This article reproduces “Fukushima Became Neither Hiroshima nor Chernobyl,” an essay by Jun Takada, then a professor of radiation protection at Sapporo Medical University, published on the Radiation Protection Information Center website on February 27, 2013. It records Takada’s arguments concerning radiation fear after the Fukushima Daiichi accident, power shortages caused by the suspension of nuclear power generation, reputational damage to Tohoku’s agricultural and fishery products and Japan’s high-tech industries, the responsibility of the Naoto Kan administration and the media, China’s nuclear tests, and Japan’s postwar anti-nuclear movement.

Fukushima Became Neither Hiroshima nor Chernobyl
Jun Takada
Professor of Radiation Protection, Sapporo Medical University
Comments Following the Award
Since my first field investigation in Fukushima in early April, when it began to become clear that not a single person had died from nuclear radiation and that the doses were too low to cause future health damage, my humanitarian colleagues and I, as scientists conducting radiation-dose examinations of residents, have visited Fukushima repeatedly to encourage its people.
Japan fell into a state of mass hysteria under the influence of media reports in which pseudo-experts stirred up fear of radiation. The resulting shutdown of nuclear power generation caused electricity shortages, while Tohoku’s agricultural and fishery products and Japan’s high-tech industries suffered reputational damage.
I believe that this essay’s receipt of the Toshio Motoya Award will become a powerful force for communicating the truth about this fictitious radiation disaster both within Japan and abroad, and for opening a path toward Fukushima’s reconstruction.
I am extremely pleased. Thank you very much.
Naoto Kan kindled the fire of nuclear “danger,” left-wing liberals and opportunistic academics helped him, and a portion of the media—though a large one—fanned the flames, leaving Fukushima Prefecture psychologically subjected to the flames and turning Japan into a nation gripped by radiation hysteria.
Even five months after the earthquake disaster, newspapers continued to inflame anxiety with the meaningless figure that the amount of cesium in Fukushima was 168 times that of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. Yet not a single person died from cesium in 1945.
The radiation dose from a nuclide with a long half-life of thirty years is negligibly small.
Because radioactivity is inversely proportional to half-life, radiation from nuclei with short half-lives measured in seconds or minutes was dangerous.
If newspapers simply accept the statements of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, whose officials do not even understand these elementary facts about nuclear-explosion disasters, their level must be described as low.
In modern history, as symbolized by the controversy surrounding Hiroshima’s monument inscription, national policy has repeatedly been swayed by a “peace movement” that has diverted the eyes of the Japanese people from nuclear realities and deceived them.※1
The same thing has happened in the Fukushima nuclear event.
In other words, forces have worked to stir up anxiety over a radiation problem that would cause no one any health damage, thereby pushing Japan and the world in a negative direction.
Sixty-five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a country that stands at the forefront of nuclear-radiation technology in energy and medicine is now about to become an object of ridicule throughout the world.
Germany and Italy, where nothing had happened, surrendered first, just as they did during the Second World War.
People of Japan, awaken and confront this national crisis with strong hearts!
No one in Fukushima has died from radiation or radioactivity.
For reconstruction, the country must respond correctly on the basis of radiation-protection science.
The nuclear power plants stopped by Kan must be restarted promptly so that the foundation of the nation’s energy supply can first be restored.
That is the position taken by responsible nations, including France, gathered within the IAEA.
After that, implement short-, medium- and long-term measures against major tsunamis.
Now is the ideal opportunity to develop the world’s safest nuclear-energy technology.
After a crisis, an opportunity will always come. If we give up, only defeat remains. The people of the Heisei era will not be defeated.
While demonstrating what the author regards as the falsehoods of the postwar anti-nuclear peace movement, this essay presents what he considers the truth of Fukushima—that it was a low-dose event that would cause no health damage—and sets out a path toward reconstruction.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan Ran Out of Control
At Chernobyl in the Ukrainian Republic of the Soviet Union on April 26, 1986, the nuclear reaction inside the reactor ran out of control and exploded. As a result, plant employees, firefighters and others suffered acute radiation injuries, and thirty people died shortly afterward.
By contrast, at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on March 11, 2011, the nuclear-fission chain reaction was automatically shut down before the S-waves from the enormous magnitude-9.0 earthquake arrived. The reactor therefore did not run out of control.
Consequently, no employee suffered acute radiation injury, and no one died from that cause.
The only thing in Japan that ran out of control was Naoto Kan, who engaged in political recklessness in order to cling to his position as prime minister.
