I’ve been away from this blog for far too long, and for no good reason. I’ve also been mulling over whether to wrap this up, and if so, how to do so. What follows in this post is not the answer to these questions; I’ve said in an earlier post that the disaster is in some ways still going on, and that statement is still true even now – meaning that I expect there will still be things to write about on this subject from time to time. This post is not the final statement, nor the conclusion, but a gathering of a few loose ends and recent observations – until next time.
In Infamy
December 7th, 2011 was the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Somewhat remarkably – especially in light of the recent end of large scale American military involvement in Iraq and the on-going troop presence in Afghanistan, as well as what these wars have done for the position of the military in American society over the past decade – the media attention paid to the anniversary of this “Day of Infamy” seemed rather low-key. Back when I was growing up – in the 1970s into the 80s – it seemed like December 7th never passed without numerous media retellings of the treacherous events of that day, along with accounts of the Japanese foreign aggression that preceded it and the brutality of the Japanese military in the war that followed. If nothing else, though, back then December 7th was a day when Americans were roused to some sort of cognizance of Japan – no matter how briefly – a cognizance that was almost always for the worse in terms of their impressions of the Japanese.
My hunch is that this focus on the Japanese aspect of December 7th began to decline as the shock waves of the Japanese Bubble economy’s collapse subsided, and it became apparent to most Americans that Japan was neither “Number One” nor the hyper-efficient “Japan, Inc.” hell-bent on dominating the world economy in much the same way that its defunct imperial military had tried to impose a “co-prosperity sphere” on East Asia. In recent years, the perpetrator of the December 7th attacks is duly noted, but the focus seems to be increasingly on the sacrifices of the 2,402 American service personnel who died in the attack, rather than on the treachery of the Japanese enemy.
Although the decreasing perception of Japan as an economic threat to American market interests is certainly a factor in this shift, on the whole I see it as a good thing: not that the past should be forgotten, of course; but managing to recall it with a sense of objective detachment is the first step to gaining a perspective through which to understand the decisions and actions of a former adversary as something more complex than just arising from the “inherent” barbarity and cruelty of “those bastards.”
So, what does this have to do with a blog on the March 11th tsunami and its aftermath? Nothing at all…were we to be living in a civil, reasonable world. Alas, we are not.
Anyone who was paying fairly close attention to the stories and videos coming out of Japan that appeared on American news sites and YouTube after March 11th, and who bothered to read the comments that other readers posted at the bottom of those pages knows where I’m headed with this. I chose not to delve into the topic at the outset of this blog because I found it infuriating just to think about, but also it seemed entirely beside the point at the time – since I was then primarily focused on coming to terms with the destruction and suffering experienced in Tohoku. What brought it back to mind a few days after the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, was yet another comment I saw on the web, attached to a picture of the tsunami’s devastation in an on-line “2011 in pictures” type of gallery of photos. I can’t recall the site exactly (I could have sworn it was on the Time Magazine site, but I failed to bookmark it and couldn’t find the exact page on a subsequent site search), but the first comment attached to this photo stayed with me even though it consisted of only two words: “Karma!! Karma!”
In the days after the tsunami, as images of the devastation flooded the American news media, the idea that the tsunami was “karma” or “payback” for something Japan had done become the motif du jour of internet trolls across the country. For most posts of this kind, it was the attack on Pearl Harbor that Japan was now paying for. Others, however, claimed that it was Japan’s slaughter of dolphins and whales that had marked the nation for destruction. Of course, it is very unlikely that most of these cretins actually believed that the tsunami was some sort of divine retribution for either – an important part of the asinine art of trolling is precisely not to be sincere. What I found particularly striking, though, was that many examples of this kind of commentary seemed to violate another cardinal rule of trolling: that it should be anonymous, or at least pseudonymous, so that one’s offensive comments would forever remain unattributed. The whole point of trolling is to promote an outraged response without having to take personal responsibility for it, after all.
