very real consequences for the people who live there.

Fukushima City was far from both the coast and the nuclear meltdown, and so life pretty much just goes on there. It's a large-ish, bustling city with restaurants and shops and everything normal you can imagine. We took the train into the city and spent the night there having dinner with a local English club. There ensued many of the usual trappings and quirks of the semi-formal Japanese gathering, by which I mean that every member of the club stood up and read a pre-prepared speech on the topic of their favorite thing about Fukushima. They wanted to know what we'd learned about Fukushima before we came. One man confessed to me that he panicked at first after the disaster, and abandoned his job to run away to Kyoto. The way he spoke about it, almost like it was a matter of shame, was very interesting to me--he kept saying that his wife was the strong one and that he was not a man for running away. You could really tell that what the prefecture has suffered has changed people's perceptions of themselves and strengthened their "prefectural" identity, if you will (Perhaps you could compare it to post-9/11 New Yorker identity). But mostly, these people just wanted to have a good time and practice their English. Life was pretty normal in Fukushima City.

Things were much more somber in Hirono Town, a small town very close to the Daiichi Power Plant. On the way there we passed the highway exit to the plant (it was closed off). In reality, Hirono's radiation level is comparable to Fukushima's, but its stigma damage is much, much worse because of its proximity to the plant. This entire town naturally had to be evacuated when the disaster occurred. The town originally had a population of about 5000, but only just over 1000 of the evacuees returned. The majority of the evacuees are living in nearby Iwaki City, which has a population of about 300,000. As long as the evacuees continue to stay away, poor Hirono Town is facing the serious possibility of disappearance. There were numerous empty houses, and the elementary school we visited only had about 20 students. We watched the kids sing a few songs for us then taught them to sing "Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes." We were told to "be as cheerful as possible, to lift their spirits." They were super cute and ran from window to window waving goodbye at as our bus pulled away, but it was also a little sad. Why aren't the evacuees returning? Part of it seems to be that people are leaving the agricultural sector because it's simply not a viable option when no one wants to buy produce from Fukushima. Part of it seems to be simply that the younger generations found Iwaki City much more convenient and filled with opportunity than the small town they grew up in.

Our last stop was Iwaki City, and this perhaps was the most emotionally brutal. We visited a non-profit organization called The People, and talked to them about their efforts to help rebuild and provide counseling and community services to evacuees living in Iwaki. They seem somewhat successful in having created a community space and sponsoring activities in that space for evacuees. What hurt to watch was the explanation of their project to save the agricultural industry of Iwaki. As I said before, some farms have already started selling their produce again, while others are still waiting for radiation levels to go down. One farmer we spoke to near Date City was very optimistic about passing the levels this year and having his first crop sold. We asked if he felt that consumers would still buy, and again he seemed very optimistic. Well, Iwaki has been able to sell their produce since last year, and it has not gone well. Demand is way down. Consumers who used to look to some Fukushima produce specifically for its organic quality now stay far far away from it. The People has begun a new project to try to revitalize farming....and the project is organic cotton. =( I feel that probably most of us were suppressing pained winces as we watched the inspiring promotional video depicting agricultural experts coming in to teach farmers this new skill, intercut with snapshots of happy children and cheerfully spooling cotton thread. It was rough, because the spokesperson was selling this project as an innovative solution to an economic crisis...while we sat there thinking, who's going to pay $40 for a cotton T-shirt?

All in all, Fukushima is not the radiation nightmare some conspiracy-loving panic-mongers would believe, but it is a place that is facing some serious challenges right now. Whatever changes may come to this place in the future, people are pretty resilient. Hopefully they'll manage and come through to the other side.

Japan's Education System

I'm kicking off this post with a heavy-handed illustration of just how much education is about perspective: above you see a map in which Japan is the center of the world. ;)

Basic snapshot of the school system--there are no "standardized tests" required to graduate at any point, but there are intense entrance examinations to middle school, high school, and college. At the high school level, these entrance examinations have the effect of sorting students into tracks by putting them in schools at their level. There are vocational schools, and there are various intensities of academic schools. However, the fact that the testing system is entrance rather than exit-based means that once you test into high school, or college, for example, there's basically a 100% graduation rate. If you go, you pass. 

So we visited 2 middle schools, 2 high schools, and 3 elementary schools during my time in Japan. We had the opportunity to speak to many teachers and principals. I learned a lot! Obviously, I have lots to say, but I think I'll just drop some pictures with straightfoward descriptions first so there's a sense of what school is like in Japan. 

