Tuesday, December 11, 2012

#Radioactive Japan: Mayor of Iitate-mura in Fukushima Wants Residents Back in 2014


There are neptunium and plutonium in Iitate-mura's soil, spiders are concentrating radioactive silver. Back in early April last year, IAEA said they had found 20 million becquerels/kg of iodine-131 from the soil.

Never you mind.

The highly political mayor of Iitate-mura says he will declare that the residents of this highly contaminated village return to the village in the fall of 2014. At the latest, by the spring of 2015.

Mayor Sugano is planning to have the villagers back three and a half years after the worst nuclear accident in Japan. The national government will be delighted, as that will mean the end of paying the compensations to the villagers.

From Yomiuri Shinbun (12/11/2012):

東京電力福島第一原発事故で全村避難が続く福島県飯舘村の菅野典雄村長は11日、住民に帰還を呼びかける帰村宣言を出す時期について、「2014年秋頃」と語り、初めて見通しを示した。

As evacuation after the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant continues in Iitate-mura in Fukushima Prefecture, Mayor Norio Sugano mentioned the timing of issuing his declaration for the villagers to return to the village for the first time, saying it would be "around the fall of 2014".

村議会の一般質問で答えた。

He was answering the general question during the Village Assembly on December 11.

国は14年3月までに除染を完了させるとしているが、菅野村長は「遅れる可能性がある」との認識を示し、「14年秋か、遅くとも15年春には宣言を出したい」と述べた。宣言に合わせ、福島市に避難している役場も村に戻す。

The national government plans to finish decontamination by March 2014. Mayor Sugano acknowledged that it may be delayed, but said "I want to issue the declaration [for the return] in the fall of 2014, or the spring of 2015 at the latest." Once he issues the declaration, the village office, currently evacuated to Fukushima City, will return to the village.

飯舘村は昨年4月、計画的避難区域に指定され、今年7月、空間放射線量に応じて3区域に再編された。国は、村内20行政区のうち、「避難指示解除準備区域」と「居住制限区域」の計16地区の避難指示を解除する時期の見込みを、14年3月と設定している。

Iitate-mura was designated as planned evacuation zone in April last year, and was reorganized into three zones this July depending on the air radiation levels. The national government has set the target date to lift the evacuation order in 16 districts in the village currently designated as "zone to prepare for the lifting of the evacuation order" and "zone with restriction in dwelling". There are 20 districts in the village.


Iitate-mura is one of the municipalities in Fukushima Prefecture where the national government is in charge of the so-called "decontamination". The decon project in Iitate-mura has been awarded to one of the largest general contractors in Japan (Taisei), but faced with the reality the scope of the project has narrowed significantly. All the government is doing and will do is to remove surface soil in the agricultural land (rice paddies, crop fields) and to clean up around residences. Forests and mountains won't even be touched.

Even the decontamination of the farm land only makes sense in the minds of bureaucrats in the central government who have never worked a single day in the real world (like farm land). The government decontaminates (i.e. removes surface soil) the rice paddies, for example, BUT NOT the footpaths between the rice paddies. No decon work will be done on the footpaths, because the government's decon plan doesn't say anything about the footpaths, according to one of the very frustrated Iitate farmers who tweet.

On December 7 when M7.3 earthquake hit Tohoku and Kanto, a man in his 50s apparently died of a heart attack in Iitate-mura when he tried to escape. He was working at a factory in Iitate-mura, which has been kept open and operational despite the nuclear accident. There are a few, large-scale machining factories in Iitate-mura which have continued to employ hundreds of Iitate villagers since the nuclear accident. One of the reason why it took until late April last year for the evacuation to take effect in Iitate-mura has been rumored to be Mayor Sugano's negotiating with the national government to make these factories exempt and allow them to continue to operate, employing the villagers as before.

Many Iitate villagers on Twitter have been tweeting the high radiation levels in Iitate-mura. One of them, Mr. Ito, recently tweeted that the national government is creating a "temporary" storage area for the highly contaminated soil removed from farmland. Where is it? Right above the reservoir that feeds water to farmland.


Outside the village, no one seem to care any more.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Magnitude 7.4 earthquake, now.