The breaking of this rule came about because the trolls apparently weren’t content just to ply their trade on internet chat sites. Many chose to “tweet” such garbage, or else post it on their Facebook walls. In either case, of course, all their friends and “followers” would know their real identities. And, since nothing is really private on the internet, they would eventually be known to a much wider audience as well. Within days, bloggers who looked upon this phenomenon with a healthy disgust began collecting these posts and putting them up on their sites for the whole world wide web to see, often with the names of the responsible parties un-redacted. Below are just a few samples with links to the blog pages I found them on, where you can find many more egregious examples. (My thanks to the bloggers who put these together for “bearing the unbearable” in the quest to chronicle such human ignorance and insensitivity – kudos! Although most of the quotes below appear on the blogs with names attached, I’ve decided not to provide them here, on the off chance that some of these folks have thought better of it since…although I really doubt it – It takes a truly dedicated scumbag to engage in mean-spiritedness to this level.)
“getting a little more payback for pearl harbor. They thought we forgot about that BS, didn’t they?”
“It’s been almost of full day of tsunami coverage. Time to move on. At first, I really did kinda feel bad for Japan. But then, I Googled “Pearl Harbor Death Toll”. There. All better.”
(PZ Myers, “I hope these people aren’t your friends,” Pharyngula, March 12, 2011. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/i_hope_these_people_arent_your.php) [Be sure to click on the “compilation of facebook entries” link in the text to see the collection.]
“damn facebook wont[sic] let me publish a note on Japan no I will not help Japan they didn’t help us with any of the disasters we had then they bombed pearl harbor and killed a bunch of our people sure we dropped the bomb on them but it stopped the war, we dont[sic] owe them diddly.”
“Japan Is Getting Back There[sic] Own Pearl Harbor Back[sic]”
“Hey Japan, that tsunami was for my great grandfather and all of those who perished on December 7, 1942[sic]! Pearl Harbor just came back to bite you in the ass! Karma really is a bitch, isnt[sic] it?”
“Enough about the japs who gives a shit they bombed pearl harbor let them all die they would be happy if that happened to us!”
(Tanner Ringerud, “Facebook Weighs In On The Japanese Tsunami,” Buzzfeed, “posted about 9 months ago.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/idiots-of-facebook-weigh-in-on-the-japanese-tsunam)
“Fuck the japs playback[sic] for pearl harbor bitches”
“No offense japan, but just saw the cove and mother nature is kicking your ass for the millions of dolphins and whales you’ve slaughtered”
“Japan’s tsunami… Pearl Harbor… Thx[sic] Karma, and fuck you Japanese people, where were you in pearl harbor?”
(Lisa Wade, “The Tsunami in Japan and the Minds of Americans,” Sociological Images, March 15, 2011. http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/03/15/the-tsunami-in-japan-and-the-minds-of-americans/)
“for all i care japan can suck it for what they did to pearl harbor, but the reason why i donated is because i want more video games :D”
“i would #prayforjapan butt[sic] since they bombed pearl harbor and killed all those people! i think im[sic] good!”
“I bet when the people who live in Pearl Harbor found out about the earthquake in #Japan…they smiled on the inside.”
(Rosie Gray, “Go Away: Facebook Imbeciles Think Japan Tsunami Is Karmic Payback for Pearl Harbor,” Village Voice Blogs, March 12, 2011. http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/03/facebook_imbeci.php)
These examples are from only four blogs among many, many more like them that catalogued comments of this kind. In every case, the persons responsible had absolutely no problem whatsoever with having their names associated with such hatred. To be sure, they probably represent the attitudes of a perpetually bitter and racist, but thankfully small portion of people on the web. By the same token, however, as Rosie Gray’s Village Voice blog observes, “pearl harbor” came in among the top ten phrases that Twitter was “trending” toward among users in New York on March 12th, although some of those tweets probably criticized this type of thinking, just as tweets with “#prayforjapan” in them were, as in one of the examples above, not necessarily sympathetic to the Japanese.