Environment

Most of the schools we visited had the kind of open layout that you see in this picture above. One principal told us the design was deliberate--the idea is to create a space in which one can observe everything that is happening easily. My school is actually built on a similar principle, with windows in the doors, etc. Of course, this school is nearly open-air. Indeed, in some of the schools there were no windows (only open space). Obviously, this counts air conditioning right out. Trust me, this is rough--kids attend school right through July, and Japan is unbelievably hot and humid in the summer. In plenty of the classrooms we observed, kids came close to being passed out on the desks...but still didn't complain. We noticed that the middle schools tended not to have air conditioning, while the high schools had at least the minor levels of air conditioning used throughout Japan. 

In the middle school and elementary school classrooms, there were cubbies located at the back for backpacks and thermoses. 

The majority of the schools we visited had a structured policy regarding shoes. You remove your shoes upon entering the building and put on school slippers. If you look carefully at the feet of the students in the picture above, you can see they're wearing what sort of look like blue plastic shower slippers. There are also slippers for the bathroom, and special shoes for gym class, as seen just below:

In the classroom itself, kids almost universally sat in neatly arranged rows like below. In the middle schools, rows would alternate boy girl boy girl, and even in some of the high schools we noticed this type of segregation. You'll probably notice that students are wearing uniforms--in Japan, middle school and high school students wear uniforms, while elementary students do not. 

Schools had their attendance posted for everyone to see. The big numbers indicate the number of students in class (class size varied from 30-45), the 0s and 1s indicate the number of absences, lates, and early departures. Yep, attendance is pretty incredible. That seemed to be almost universally true based on all the schools we visited. 

Cleaning

In Japan, there are no school janitors. The students clean everything, and are taught to do so from elementary school on. They have "cleaning periods" built into their daily schedules. 

 

 

Lunch

Japanese elementary and middle schools tend not to have cafeterias--instead, kids eat lunch in their homeroom class (homeroom, by the way, is much more important in Japanese schools than American schools, because those students go to all their classes together and the homeroom class serves as the organizing base for all school activities). The lunch is prepared either off-site, or in some rarer cases, in a school kitchen, and brought to the classrooms. The homeroom teacher supervises the students whose turn it is to serve the class lunch. In elementary school, the "Toothbrushing Song" will be played after lunch and students will brush their teeth at their desks! Super cute.

Special Ed and Immigrant Students

When we think of Japan, we think of an incredibly homogeneous culture that is often horribly racist. To some extent, this perception is justifiable. Especially compared to the United States, Japan has a very low immigrant population (this is a separate issue, of course, and Japan undoubtably realizes that they will have to allow more immigration if their population continues to decline). It's laughable to try to compare Japan's education system to the US' when they don't have the same language and diversity issues that we do. I will say this, though--I saw more diversity than I was expecting, on the street, on the TV, and in schools. Not a lot--but more than I was expecting. A couple of schools even tried to discuss this with us because having to deal with non-Japanese speakers is a relatively new challenge for them. The schools we visited that had non-native students told us that for now, they are pulling these students out of Japanese-heavy courses to do extra reinforcement classes. 

Japan does have a concept of special education, although it seems to take quite a bit more to get the designation than it takes in the United States. I'm not entirely sure what advantages the designation results in--they definitely get special self-contained classes, and apparently also some kind of testing accommodation. However, given that Japan essentially has no basic standard for graduation (everyone who goes graduates--their testing system is based on entrance, not exit, so students are not preparing to exit high school, as our students are, but to enter college) I'm not entirely sure what that actually means or whether or not it even matters. At any rate, here are two teeny tiny special ed classes we saw!

 

Clubs
In Japan, students have class from about 8am to 4pm, and then they have an hour or two of "club activities." Clubs are a much more formalized endeavor in Japan than they are in the United States. For one thing, in middle school they are mandatory. By high school, you can choose not to be involved but my impression was that most student still belonged to something. Because they're mandatory and because teachers MUST head at least one club, there's a lot more structure and continuity in the life of a club. Older students who have been in the club for two or more years essentially run the club and train the younger students to take their place when they leave. Teachers might not have whatever skill necessary (like kendo or karate) but still find themselves in charge of this club, so this continuity and student-led aspect is essential. Clubs actually continue in the 6-week summer "break" that students have, so although students may not have school, most of them are still going to school every day for special club activities. It seems like schools invest quite a lot of money into their clubs. The clubs in the pictures below all require special spaces that I can't even imagine my school having or wanting the money for.