A prime minister incapable of making effective use of the bureaucracy was, predictably, unable to make effective use of Japan’s radiation-protection capabilities or its emergency radiation-medicine system.
Moreover, through amateur judgments, he caused suffering among the people of Fukushima Prefecture, heightened public anxiety and spread subjects that produced reputational damage both inside and outside Japan.
The resulting human and economic damage was enormous.
A “prime minister” without the will to defend the country became an amplifier of the earthquake disaster.
Nationwide electricity shortages were one of the consequences.
I am a specialist scientist in radiation-protection studies who has investigated nuclear-disaster areas throughout the world.
While continuing these investigations, I repeatedly asked myself what nuclear energy is, what a nuclear threat is and what becomes of a nuclear disaster area. In doing so, I became aware of many unexpected facts.
Since the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, I have concentrated primarily on research into nuclear protection for the safeguarding of the Japanese people.
Following the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, I also conducted field investigations of the Fukushima nuclear event, beginning in early April and continuing in June, July and August.
I quickly reached the conclusion that the radiation doses were incomparably lower than those in the Chernobyl reactor accident and that even the residents of Fukushima Prefecture would suffer no health damage.※2
This was attributable to the high earthquake resistance of Japan’s light-water reactors, their strong containment vessels and the absence of graphite that could become a cause of fire.
Tokyo Electric Power Company appears to have had inadequate tsunami countermeasures, but Japan’s engineers should certainly be capable of developing protective technology against major tsunamis.
Clues can be obtained by examining the survival of Tohoku Electric Power Company’s Onagawa Nuclear Power Station, which was closer to the earthquake’s epicentre.
Meanwhile, a vast intellectual and psychological disturbance arose in Japan, with the Kan administration as its epicentre.
Japanese society was easily affected by it.
What had the Japanese people studied, despite the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
More than sixty-five years after the war, Japan in the Heisei era still did not understand the nuclear science of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and reacted allergically to radioactivity in Fukushima.
As long as Hiroshima retains a monument inscription filled with a self-condemning view of history, the nation will not recover a sound state of mind.
Japan must face the true threats and implement realistic countermeasures.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people worked toward reconstruction.
In the case of Fukushima, however, people were told that reconstruction was impossible and that they should flee.
The Kan administration, which did nothing positive for the people of Fukushima Prefecture, effectively told them to abandon their home communities and go elsewhere.
In concert with that position, some intellectuals deliberately issued messages designed to heighten public fear.
They were government-favoured academics dependent upon a prime minister who was not trusted by the people.
Both groups had remained silent on national issues such as North Korea’s abductions and the September 7 Senkaku incident, while concealing what the author describes as the unprecedented nuclear-explosion disaster around Loulan on the Silk Road, which he regarded as far exceeding Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This was the disguised anti-nuclear peace movement that rose after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Daigo Fukuryu Maru incident and distorted postwar Japan.
The Sword of Damocles and the Spirit of Patriotism
Neighbouring China has completed its nuclear armament and is capable of launching nuclear missiles toward Japan at any time.
A single one-megaton nuclear weapon could devastate Tokyo and kill 3.5 million people.※3 China has deployed a total operational nuclear capacity of 270 megatons and maintains missile bases in eastern areas, including Jilin Province, directed toward Japan and Taiwan.
Without even discussing this Sword of Damocles suspended above the Japanese archipelago, NHK and newspapers including the Asahi Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun made an enormous commotion from March 12 onward over the low-dose Fukushima nuclear event, in which no one died.
On September 7 of the previous year, a Chinese fishing vessel collided with Japanese vessels in the waters around the Senkaku Islands. The government tried to dismiss it as an accidental contact, but it was in fact a deliberate ramming.
China’s policy of territorial and maritime expansion is that of an imperialist state in the twenty-first century.
For some reason, it was the Japanese government—which was supposed to defend the country—that attempted to conceal this.
In addition to a government that remained silent about the greatest threat, the media’s concealment was a crucial issue.
Newspapers such as the Sankei Shimbun, which did not participate in that concealment, were in the minority.
Beginning with my investigation of the Hiroshima “black rain” during my doctoral studies, I investigated the Chernobyl reactor’s uncontrolled nuclear-fission disaster and the nuclear-explosion disasters in Kazakhstan, Bikini and Loulan.※4
Among these, the world’s worst nuclear disaster was, in my assessment, the area around Loulan on the Silk Road, about which NHK had for many years reported only the romance of ancient history.
China detonated a total yield of twenty-two megatons, equivalent to 1,375 Hiroshima bombs, killing Uyghurs, including soldiers.※5
The total amount of radioactivity dispersed into the environment by ground-level nuclear explosions was, according to the author, eight million times that of Chernobyl.