After seeing more than enough of this kind of crap in March and April, I decided to put it out of my mind. As unkind as these comments are, after all, Americans haven’t exactly cornered the market on insensitivity. Although most Japanese bigots would be much less comfortable about having their most blatantly racist thoughts attached to their real names in the way that these are, to find similarly obnoxious stuff on the web in Japanese all one needs to do is Google terms like chūgokujin (中国人, Chinese), zainichi chōsenjin (在日朝鮮人, the descendants of Koreans who settled in Japan during the years of Japanese colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, 1910-1945), or burakumin (部落民, a somewhat derogatory term for the modern descendants of certain premodern outcaste groups) – and you’ll turn up a plethora of links to chat sites on which some of the most egregiously racist stereotyping imaginable in the Japanese language is “on parade.” And, interestingly enough, the contents of these stereotypes are very reminiscent of common racist images in American society: Chinese and Koreans, much like the image of Latinos among anti-immigration proponents here, are depicted as “over-stayers,” welfare thieves, sociopathic criminals, and a threat to the cultural well-being of the nation; stereotypes of the Burakumin, like those of African-Americans, emphasize the supposed shiftlessness, violence, and “innate” criminality of the minority. Despite the fact that jingoists and bigots the world over like to wrap themselves in the flag of their country and claim privilege of place as the guardians of the supposedly unique values and traditions of whatever nation-state they happen to belong to, it is one of the most universal, unoriginal, and ignorant positions one can possibly take – on the internet or anywhere else.
After seeing the aforementioned “Karma!! Karma!” comment, I began to recall the earlier vitriol in a new light. Since I have no way of knowing how representative these comments were, yet plenty of reasons to believe that the vast majority of Americans who learned of the devastation and loss on March 11th felt a great deal of sympathy for the victims, I realized that these comments probably weren’t significant in any numerical sense. What they did reveal, however, was a lingering impression in the American mind of the Japanese as the Irredeemable Other. This image, of course, drew on long-standing images of an exotic but inscrutable and nefarious Japan, brewed in the anti-Japanese immigration movement of the 1920s and the global reaction to Japanese expansionism in the 1930s, and distilled into a potent cultural motif in the wake of Pearl Harbor and the bitter war in the Pacific that followed.
And, it also reveals an interesting blind spot, which has plenty to do with the way in which nationalism – and particularly its American variety – operates on historical memory. If 3/11 is “payback” for Pearl Harbor, after all, then what were Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as well as the numerous conventional bombing raids on other Japanese cities) for? Very few of the statements in these posts even mention the atomic bombings, and those that do – like one of the examples quoted above – in essence claim that the bombings don’t count as revenge, apparently because they were done simply to “end the war.” The historical record, by the way, doesn’t support either interpretation unequivocally: while there is no evidence in the record of meetings leading up to the deployment of nuclear weapons against Japan that suggests these attacks were seen as justifiable “payback” by Truman and his Chiefs of Staff, there is also no clear evidence that these men believed at the time that using the new weapon would bring about Japan’s surrender; the a-bomb was just another weapon in the American arsenal, and plans for a full-scale landed invasion continued apace even as “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” fell from the skies.
Ignoring, or in any case downplaying, the suffering and trauma of the atomic bombings, while claiming that the tsunami was “karma,” “payback,” or just deserts for Pearl Harbor reveals a particularly nasty strain of American nationalistic sentiment: we can defeat our enemies, and utterly, but we never forgive them. My sense is that Japan has been the target of this kind of jingoistic racism on the part of some Americans at least as much as, if not more than, any other country that the United States has ever engaged in warfare – although it is still far too soon to tell in regard to Iraq and Afghanistan, and perhaps the rest of the Middle East.
As for those who feel comfortable with the argument that thousands of Japanese people deserved to die because of Japan’s treatment of dolphins and incomprehensibly hard-line policy on whaling, I can only say that it takes a special kind of misanthrope to decry the killing of these ocean mammals because they are sentient creatures, but revel in the deaths of human beings – who are also sentient creatures, if not always particularly bright or compassionate ones – simply because they happen to belong to a country whose policies one does not agree with. If the karma-for-Pearl-Harbor folks could be accused of right-wing jingoistic racism, the payback-for-killing-cetaceans crowd might be seen as engaging in its left-wing counterpart.
