“There is no democracy in Japan”

Such were the last words I heard Jun Hori utter before he left for Japan, having spent a year at UCLA as a visiting scholar.  His quote paints a picture that is reminiscent of the world created by George Orwell’s dystopian classic “Nineteen-Eighty-Four”.  Admittedly, Japan is a far cry from Oceania, the totalitarian regime that conjured the notion of “Big Brother”, but some of the Orwellian factors may indeed be present in today’s society. Jun is a prominent TV personality, working for NHK, Japan’s only public broadcaster.  His easy personality and his 「甘いマスク」(sweet looks) belies a stubborn drive and determination to rectify all that he deems to be wrong with the Japanese society.  The ongoing dilemna that Jun faces is based on the unique position he stands on:  on the one hand, he works for NHK, the largest, most dominant TV presence in the country, but on the other, he is an independent journalist/film maker, driven by his desire to cover stories that NHK refuses to cover.  The juxtaposition of his two sides puts him in constant ire of his employer, NHK, who finally decided to let him go just a few days ago.  Now, Jun is free from the clutches of the media giant that has kept him grounded, like so many others.  His new-found freedom will certainly enable him to pursue his own passion towards an “open” press, one where the people tell the stories.

Jun Hori’s last day at UCLA was spent putting the finishing touches to his movie

Metamorphosis is a movie, a product fueled by the turmoil Jun has felt working for NHK while covering the disaster.  Media in Japan, he says is a “one way” street. “We create the stories based on provided templates, and discard those that don’t fit”.  The results, he says, are carefully  calibrated stories that reflects the desired views of the government, and not the people.  During the tenuous days that followed the 3.11 disasters, the numerous explosions at Fukushima’s Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant prompted the Government, and TEPCO to make questionable decisions during intensely high pressure situations.  Many of these decisions involved the public’s safety, and many of these discussions were withheld from the very public it was trying to keep safe.

Metamorphosis dives straight into this conundrum, as if to ask the question:  What really happened?  Not only does it do so by touching upon the people’s fury and frustration over the government and TEPCO’s many missteps along the way, but it goes further, by exploring nuclear catastrophies through a historical lens.  This is done by Jun himself journeying across the globe to the United States, and visiting sites of nuclear significance:  Three Mile Island (1979) and the lesser known Santa Suzanna (1959).  There he interviewed local residents and joined them in their on-going town hall meetings between community members and nuclear power plant related employee’s, dialogues he claimed would “never” happen in Japan.

But the true essence of the movie comes about through the disclosure of some shocking revelations. Metamorphosis masterfully succeeds in “connecting the dots”, showing a sequence of interviews with key players:  the city council member put in charge of evacuating his 7000 citizens in Naraha Town, the former secretary to the then Prime Minister Kan and the former TEPCO part time employee who was forced to submit a false resume.  These individual stories connect to form a collective narrative that directly challenges and questions the intent, philosophy and character that was and continues to be present in the ongoing nuclear crisis.

It should also be noted that this movie is a triumph to Jun’s ultimate goal to realize a “people’s” news channel.  Almost half of the material in the movie comes from, you got it, the “people” on the ground.  The grainy youtube clips only adds to the creditability and authenticity of the content.  To underscore the power of social media, the theme song for the opening of the movie was provided by none other than Ryuichi Sakamoto, who himself reached out to Jun through Twitter.  Here is the opening scene, beautifully taken by Atsushi Abe, one of Jun’s twitter followers, highlighted by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s theme song.

Maybe Big Brother is watching, but if Jun is to succeed, the people will prevail in Japan.

Back in July 2012, Yugo Shobugawa, David Shepard and myself presented the Bishamon project at the 2012 ESRI User Conference.

This is a short documentary on our visit to the Fukushima Nuclear Evacuation Zone, a 20km barricaded buffer around the Dai-ichi Nuclear Plant that exploded on March 11, 2011.  Read the full story here.

