"Uncanny Terrain," a documentary about organic farmers facing Japan's nuclear crisis

"Uncanny Terrain" is a documentary in progress, about organic farmers facing Japan's nuclear catastrophe. A Chicago-based, Japanese American film making team will spend up to a year in the radioactively contaminated regions of northeast Japan downwind of the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which is still releasing radioactive steam onto the winds nearly five months after the radioactive catastrophe began. Fukushima and neighboring prefectures are famous for their small, family-run, independent organic farms. Husband and wife team Junko Kajino and Ed M. Koziarski have already captured powerful video testimonies, and are requesting monetary donations to enable them to continue their work.

Japan’s Food Chain Threat Multiplies as Radiation Spreads

"Radiation fallout from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant poses a growing threat to Japan’s food chain as unsafe levels of cesium found in beef on supermarket shelves were also detected in more vegetables and the ocean." Bloomberg

French customs officials seize radioactive Japanese tea at border

The Voice of Russia reports that the first radioactive foodstuffs from Japan -- tea, exceeding "permissible" standards two-fold -- to be detected by French customs officials has been seized at the border and will be "destroyed" (radioactivity cannot be "destroyed" -- it will likely be dumped somewhere). The radioactively contaminated tea is reportedly from Shizuoka Prefecture, around 100 miles southwest of Tokyo, which is itself 150 miles southwest of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. This shows that the nuclear catastrophe's hazardous radioactive fallout has travelled far from the three melted down reactor cores and boiling high-level radioactive waste storage pools.

Radioactive contamination of beef in Japan worsens

In the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe, Fukushima farmers claim that the Japanese federal and prefecture governments gave no warning or advice about how they should prevent radioactivity from contaminating their cattle, as through exposed feed. As a result, many cattle contaminated above regulatory limits have been marketed to grocery stores and restaurants.

On July 19, the Japanese federal government issued a ban on beef exports from Fukushima prefecture in an effort to stem the flow of contaminated cattle, many of which were fed contaminated rice hay in the wake of a food shortage after the disaster. Some hay measured radioactive cesium contamination at 690,000 becquerels per kilogram, while Japan’s “permissible” level is set at 300 becquerels/kg. Originally reported as 500, the number of contaminated cattle has now increased to over 1,200. Contaminated beef may have been shipped to 45 of the 47 prefectures in Japan.

Other foods, including spinach, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, tea, milk, plums and fish have also been found to be contaminated with cesium and iodine, some as far as 360 kilometers (225 miles) from the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi atomic reactors.

One Fukushima farmer referred to his ghost town -- that should have been a bustling farming community, but evacuated due to high levels of radioactive fallout – in terms of a “silent spring.” Rachel Carson used that very phrase as the title of her 1962 book, warning about the hazards of pesticides and radioactivity, which helped launch the environmental movement.

These stories show how difficult it is to monitor and control radioactive contamination in modern farming and food distribution systems and therefore, how difficult it is to keep people, especially children, safe from internal doses of radiation due to ingestion.  Since no dose of radiation is safe, it is advisable to not contaminate our environment in the first place.

Help protect the children of Fukushima from radioactivity by signing Green Action Japan’s petition, and help prevent a Fukushima in the U.S. by signing Beyond Nuclear’s petition to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission calling for an immediate shut down of the 23 particularly dangerous General Electric Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactors operating in this country.

"Fukushima is Worse than Chernobyl -- on Global Contamination'

In an interview with the Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus, Dr. Chris Busby of the European Committee on Radiation Risk challenges the International Commission on Radiological Protection's radiation dose methodologies, and predicts around 200,000 cancers will result over the next half century in populations within 200 km (124 miles) of the catastrophically leaking Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.