Finally, before moving on from this topic, just a few observations about another explanation for the tsunami that made the rounds of internet chat sites and comments posted in response to YouTube videos of the catastrophe: that it was God’s punishment of the Japanese for not being Christians, or – as Glenn Beck, among others, had it – to humanity in general for not doing “the right thing.” Here’s one particularly egregious example of this line of thought (although this is so over-the-top that I suspect, in fact I hope, that it’s a hoax – but even that wouldn’t make it funny). Watch at your own risk:
Whether the disaster was god punishing atheists (or heathens), or meant as a warning to us all, proponents of such views never bothered to explain why a supreme being would single out the Japanese for such punishment, nor did they explain why, if the Creator was indeed so jealous and petty as to destroy so many lives simply because the people in question (some of whom were Japanese Christians, by the way) didn’t subscribe to the Christian doctrine, even worse punishment shouldn’t be meted out to those who are hypocritically proud of being “Christian” without taking to heart the social philosophy that Jesus Christ supposedly taught. It called to mind Pat Robertson’s brain-addled quip about the earthquake in Haiti being divine punishment for the “pact with the devil” that the Haitian people supposedly made in order to gain independence from France.
There is no way to win an argument against folks who believe such nonsense, not only because the whole premise is patently ridiculous, but also because they refuse to apply the basic claims of their argument consistently: when natural disasters hit other countries, it’s because God is displeased with them for not being more like “us”; when disaster strikes closer to home (as in the case of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina – which inspired another numb-skulled comment from Pat), it’s blamed on people who don’t share “our” religious, social, and political beliefs. And when disaster hits the believers personally? Well, God is just testing them, apparently because he loves them so much.
Return of the Tsunami: Debris, Radiation, Uncertainty, and the Potential for Scapegoating
All of that was ten months ago, however. Time flies, and for most Americans, images of the devastation caused by the tsunami – whether they connected it to “karma,” “payback,” divine punishment, or took a much more rational and compassionate view at the time – have long since faded in memory. Even concerns over the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have largely disappeared from the mainstream news in recent months.
But the ocean that lies between the two countries – the same ocean that rose up on March 11, 2011 and pulverized communities across the coast of Tohoku – recently threatened to bring it all back, albeit in a new sense.
The same water that battered the towns and cities of coastal Tohoku dragged tons of debris out to sea as it receded, with a power no less savage than the force of the initial onslaught in many areas. There’s no way of knowing the exact amount, but best estimates suggest that anywhere from 5 to 20 millions tons of it ended up in the ocean. The denser materials quickly sank to the bottom, only a short distance from shore – where much of it still rests today, to the detriment of seaweed and oyster cultivation beds and fishing waters for many species. (Worse still, perhaps, is the tremendous variety and volume of petroleum products and other toxic chemicals that ended up in the ocean – a topic I will probably return to in a future post.) But the more buoyant materials and objects – lumber from shattered homes, innumerable marine floats and fishing boats, household appliances, and all manner of personal objects – were carried out into the currents that cycle water around the vast Pacific. The forecast is that some of this flotsam – how much of it is difficult to estimate – will wash up along the Pacific Coast of North America within the next two to three years, and on the beaches of Hawaii after that, as the clockwise rotation of the Pacific Gyre carries it back toward Japan.
