Executive Omission

Displacement, ignorance and denial are what the government of Japan is doing to victims of the great earthquake and the accident in the First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. It is necessary for people to recognize that reconstruction process has to be built from the viewpoint of human rights.

There still are 310 thousand people who moved from their home due to destruction by quake or tsunami and to contamination by radioactive materials emitted from exploded nuclear plants. For 160 thousand of them escaped from Fukushima region, the most crucial thing for them to decide they can go back to their hometown is whether decontamination of the land will be successful. Although the government of Japan is leading a project of the decontamination, there still is no concrete plan for FY2014 or later. That is why the number of displaced people is not reduced.

The government proposed an idea to build “temporary town,” where sufferers can live until long-term reconstruction policy would be determined. However, it cannot determine where the town should be built. One candidate is Iwaki city, located in southeast region of Fukushima prefecture. While a lot of residents in Iwaki are frustrated with that displacement policy, victim families started moving to the city before the details of the policy were not clarified. Emotional collision between old residents and new residents began to appear now.

In the law of Relief for Children and Victims of Nuclear Accident legislated last year, the government has to prescribe “basic plan” as the package of the relief policies. After about a year from the legislation, there still is no basic plan. Although the government argues that it is difficult for them to determine the area the law should be adopted, the truth is simply that they are reluctant to throw more resource into unmanageable policy. But, it is a crime of executive omission for the government not to fulfill a requirement of a low. It needs to stop ignoring the hard situation of displaced people.

On the other hand, the government is reluctant to adopt new idea to reconstruction policy. An entrepreneur in Minami-soma city found that hydrogen peroxide is effective in removing radioactive materials from exterior of houses, and that chaff of rice effectively collects cesium in water. But the government would not adopt that technology in decontamination effort. The workers keep on wiping roofs and walls without water not to produce contaminated water, and using less effective ze-olite to collect cesium.

The reason why the government stays on their rigidity is unclear. But it is clear that the people in the government are not enthusiastic about helping suffered people.