The tea cermony club. 

paired Kendo practice

Student-led Kendo practice

Sumo club

Teachers

Teachers in Japan work similar hours as American teachers (so, looong) and don't get paid as much. Both teachers and principals work as part of the entire education system, and get transferred to another school every few years. The system almost reminded me of the military, in that you have some choice about where you go, but the ultimate decision rests with the system. I was pretty shocked when I first heard this, since from my perspective it seems to be robbing both teachers and schools of that element of free market competition for the best resources and workplaces. At the very least, it speaks to a much more nationally cohesive system than we have here. On the other hand, maybe that's a good thing? Your allegiance is to the education system as a whole rather than one school. Teachers get experience working in different places with different students. The system and the curriculum are stronger than the individuals leading the classes. On the other hand, it sort of does put limits on how much you can invest yourself in any particular school and creates questions about leadership and continuity as far as principals are concerned. 

Anyway, teachers follow the students' schedule in that they work from about 8 to 4 then are responsible for some kind of club activity. We were told many teachers stay late, until 9 or 10 at night, to grade papers. It doesn't seem like they spend much time actually lesson planning, which makes sense given that most lessons seem to be textbook work. 

Just for fun, a teachers'  room in Japan:

Some Thoughts

There are some really obvious differences between trends in American education and Japanese education, and the first bit I'll get into will be what people expect. Yes, Japanese classrooms are as big and as quiet as you think they are--almost 40 students is the norm. They sit at individual desks. The students don't chat a whole lot (though there is sometimes some inattention and nodding off), and I observed almost no questions. In general, there's a LOT of textbook-focused instruction and very little group work. Most of the lessons we observed did not share the warm up-mini lesson-practice activity structure that many American schools demand, but instead were simple running through textbook exercise after textbook exercise. Lesson planning honestly doesn't seem to be overly creative or inspiring, and I saw low engagement in a lot of classrooms. In one class, I did an engagement count at one point and found that out of 36 students, 4 were actively listening to the teacher. What I found quite interesting is that whenever we asked principals what they look for during a teacher observation, they said all the normal things that an American principal would say--interaction between students and teachers, high engagement, critical thinking. The hilarious part is that in no way did that description ever fit what we saw in those principals' schools. 

Despite some of these things that I would say are severely lacking, there's an undeniable structure and cohesiveness that I find really appealing. First of all, there's a very clear structure to the school and to the classroom, and students know what to expect. The school right away sets a structure and routine with having school uniforms and school slippers. You literally have to put your head in school-mode when you get dressed in the morning, and you leave the outside world behind when you enter the school doors. At the beginning and end of every class, all students stand a bow--ritualizing the beginning and end of class really sets a clear mental starting point and ending point that I really like. Having students take responsibility for the cleaning of their own school really lends a feeling of ownership to the building and learning community--and probably trains them pretty well to keep clean for the remainder of their lives. Hey, no one can deny that Japan is really really clean. In my month there, I saw public litter once. Once. 

You know, I think what underlies all these structures and expectations is a real idea that teaching manners and social behavior is a primary objective of the school. I would argue that it's a secondary objective in American schools, but in Japan it really seems to be a driving force. All of the schools we went to put a strong emphasis on "a proper greeting" as part of their teachings. There were visible attempts made to include students in all activities. What are the mandatory clubs about if not a way to make sure everyone is initiated into the community and society? The major concern for both teachers and students is NOT the lesson that happens in the classroom but creating that community of inclusion. At one Q&A session we asked if teachers were evaluated based on their test scores, and they genuinely had trouble understanding the question. When they finally got it, one teacher just burst out, "But that's just stupid." Of course they wouldn't understand this impulse to evaluate individual teachers based on performance. Japanese teachers are not evaluated in this way--they're evaluated, to be sure, but a struggling teacher goes through years of mentoring and it's almost impossible to fire a teacher. But Rob put it best when he said this is because in Japan, education is an ecosystem--responsibility for a child doesn't fall on any one particular teacher because there are an infinite number of factors at play when it comes to a child's achievement and learning. I loved this analogy. It's the polar opposite of what we have in the United States where we like to quickly assign causal relationships to how a child does and what the teacher does, but it's not that simple. Other teachers play a role. The family plays a role. The environment of the school plays a role. Learning really is an ecosystem and a school needs to be the one responsible for maintaining its overall health and balance. I think we could really use a little more of that in the United States.