Predicted course and progress of debris from the tsunami. The red lines indicate the projected direction and range of drift by the one-year mark; the orange lines, by the second year; yellow, year three; light blue, four years; and violet, five. (Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website, “Japan Tsunami Debris: Information and FAQs,” http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/japanfaqs.html)
In fact, some of the most buoyant items, such as the large plastic floats used in oyster cultivation to mark the location of underwater beds, apparently have already been discovered on beaches in northern Washington State and British Columbia, arriving well ahead of schedule. The Peninsula Daily News (covering Washington’s Olympic Peninsula) covers the story, along with news on the work of oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Jim Ingraham, who are researching the problem and have called for the public’s assistance in recovering debris and returning personal effects and whatever human remains may come ashore in the flotsam (including the gruesome possibility that the feet of tsunami victims washed out to sea might make the trans-ocean voyage in buoyant shoes after the rest of the body has become separated due to decomposition) to their owners or next of kin in Japan. (Arwyn Rice, “First debris from Japanese earthquake/tsunami reaches Olympic Peninsula,” December 14, 2011. http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/article/20111215/news/312159994)
American mainstream media began to pay attention to this story in late October (despite the fact that the debris had been floating towards the US for months by that point). Here’s how ABC’s Good Morning America covered the story on October 25, 2011.
Of course, when you don’t take the time to carefully present a story – offering instead a “snapshot” to grab viewers’ attention – you run the risk of conveying misinformation, either inadvertently or intentionally. This clip is a case in point. For one thing, Fukushima was not “ground zero” for either the earthquake or tsunami; the epicenter of the quake was much closer to the coast of Miyagi Prefecture than Fukushima, and although the tsunami did indeed hit the coast of Fukushima, the highest waves were recorded in Iwate, even farther north than Miyagi. The use of “ground zero” here may have been a deliberate attempt to draw connections in viewers’ mind to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi – a point I will return to shortly. Another even more significant problem with the information presented in this news segment is the provocative title – “Target: West Coast – 20 Tons[sic] of Tsunami Debris” – as well as the following line: “Houses, boats, cars, and entire neighborhoods pulled out to sea – the dramatic images seen in March when a devastating tsunami hit Japan. And now, all of that debris is on a direct collision course with the Pacific coast of the US.”
“All of it”? All 20 millions tons? First of all, this ignores the portion of that estimated 20 million tons that was too heavy to float very far, and ended up at the bottom of Japanese waters. Even if we choose to overlook that point for argument’s sake, however, a complete debris onslaught “targeting” the West Coast of the US is not what the models produced by the NOAA or the forecasts of experts like Ebbesmeyer predict. While debris from the tsunami will certainly arrive on beaches along the West Coast and in Hawaii, there’s no telling how much of the total it will be. More than likely, the greater portion of it will get caught in the already enormous “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” that lies in the vortex created by the Pacific Gyre. As the debris moves across the ocean, it will also become more dispersed, with exposure and rough conditions breaking up less durable pieces of debris. Much of it will sink en route, as well. Indeed, a recent report from the NOAA (dated December 16, 2011) notes that large debris fields are no longer visible in satellite images scans of the North Pacific, and ships passing through the area report very few sighting of large clumps of debris. (“Tracking Marine Debris from the Japanese Tsunami” NOAA website. http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/news/features/dec11/japan-tsunami-debris.html)
None of this is intended to suggest that the debris from the tsunami does not pose a problem. Its environmental impact on the Pacific Ocean and the flora and fauna of the reefs that lie underneath, though difficult to measure, will most likely be considerable and long-term. Marine animals living at any depth will be negatively impacted by it, as will the coastal habitats it washes into. That said, it is also unclear how much more stress this will add to these oceanic and coastal environments than is already placed upon them by the enormous volumes of trash and toxic substances that all countries on the Pacific Rim dump into the sea on a regular basis.
Of course, the internet trolls will have their say. Case in point: a comment left at bottom of the Peninsula Daily News article, linked above, from a reader responding to a Japanese reader apologizing for the debris and any radioactive contamination it may contain, and an American reader who expressed commiseration:
“how about some empathy for the generations of kids who will be suffering and dying from radiation poisoning ? How about some empathy for the millions of Parents who will be watching their kids die in us[sic] from jap radiation ? How stupid is it to build nuclear plants on the coast and on earthquake faults ? You people got exactly what you deserve….. Back to you regularly scheduled programming……”
In a small victory for civility on the net, the very next comment takes the writer of this one to task for being both alarmist and callous.