At least 190,000 people died by a conservative estimate, while leaked confidential documents allegedly indicated that 750,000 people were killed.
A city on the Kazakh border north of the Tian Shan Mountains was one thousand kilometres from the explosion sites, yet on at least two occasions received doses exceeding one hundred millisieverts from nuclear dust originating in China.
This was the consistent conclusion of investigations conducted by Kazakhstan and by the author.
China’s nuclear explosions began in October 1964, during the Tokyo Olympics, and continued until 1996.
An estimated 270,000 Japanese people travelled to the Silk Road after being encouraged by major NHK programmes.※6
The damage suffered by those Japanese travellers must have been considerable.
Information has gradually begun to reach the Silk Road Science Project conducted by the author.
From that time onward, NHK became complicit, in the author’s view, in concealing crimes committed by the Chinese state.
He characterized this as a violation of the Broadcast Act.
During this period, nuclear dust also continued to fall on Japan.
Cesium and strontium were carried by the prevailing westerly winds and fell across the Japanese archipelago. Through drinking water and the food chain involving vegetables, milk and rice, the entire population received significant internal radiation exposure in addition to external exposure.
Beginning in 2009, I conducted a three-year study, supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, into internal exposure caused by strontium accumulating in the skeleton.
The effective half-life of cesium accumulated in muscle is one hundred days, whereas the effective half-life of strontium in the skeleton is fifteen years.
Numerous cases of leukaemia occurred among people who absorbed large quantities of strontium along the Techa River in the Soviet Union.
Long-term analyses of bones from autopsies by the National Institute of Radiological Sciences have shown that notable amounts of radioactive strontium accumulated in the skeletons of Japanese people born in the 1960s and of those who were growing adolescents during that period.
Using those radioactivity measurements, I calculated that Japanese people living four thousand kilometres away received internal doses of between one and seven millisieverts.
The False Anti-Nuclear Movement
The backbones of the baby-boom generation, which promoted anti-nuclear and left-wing movements, and the skeletons of people who were then in their forties contained comparatively large amounts of “Made in China” radioactive strontium, causing their bone marrow to be exposed to beta radiation every day.
Nevertheless, I judge that this beta radiation would not cause leukaemia. Doses of several millisieverts do not affect health.
Japan’s status as the country with the world’s longest life expectancy demonstrates that several millisieverts of bone-marrow exposure do not present a problem.
I was born in 1954, the year of the Bikini Daigo Fukuryu Maru incident.
When I was a child, people repeatedly warned us not to get wet in the rain because it would make us bald, but none of my friends became bald.
The captain of the Fukuryu Maru knew the location of the United States nuclear-testing area and nevertheless approached the boundary of the prohibited zone, where the vessel was exposed to nuclear fallout.
It was an extraordinarily dangerous act.
All twenty-eight crew members returned to their home port of Yaizu after suffering beta-radiation burns.
After receiving blood transfusions contaminated with hepatitis viruses, seventeen of them developed liver disorders.
The radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, who had the most serious symptoms, died.
Having investigated the Marshall Islands, where people suffered similar exposure, I know that none of the local victims developed acute hepatitis.※7
There was a falsehood at the origin of Japan’s movements against atomic and hydrogen bombs and its anti-nuclear movement.
There Will Be No Health Damage in Fukushima
Kunihiko Takeda criticized the government for raising the annual exposure limit for disaster-affected residents to twenty millisieverts.
He stated that “childhood cancers began appearing in the fourth year after exposure in the Chernobyl accident.”※8
Although he did not specify it, he was referring to thyroid cancer.
It is a serious problem that his statement gave readers the mistaken impression that such cancers developed at doses as low as those in Fukushima.
At Chernobyl, thyroid doses reached a maximum of fifty sieverts, while many people received several sieverts, and these exposures caused the disease.
In Belarus, the annual incidence among children per 100,000 population was four cases in the fourth year and reached a maximum of thirteen cases in the ninth year before declining.
In Fukushima, the thyroid doses received by residents were between one-thousandth and less than one-ten-thousandth of those at Chernobyl.
Among the sixty-six people whom I examined, the maximum dose was eight millisieverts.
Judging from those doses, the risk of thyroid cancer among the residents of Fukushima Prefecture would be fewer than one case per ten million people per year.
Because Fukushima Prefecture has a population of two million, no one would develop thyroid cancer as a result of these low doses.
Those who frighten Fukushima residents and the Japanese public on the basis of amateur knowledge must stop.
To be continued.