1954 - The whole of Japan affected by radiation

February 4, 2013

Fukushima disaster renews interest in documentary on 1954 incident

A poster for the documentary film titled "Hoshasen o abita X nengo" (X years after exposure to radiation).

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20130204p2a00m0na014000c.html

The ill-fated Daigo Fukuryu Maru was not the only Japanese fishing boat to be exposed to nuclear fallout from U.S. hydrogen bomb testing on Bikini Atoll in 1954, says a Japanese television program that was recently converted into a documentary film.

A television program by a Japanese broadcasting network in 2004, which has now resurfaced as a documentary film titled "Hoshasen o abita X nengo" (X years after exposure to radiation), says that some 1,000 Japanese fishing vessels were in surrounding waters at the time. One-third of these belonged to fisheries cooperatives in Kochi Prefecture.

A total of six H-bomb tests were conducted by the United States on Bikini Atoll between March and May of 1954. The well-known Shizuoka Prefecture-based tuna fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru was some 160 kilometers east of the site of a blast that took place on March 1. The death of the ship's chief radioman, Aikichi Kuboyama, several months later due to acute radiation syndrome sparked a worldwide movement against A- and H-bombs.

Released in September last year, "Hoshasen" is an 83-minute documentary film that tracks down former tuna fishermen from Kochi. In one scene, a widower of a former deckhand who died in 1999 at the age of 74 looks back on the cremation of her husband, saying, "Only the bones of my husband were in bits."

One-third of the 241 seamen who were identified had died before reaching their 50s or 60s, and those still living suffered from illness. Many had cancer, and more than a few showed symptoms believed to be caused by radiation.

The Japanese government, however, settled the issue with the U.S. government in January 1955 with the receipt of 2 million dollars in compensation, without having investigated the health problems experienced by seamen who had been on ships other than the Daigo Fukuryu Maru. U.S. government records show that the whole of Japan was covered in radioactive materials that year, levels of which the U.S. had measured. The film succeeds in revealing numerous such facts in a controlled tone.

The television documentary series on which "Hoshasen" was based was produced by Hideaki Ito, a director at Nankai Broadcasting Co. in Ehime Prefecture who learned about the activities of former high school teacher Masatoshi Yamashita through the Internet.

In 1985, Yamashita began to research fishing ships that had been exposed to radiation with local high school students in a seminar he held on local history. As former seamen who had been reluctant to speak about their experiences opened up to the students, the truth gradually came out.

Shocked with the information Yamashita had gathered, Ito produced the program "Washi mo shi no umi ni otta" (I, too, was in the sea of death). In 2004, it was aired nationwide on Nippon Television Network Corp.'s documentary program, NNN Document, and won the grand prize at the Age of Regionalism Video Festival. Though sequels were aired locally, there was little response from viewers. It was just when Ito was considering aborting the project that the disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant broke out. The program was rebroadcast on NNN Document in January 2012, and became widely discussed on the Internet.

Reaffirming his commitment to the project, Ito successfully appealed to his superiors at Nankai Broadcasting and his contacts at Nippon Television for support in making the program into a film.

"I believe that shedding light on what happened half a century ago will help minimize the harm done to the people of Fukushima," Ito says.

The film's distributor, Ukky Productions, says independent and cinema screenings at some 30 locations are planned through this summer, and that they are looking for more parties to host screenings.

Ukky Productions can be contacted by phone on: 03-5213-4933 (Japanese language only)