At this point, however, very few comments on internet stories of the debris accuse the Japanese of posing this danger – albeit inadvertently – to the health and welfare of Americans due to the debris. Instead, one finds the occasional troll making wisecracks about Godzilla coming ashore in the debris, or going down to the beach to pick up the latest Sony or Panasonic flat screen TV. There are also those who question who will take responsibility for this, and what Japan is doing to clean up its mess. It is a fair question, perhaps, but ignores the fact that the people of all countries bordering on the Pacific dump massive amounts of refuse into the Pacific on a regular basis, yet few people ever pause to think about it, much less ask who will take responsibility for removing it.
The majority of the comments you’ll find on this story anywhere, however, express concern over the possibility that this debris may be radioactive. In light of the international aspect involved, and the willingness of some on the net in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami to cry “payback,” I find it quite surprising that more of these comments aren’t like the one quoted above, with its condemnation of the Japanese for contaminating our beaches and killing our children. Why this is so may be because – up to this point, at least – the internet readers who have paid the most attention to this story tend to be people with a fairly strong environmental consciousness, who are also likely to be more left-leaning than right- in regard to domestic and international politics.
Even so, devoid of such open nationalistic animosity as they may be, many of these comments hit similar notes of concern, sometimes bordering on hysteria. The reason for concern is understandable, of course, especially given how little we know at this point about how radioactive contamination spreads in a situation like this. Some people may be simply equating anything related to the March tsunami with the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi, as the Good Morning, America clip above seems to suggest. This kneejerk equation of the meltdown with the separate event that triggered it aside, however, we do know that the radioactive plume which the reactors spewed into the atmosphere in the wake of the hydrogen explosions and subsequent containment vessel venting drifted over the Pacific Oceans as well as over much of the eastern half of the island of Honshu. Rain that fell through this plume would have created localized “hot spots” in the ocean, however temporarily, just as it did on land, and could conceivably have landed on floating debris.
Satellite image of the radioactive plume released from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (located along the coast of Honshu, under the red tip of one of the plume’s tendrils), taken at 11am, March 15, 2011. An animated representation of the drift of the plume between March 12 and March 17, compiled by the Viennese Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics can be found on the March 18th post on Edward Vielmetti’s blog Vacuum, here: http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2011/03/fukushima-fallout-plume-animation.html)
We also know that at least 3 million gallons of highly radioactive water used for emergency cooling of the reactors was subsequently released back into the ocean, where it joined some of the same ocean currents that were already carrying debris from the earlier tsunami eastward. TEPCO first became aware leakage of radioactive seawater through an eight inch wide crack in the concrete barrier between a flooded maintenance trench of reactor unit 2 and the sea on April 2, and began pumping contaminated water from overflowing storage tanks into the ocean two days later. (See the incredibly well-documented timeline of the Fukushima disaster on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster)
Simulation of contaminated water dispersion in the Pacific between March and August 2011, by ASR Ltd., a coastal and marine environmental consulting firm.
This is all certainly cause for concern, as I said, but it also raises questions that need to be considered rationally and in light of the data and developing scientific understanding of radiation pollution. Is there any reason to assume that the debris is any more radioactive than the ocean water that the currents will eventually carry to the West Coast? Even if “hot spots” formed on top of some of the debris, how do we know that radioactive particles would adhere to the waterlogged debris in amount substantial enough to represent a health threat to the West Coast, especially when high-side readings taken from the immediate vicinity of the plant back in May were in the range of 130-135 microSieverts per hour? While 130-135 microSieverts is certainly not insignificant, it is much higher than the levels observed in other “hot spots” discovered on land since (and thus presumably higher that any that formed over the debris by rain falling on it through the plume). Furthermore, levels detected on land have continued to decline since then: readings from several towns and cities within a 60km radius of Fukushima Daiichi taken in December and January tend to fall within a range of 0.265 to 0.9 microSieverts/hour. Even if radioactive isotopes did adhere to some of the debris for the voyage, there is no reason to expect that it would register significantly higher levels than these land-based readings. (Source: Yahoo!Japan’s radiation map [http://radiation.yahoo.co.jp/], complied from data supplied by the grassroots radiation mapping organization “Safecast” [http://blog.safecast.org/]).
