Thursday, January 26, 2012

(Video) What Happened to Chernobyl Children 7 Years after the Accident (from a Japanese TV program in 1993)

When it was someone else's problem (Chernobyl), Japan was telling the truth about the effect of radiation, particularly on children.

Tokyo Brown Tabby's translation and captioning of a TV program from 1993:


Ironically, the female newscaster has morphed into one of the strongest proponents (even today) of nuclear power generation. The journalist on the right has remained a journalist; he was seen investigating and reporting from the high-radiation areas in Fukushima, right after Reactor 1 blew up at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.

Tabby's description of the Youtube video:

This video is from a Japanese evening news program broadcasted on Nihon TV, seven years after the Chernobyl accident (around 1993).

I hope the families in Fukushima who still hesitate to voluntarily evacuate their children will watch this and change their minds.

The original video is at: http://youtu.be/tWWICnIQE9k

German version is at 007bratsche's channel: http://youtu.be/_9F9M1Sq7KI
French version is at kna60's channel: http://youtu.be/oWvQT6ei8C0

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, Yoshiko Sakurai has become the fountainhead of Japanese ultra-nationalism today, so it is quite nice to see her prior to the transformation. Methinks a lot of former Japanese leftists or centrists waffled to ultra-nationalism simply because of the times...no moral center, so to speak.

BTW, AREVAMIRPAL, I understand your need for privacy, but I have this gut feeling that we've met in DC, say almost 12 years ago, for a brief talk. Jim introduced us (he still writes articles with Sakurai in the Sankei occasionally) while I was in the USG...you were certainly disillusioned with Japan (as I...that is why I left the USG position) then went to a financial job in the Windy City...received that finance blog for a few years, then time past by. I must say, right or wrong on my hunch, you've done a helluva job that history will prove so important!

Janick Magne said...

Thank you EX-SKF for this excellent link and topics.
Ryuichi Hirokawa is not simply a journalist, he is a war reporter, very committed to peace, who supports simple people's cause when main media ignore them. He has been everywhere: Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq... where innocent people have been killed. He is also an excellent photographer and launced DAYS JAPAN, a political photojournalism magazine.
Last but not least, he is very active in the "Chernobyl Children's Fund, Japan" which he created and, year after year, he gives some of his best Chernobyl's photographs to the Fund to be printed in calendars sold to support the children. Because he keeps going to the Chernobyl area several times a year to deliver the money and witness people's hardships, he is permanently contaminated by radioactivity & radionucleids.
When the nuclear crisis started in Fukushima, he flew to FUTABA (3km from the DAIICHI plant)with a megaphone to engage people to evacuate as fast as they could.
As you can guess, I am a fervent admirer of his actvities!
Janick Magne from Tokyo
Link: http://myhero.com/go/hero.asp?hero=RyuichiHirokawaJapan

xanteacher said...

excellent work, again
keep it up, ex-skf and Tokyo Tabby

how was this documentary unearthed, btw?

Anonymous said...

Ex-SKF great job!!

Video time point 3:50 - IAEA did not find any connection with radiation exposure.... the current state in official post Fuku Japan.

Video time point 4:50 to 5:34 - Thyroid cancer in kids is about 1:500000 (without radiation exposure). Now 70km from the plant 7.5% percent of kids have been found to need further observation - 20% of those (1.5 %) will get Thyroid cancer.

What are the Japanese numbers: 30% of kids were found with some irregularities in their Thyroids and 2% of tested kids were found with a lump.... and we only have 1 year after the accident.

I am pretty sure, that about 20 years ago, a 5mm lump could not be detected by ultrasound check....

Now one might think the kids in Japan will get proper medical treatment in the future, but do not forget the official opinion is this is not due to radiation, so no special support for the treatment from the government and again the kids of the poor will suffer heavily...

Sad is a too mild word.

Anonymous said...

TEPCO the Jap Government and all pro nuclear dickheads need a bullet in the head for the Fukushima thing, history repeats itself yet again and it couldnt have happened in a worse country than Japan, denial and hiding the truth being part of Japanese culture... .. More kids will get very sick and it will be swept under the carpet, mark my words.

Lord Metroid said...

When sad is to mild word, I would recommend to use the word tragedy.

I love Japan and its culture, it is so sad, I had plans to revisit Japan this year but after this tragedy. Now I simply can not travel there as I do not want to be exposed to, ingest nor inhale radioactive material.

Everything is so sad. I have friends all over Japan from Sendai to Tokyo, living there lives in business as usual. I fear they will probably develop cancer or other ills caused by the radiation but I can not do anything for them. I can't even visit them. Outright depressing!

Tokyo Brown Tabby said...

@xanteacher
I happened to find it on YouTube. This video clip is a part of a series of 4 clips that reported on Chernobyl aftermaths.
You can view the other 3 on YouTube, too, though they are only in Japanese.

The first clip: http://youtu.be/WCfzjHaVu5s
(about the 50,000 patient's charts that revealed the true damages by radiation)

The second is this one.

The third clip: http://youtu.be/0rDbSMWKGPw
(about the life in surrounding contaminated areas)

The fourth clip: http://youtu.be/0rFYHpmta_0
(about the health damages to children and the uninhabitable lands)

Anonymous said...

What gets to me is the cover-up. These guys are like Holocaust deniers, or those Turkish politicians pretending they didn't try to kill all the Armenians back in the day, or those tossers who try to make out there's no global warming. I hope they all roast in hell.... the truth does come out but so many people just don't want to know. You and Mochizuki-san of Fukushima Diary are telling the world something very important - please keep it up!

We've all got our heads up our collective bottoms but the truth is that our world is becoming uninhabitable, one place at a time. They bombed Iraq with so much depleted uranium that the kids there look like something out of a horror movie, the same has happened in vast swathes of Russia, Ukraine, the Pacific and now Japan. Where will it end?

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