Anecdotal Evidence that Government and JA Pushed Tohoku/Kanto Vegetables to Western Japan Last Year

As the title says, it is purely anecdotal, nothing systematically gathered and statistically analyzed. It's from the readers of my Japanese blog and twitter followers in Japan who wrote to me after reading the Asahi AJW article (I translated it into Japanese) that back in 2005 IAEA had proposed the 300-kilometer radius for contaminated food regulation but the Japanese government objected.

(By the way, the Asahi article appeared in Japan on March 15, 2012 in Japanese, I was told by a reader, but only in the printed version of the paper. So unless you're an Asahi subscriber you would never know about it.)

About the vegetable lineups in supermarkets in the Kansai region (western half of Japan) about the same time last year:

赤ちゃんがいるので、関西に越したのですが、昨年はスーパーには北関東産野菜がずらり。今年の同シーズンの現在、九州四国野菜がずらり。昨年の品揃えはなんだったのでしょう。

We relocated to Kansai last year because of our small baby. Vegetables grown in northern Kanto [Tochigi, Ibaraki, Gunma] were on prominent display at a local supermarket last year. The same season this year, all I see is vegetables grown in Kyushu and Shikoku. What was that lineup last year?

関西在住ですが、昨年は今までスーパーで見たことのない関東産ばかりが並んでいました。地場産は滅多に見つからないほどでした。

I live in Kansai. Last year, it was all vegetables grown in Kanto, which I had never seen before. I could hardly find locally grown vegetables.

うちはチビだけ大阪の実家に避難させました。理解力のある母なので食材に気をつけてくれてましたが｢なんで危ない向こうのが出回る!｣と怒っていました。

I sent my small child to my parents' house in Osaka. My mother understood the radiation danger and she paid close attention to food. She was very angry, saying "Why are they selling these vegetables from the dangerous [contaminated] areas?"

大阪在住ですが、いままで福島の農産物なんて見たことなかったのに、去年の今頃は、伊達市のきゅうりをはじめ、線量の高い地域からの野菜ばかりでした。

I live in Osaka. Same time last year, the vegetables I saw at the supermarket were all from the high-radiation areas, like cucumbers from Date City, Fukushima. I had never seen any vegetable from Fukushima before.

About the same time last year (late March) and onward, there were people in Kansai (Osaka, Hyogo, Kyoto, etc.) reporting that the vegetables at their local supermarkets were all of Kanto origin that they had never even seen before. They were roundly ridiculed, and were accused of fear-mongering, making up stories, or worse, discriminating against Fukushima people. They were called "racists" in a country which is pretty much homogeneous.

One year later, the vegetable lineups seem to have gone back to pre-Fukushima normal, i.e. vegetables from western Japan sold in western Japan.

Remember all that beef contaminated with radioactive cesium last year? Here's one of the earliest posts on the topic from last year. The Japanese government started encouraging and facilitating the sale or transfer of cattle out of Fukushima before the planned evacuation zone was set in late April, and beef of Fukushima origin was sold in great quantities in locations which had never seen such a surge in sale of Fukushima beef.

Remember also the radioactive crushed stones from a stone pit in Namie-machi, right outside the no-entry zone (20-kilometer radius) and inside the planned evacuation zone? The stone pit operator was able to sell (literally) tons of stones far and wide (some were sold and used in Tokyo) before the planned evacuation zone was set in late April.

The Japanese government has successfully disseminated contaminated vegetables, beef, crushed stones, and a host of everything else (firewood, used cars, leaf compost, sawdust for shiitake growing, etc.) out of Fukushima and the contaminated areas in northern Kanto. Its success is partly attributable to people who attacked people like these mothers (and fathers) as "fear-mongering", "irrational", "nuclear-crazy" "racists".

Right now, a different set of people are called "racists", because they oppose accepting the disaster debris from Miyagi and Iwate and burn it in their towns. the Japanese government looks set to score yet another success. Letting the citizens squabble with each other with "racist" name-calling, while the government promising endless money to those in the local governments and waste disposal industry.

People like Ms. Cyndi Lauper and Mr. Paul Blustein provide a good old "external" (international) pressure (or "gaiatsu" in Japanese) for the government to tell the citizens, "See, international celebrities and scholars are saying what we've been telling you."

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