Since according to IAEA standards the maximum acceptable dose a person (aside from those working in nuclear power plants) should be exposed to from any facility is 1 milliSievert per year (1,000 times larger than a microSievert), and the average background radiation that someone in America is exposed to in a year is 3 milliSieverts (or 0.34 microSieverts per hour), it is difficult to see how the amount of additional radiation that this debris might introduce into the coastal environment would result in greatly augmented levels of exposure. (See Wikipedia’s source page on the Sievert for a full explanation of what it is, how it’s measured, and what the acceptable threshold and commonly observed background levels are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert)
I do not mean to imply by this that “everything is going to be just fine,” or that there is no reason to monitor whatever debris comes ashore carefully and dispose of any material that reveals even trace amounts of radiation in such a way as to minimize its environmental impact. If large amounts of debris begin to wash up on West Coast beaches, any clean-up efforts mounted by state or local authorities will have to take this into account and institute measures to inform the public of observed radiation levels as well as arranging for its safe disposal. This should be done in tandem with Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s suggestion to identify any personal effects or human remains that are found among the debris and attempt to return them to their owners or next of kin in Japan. Yes, it may become an inconvenience, even a headache at times, for those tasked with the job and those who live and work along the coast. But it probably won’t be the end of civilization as we know it.
But you wouldn’t know that by reading some of the reader comments posted to stories about the debris on the net. Below are just a couple of examples. These are alarmist, to say the least, but still fairly representative of other readers’ posts:
“It will be widespread news within a few months. There are thousands of civilians with Geiger counters that will confirm the debris is radioactive, unless the military closes the coastlines. Proof either way. This will kill off tourism, regardless of what the MSM says. Then people will start to question how this affects the local food supply. No one will be able to stop the food conversation. In a year and a half, tops, no one will want any agricultural products from California. No one will want Napa wines. Complete economic devastation of the 8-9th largest economy in the world. Housing prices will plummet. Anyone with any money (if there’re any left) will move east. Midwesterners will point their Geiger counters at the incoming Californians. If radioactive, they won’t be very welcoming. Expect severe civil strife. Then the waves of cancers will hit. The medical community will only be able to treat a fraction of these cancer cases, if at all. We’re only a few months behind Japan on that timetable. Straight off the charts. Then folks will look at jetstream maps and realize they’re in the path, too, regardless of where they’re at in the Northern Hemisphere. There’s nothing to do, really, except drag your radioactive butt around the planet. We’ve all been exposed, it’s just a short matter of time. The only good news is, they breathed it, too, and underground bunkers can’t filter out all this radioactive air. Their kids are just as screwed as ours. They won’t be around to continue the family looting.”
“The real threat is that all the debris is potentially contaminated with radio-nuclides. The levels of contamination could even be potentially deadly. The problem is the reactor 3 sfp had been ejected into the atmosphere where the main proportions of fallout moved up and east Into the pacific ocean. The main masses of nuclear fuel, cement, and dust particles;[sic] that were ejected during the Reactor 3 hydro-nuclear explosion were distributed into the pacific drift current system in a small particulate form. These particulates numbering in the trillions are equal to trillions of potential overdoses of radiation to the human body. (That is not an understatement), There was a potential for several apocalypses, released from the reactor 3 spent fuel pool alone… One thing to consider when reviewing these reports, is that small masses have yet to be reported… As, Larger objects in the debris field, have already been reported on the United States mainland. The particulate that I am speaking of is the radiation its self[sic]. It is a small mass, that weighs less than salt water. The weight ratio suggests that the substance is buoyant. So what we are looking at is a preposterous amount of radionuclides, (amounting to several full-on human apocalypses);[sic] Moving in a vast concentrated pool of debris; Steadily, inching its way to the United States and Canadian west coastlines… My main concern is that the debris field its self is highly contaminated. Further more[sic], rain and storm systems on the US, and Canadian coast lines, are created through evaporation of the coastal waters. So each and every pacific rain out;[sic] is a proportion of that very same surface water, interacting with the cloud layer, to only again become fallout on United States citizens. This is a very real threat to all united states citizens, who live near coastal communities.”