JAnonymous said...

Rumors are just rumors, but sometimes they are much more fun than big lies being peddled to us as the truth.

Here's my very own rumor absolutely not fabricated, all solid and backed by anonymous unquoted sources !

Mayor Sugano wants to start a new human branch in evolution by applying Darwin theories to his own village.

They will be kept in as much a radioactive environment as possible, so that when China misnukes (same as misspeak : nuke by mistake and without real intent) the whole Japanese archipelago, Iitate mura will prevail.

Of course, they have to do decon to deceive the townsfolk and govocrats, so they just shift the rad stuff to the water reservoir. Then, it slowly crawls back in, and will all be there by 2014.

Hooray for the sieverts

Anonymous said...

Perhaps the good mayor should go there ahead of those scheduled to be "forced" back to accumulate the poisons present so he can be the first of his proposed "experiment" he volunteered his former neighbors & constituents for whether they like it or not?!He can personally spearhead whatever decontamination ops his superior knowledge of said technology allows him to feel he has the right to politicize the issue while in fact the lack of ANYONE being able to deal with land & its living inhabitants effectively "dead" for many years beyond 2014,15 or mine or my children's lifetimes if I may be so bold as to suggest that example with its "positive" implications that we have ANY time left at all?!! His Honorable Majesty-The Great Mayor should beg his ancestors and the Emperor for forgiveness and take his own life instead of spreading "false hopes" and using the event to gain publicity & further his ambitions to climb the political ladder! I'm shocked at the stupidity displayed by those we elect to represent us and OUR best interests! They'd better start learning to accept the same reality(s) that those impacted by Chernobyl still face after 3 decades with thousands of KM's of land nowhere near being safe enough to be deemed "inhabitable" again! I guess the Mayor is trying to exchange his position of power from leader of a ghost town uninhabitable for a century or more,thus the end of his political life~in exchange for a seat in the Diet where his irresponsible legislative activities and "radiation danger minimizer" stance & ignorance seem to be well-received and rewarded by the pro-nuke pukes who are either dead from the neck up or have a black hole where their soul "should" be after years of taking "blood" money from the worst public health & safety violators in the industrial realm! They should be the ones going back into contamination zones they've slated for early returns of residents in their unrealistic & impossible ambitions & statements! I give up already....WAKE UP!

arevamirpal::laprimavera said...

The village has several factories employing villagers, who go there every day of the week to work. There are residents who live there, even though they are not supposed to.

Some villagers call Mr. Sugano, the village mayor, dictator.

The nuclear accident has been very good for Mr. Sugano. He got world famous, giving talks in the US and Europe. He published books, as if he was the representative of people suffering from the accident. He has grabbed a huge chunk of money from the national government for the construction and decon work for his village of 6,000 people. I hear that a business in the village affiliated with Mr. Sugano has been doing extremely well.

He was the first to scrub the area around monitoring posts so that the radiation display got low enough not to scare the villagers.

Anonymous said...

THANK YOU!~I guess my intuition & observations about the great Mayor were spot on judging by the replies that reminded me of whom we were speaking of-I should've recognized it was Mr. "Legend i9n his own mind" Sugano-san! So I also learned something new as well-he's the one who started decontaminating monitoring posts then huh? I bet the "business in the village associated with him" probably make lead-lined,steel boxes to further enclose & isolate them from the radioactive environment?!! What a self-serving pc. of shit!

Anonymous said...

When is the next election? to kick this idiot out of the office. Give him the most contaminated land in Iiitate, a 50 meters x 50 meters enclosure. Let him be the mayor of that little land.

arevamirpal::laprimavera said...

In the meantime, Mr. Idogawa, the mayor of Futaba-machi who seems to have been completely transformed by the nuclear accident that happened in his town and has been fighting for the welfare of his people, is facing a recall campaign by the town assemblymen who want to ditch him and go back to Fukushima ASAP to grab more "recovery" fund from the government.

Go figure.

Anonymous said...

What a perversion of "recall".
Whatever happened to "nobody is above the Law"?

Anonymous said...

My respect and prayers for those that are infested with "parasites".

Shake them off & get well soon!

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