助けて！イノシラだぞ！

皆さんは福島が放射性イノシシによって破壊されているニュースを聞いたことがあります。いいえそうではありません。イノシシは、彼らが照射されることになる '、放射性」ではありません。二つの言葉の違いは、彼らは非常に異なる現象を説明し、単なる衒学ではありません。私は3月11日の5周年記念のための私の最後の回想の記事でこのことについて話しました。放射性物質が不安定と周りのそれ自身の粒子を投げることを意味します。放射線照射は、生物や物体が放射性物質を吸収した、および潜在的に有毒になることを意味します。自然と今までに大きく注釈のない行っている3月11日の可能な長期的結果のいくつかについて非常に現実的、非常に重要な話が人騒がせな見出しの下にある埋葬されました。本当に排気し、まだ人間を欠いているし、福島の一部で野生を実行している動物があります。日本は常に大きなイノシシの人口があったので、彼らは福島排除ゾーン内数で上げることは驚くことではありません。

人間は去るたびに、自然が引き継ぎます。ウクライナでは、我々はすでに自然の買収にチェルノブイリの除外ゾーンを見てきました。動物は戻って来て、植物はすべてをおいしげます。私は、任意のあった場合チェルノブイリ立入禁止区域に戻って移動元住民のいずれかの話は、なくなっていると思います。時々私は、人々は、国立公園に除外を有効にするとよいでしょう言うのを聞きます。私はウクライナに行ったことがないが、私はチェルノブイリ周辺の写真や映画を見てきましたし、それは非常に不気味です。私の部分については、私はほとんど面積はわずか30年前に放棄されたと考えていることはできません。今、同じプロセスは、福島県で発生され、それは潜在的な問題です。まだ日本に散在除外ゾーンからの難民が戻ってしたいと思います。しかし、彼らは戻って行くことができますか？これは、バックイノシシに戻ります。イノシシは日和見主義者です。彼らは、ちょうど国内の豚のように、ほとんど何でも食べるようになることができます。イノシシは、本州では非常に、非常に稀であり、時折、黒クマを除き、無捕食者で、除外に安全に繁殖することができます。

Run For Your Lives! IT'S BOARZILLA!

You may have heard the news that Fukushima is being ravaged by radioactive wild boars.  No, it is not.  The boars are not ‘radioactive,’ they would be irradiated.  The difference between the two words is not mere pedantry, they describe very different phenomena.  I talked about this in my last reminiscence post for the fifth anniversary of 3/11.  Radioactive means the material is unstable and throwing it’s own particles around.  Irradiated means the organism or object has absorbed radioactive material, and could potentially become toxic.  Buried under the alarmist headlines is a very real, very important story about nature and some of the possible long term consequences of 3/11 that have gone largely unremarked on until now.  There really are animals running wild in the parts of Fukushima that were evacuated and are still devoid of humans.  Japan has always had a large wild boar population, so it is no surprise that they turn up in numbers inside the Fukushima exclusion zone. 

The Magic of The Atom

So, I’ve been seeing this around the interweb’s various social media lately:

        Now, I have no knowledge of the identities of the two posters, just-shower-thoughts and mallemerok.  I don’t know if they are Americans or not.  I don’t care.  Even if they were just having fun, the internet is taking them at face value.  And that’s where I come in.  I know I’m nerd-raging, but this is the sort of thing I started this blog to talk about.  The first poster is wrong.  You can find nuclear-spawned heroes and monsters in both American and Japanese popular culture.  The second poster is also wrong, because the narratives you get in our two countries are more the same than anything else.  The tumblr posters think the difference in the narratives is the outcome, but the heart of both narratives is that nuclear radiation is a source of power that is in effect, magic.  I do know that mallemerok is talking about the atomic bomb, and that event casts a long shadow over the Japanese imagination.  If I do not mention it, someone will think I need it pointed out.

When we think of nuclear spawned monsters we think of Godzilla and The Hulk, the Beast From Twenty Thousand Fathoms, and just about any movie featuring a giant version of an ordinary animal.  Amongst the heroes, Spider-man and the Hulk are the most famous and enjoy a large following in Japan.   But Japan’s Astro Boy also gets his powers from nuclear fuel and the lesser known Inazuman owes his powers to a radiation-triggered mutation.   The common connection between the stories about Spider-man and Godzilla is that nuclear radiation created them, but both characters go against the laws of physics.  Well, to say the likes of Spider-man and Godzilla break the laws of physics is to under-sell it.  There really is no science whatsoever in these stories.  They are so far from reality almost no one even bothers to go through the bad science of comic books and Japanese tokusatsu.  

What you have in these stories is: a) nuclear science is a source of power, b) so it confers power on other beings.  Well, a) is true.  Conferring power on another being is something that magic does.  In other words, popular culture treats nuclear science like a classic superstition.  With the right invocation, the atom gives its gifts.  Spider-man does not know the right invocation, but he could reproduce the accident that gave him his powers if he experimented.  Astro Boy’s creator Dr. Tenma did know the right invocation.  So did Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi.

3/11 Three Years On Part 3: In Which I Write about Radiation

            I said in “3/11 Three Years On Part 1” that I would not write about radiation because enough people had written about it, and I would rather write about other effects of the earthquake that I happen to feel personally about.  Well, that was before I read anyone else’s thoughts on the anniversary of the Triple Disasters and changed my mind.  I know that the nuclear disaster has overshadows the others, and I have understood this since March 2011.  Hell, that is the reason I initially decided not to write about Fukushima.  But ye gods.  From some of the chatter, and you all know if this applies to you or not, one would think the nuclear disaster was the only significant consequence of the earthquake.  I believe the nuclear disaster is the most significant consequence, so I do understand all the attention it gets.  Or rather, I would be able to if it were not for the sheer ignorance that permeates so much of what has been written about Fukushima.

3/11 Three Years on Part 2: What Happened to Me

 

Day 1 Friday March 11, 2011

            It was graduation day.  After the ceremony the students had gone home early so only we teachers were left at school and another teacher and I were talking to each other about the faculty party scheduled for that night when the shaking started.  I instinctively took shelter in the doorway out of the teachers room.  For the past year my rule had been that if the shaking did not knock anything down, I would not worry.  The first tremor knocked everything over, including me.  After the shaking ended I could not move for a minute.  The lights went off.  The shaking stopped and the office was a mess but the building appeared to be undamaged.  The principal came out of his office and began to direct everything.  I went back to my desk to sort things out when the next tremor struck and one of the Japanese teachers told me all had to leave the building so we ran out onto the baseball field.  It was snowing and I hadn’t tried to get my coat.  The shaking continued.  Some of the teachers got out their cell phones and turned on a web browser or television in order to get the news and we heard about the tsunami.  The teachers kept using a word I had never heard before but could understand that translates to “great tsunami.”

3/11 Three Years On Part 1

            I was in Northern Japan on 3/11/11, the day of the Great Northeast Japan Earthquake.  It has gotten easier for me to talk about it since then, because I have told the story so many times, and have been able to come to terms with my experiences, and with the consequences of the earthquake that I did not experience firsthand.  I do not intend to write about radiation and nuclear energy specifically, because enough people continue to write about that topic, and they do not wait for the anniversary to do so.  I will use my soapbox to write about the rest of Tohoku, where is lived and worked for a year, and came to appreciate and love.  I will tell you about Tohoku, because this is the story of the earthquake that is neglected these days.