(Taken from among the seemingly unending thread of comments in response to “Paper: First Japan debris hits US, Canada — People warned about radiation — Recommended for Police to have Geiger counters — “Bodies will likely begin washing up in about a year,” ENENEWS, December 15, 2011. http://enenews.com/paper-first-japan-debris-hits-canada-people-warned-about-radiation-police-told-geiger-counters-parts-bodies-will-begin-washing-about-year)
One thing that can be said for the writers of these comments – at least they didn’t stoop to the same kind of racist finger pointing that the writer of the previously quoted “jap radiation” comment did. I’m also inclined to sympathize with these views, in so far as I too have serious doubts about the safety of nuclear power, especially when a disaster like Fukushima Daiichi shows just how unreliable industry assurances of it are. That said, though, comments like these take us into the realm of paranoid conspiracy theories. Several posters on the same thread suggest that the reason the mainstream media has not reported on how bad this radioactive threat really is (i.e., how bad they have convinced themselves it must be) is because the authorities – indeed all governments – are lying to us in order to prevent wholesale panic, uprisings, etc., etc. If you by this line of reasoning, then you have a ready made counter-argument against any data or evidence that does not support it: it’s just industry or government propaganda. At the same time, though, outlandish claims like “These particulates numbering in the trillions are equal to trillions of potential overdoses of radiation to the human body” are proposed without any evidence to back them up, as if these were established scientific facts. Indeed dear poster, whoever you are, your claim certainly does not qualify as an “understatement,” by any means.
The crux of the problem, however, lies precisely in the fact that we really don’t know what radiation does to the human body at low dosage rates over the long term. This is essentially the same problem that motivated some of the fair citizens of Kyoto to raise the alarm over the use of logs from trees knocked down by the tsunami for the bonfires in Kyoto’s annual “Gozan no Okuribi” festival, which I wrote about in the “Reverberations (part 2)” post. And because this is uncharted territory as of yet, anything that seems to suggest a correlation between the radiation from Fukushima and heightened incidents of disease and/or death is as likely as not to be interpreted as a causal linkage between the two. Take this story, for example, from the site Reader Supported News, posted on December 20, 2011: “Study: US Deaths Tied to Fukushima Disaster Fallout” (http://www.readersupportednews.org/news-section2/312-16/9004-study-us-deaths-tied-to-fukushima-disaster-fallout). The study in question actually only notes that 14,000 more deaths than normal were recorded in the United States in the 14 week period following the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns, and draws a parallel between this figure and the 16,500 deaths above the normal rate that were observed during the 17 weeks after Chernobyl (the story does not specify where). No actual mechanism to link this observed increase with radiation that was released into the atmosphere is mentioned.
Reader Supported News reports from a strong leftist perspective – something I don’t usually have a big problem with. As I said above, I also have no problem with people who express grave doubts about the safety of nuclear power and concerns about the threat that radioactive contamination poses to the environment and humanity as a whole. I can’t help feeling a sense of foreboding, though, for where this kind of journalistic coverage of the “fallout” from the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, and the reader reactions it produces, may eventually lead. Most of the comments I’ve come across at least seem to take this as “our” crisis, meaning a catastrophe that humans in general brought upon themselves by building nuclear power plants – anywhere – in the first place (check out the comments on the RSN article for plenty of examples of this kind of viewpoint). At what point does the sense of crisis and impending doom urge people to look for a scapegoat, though? In the wake of Fukushima Daiichi, Japan already seems to be saddled with a new stereotype in the minds of many Americans (perhaps not so new, in light of Hiroshima and Nagasaki): “radioactive Japan.” It doesn’t take a huge mental leap to see how this image, coupled with a heightened sense of fear of the unseen, uncertain threat of radiation wafting and washing across the Pacific, might reenergize some truly ugly anti-Japanese sentiment in the US – a public outcry over “jap radiation.”
Time and tide will tell.