July 17-18, 2012

As the days counted down towards my visit to the barricaded areas within the evacuation zone in Fukushima, I began to wonder what I may feel, or rather, what any single human being could feel upon being exposed to a world left untouched since the worst nuclear crisis of our time. The answer is that you simply cannot anticipate what is largely unknown and undocumented to the world. It is a space that only a select few on this planet have been allowed to venture in since 3/11/11, and for good reason. But it is also a view of a crisis that must be exposed as a reminder to the world on what a deadly medley of natural disasters and human incompetence can do. According to a recent 600 page report conducted by Kiyoshi Kurokawa, a Tokyo University Professor, on the causes of the nuclear catastrophe, he says:

“What must be admitted — very painfully — is that this was a disaster ‘Made in Japan'”

The following is an account of a two day journey, one of which was spent entirely within the confines of the so called nuclear zone, an area that is still, to this day (16 months after the disaster), barricaded and protected from public access.

July 17

My day began early in the morning as I hopped on the 7am “Max” bullet train from Tokyo station heading towards Niigata. This was my first trip to the west coast of Japan. Upon my arrival, I took a cab towards Niigata University Hospital where my friend Yugo works as a medical researcher. The cab driver was intrigued that it was my first visit to Niigata and encouraged me to see the Sea of Japan, saying that “it’s not bad either” (「日本海も悪くないよ」）.

I got off at the in patient lobby of the hospital, a place I later learned had received hundreds of patients from Fukushima shortly after 3/11. Following the earthquake, many hospitals were overbooked and doctors were short in demand, and so, even this hospital, located 4 hours (170 miles) from the Fukushima Nuclear Plant, got an influx of patients.

I soon met up with Yugo and got introduced to his many colleagues.  Yugo leads a team of researchers, working in areas relevant to International Health and Public Health. He then took me to another wing on campus called the Radioisotope Center, where he introduced me to the Bishamon team.

I myself have been a  member of the Bishamon team since late last year, through a partnership between Niigata University and UCLA.  Our GIS and Visualization team (that consists of David Shepard and myself) at UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education has provided a web framework and visualization strategy for the information being collected by the “Bishamon-ers” working in the field.  As such, this was the first time I met with the rest of the team. Bishamon is comprised of a group of research volunteers, each an  expert in their respective fields. On this day four of us were to embark on a road trip to visit several cities that fall within the evacuation zone. Yugo, who I mentioned earlier, specializes in epidemic diseases. Dr. Jun Goto, who never stops smiling, is a nuclear physicist who I soon realized was the genius behind the many devices concocted for the project. Professor Makoto Naito is a doctor specializing in pathology and the current Director of the Radioisotope Center, and I should mention, the charismatic leader of this band of renegade researchers.

At times, Yugo has questioned my dedication to the project, not so much on my commitment level, but more on why I, as an outsider, am so driven to this creed. I myself have also pondered on my reasons.   My background with disaster relief stems from an opportunistic visit I made to Banda Aceh (Indonesia) in 2005, where I witnessed first hand the devastation that a Tsunami can have upon an entire village.  In Banda Aceh, 100,000 people died from the Indian Ocean Tsunami, a staggering number that even the 2011 Japan Earthquake does not come close to match (in total, almost a quarter million people died from 12 different countries from the 2004 earthquake).  During one of my visits to an IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camp in Banda Aceh, I met with one of the camp leaders who proceeded to take me to his tent, where he showed me a bag of rice with a Japanese flag on it… and thanked me profusely for it, simply because I had mentioned that I was from Japan.  Perhaps it was then that in some strange way, my destiny was set…

While simple human compassion can drive one to help in such times of crisis, I felt an entirely different range of emotions when a similar catastrophe hit my own people in my home country.  While I refer to Japan as my “home”, I do so with mixed feelings.  Being brought up as a so-called “third culture kid”, ie, one who spends a large amount of their childhood outside of his parents’ culture, I have always had an identity crisis when it comes to what constitutes “home”.  A large part of my childhood was spent hopping between different countries: Peru, Colombia, Thailand.  I did spend my college years in Tokyo, only to continue my graduate education and ultimately work as a lecturer and researcher at UCLA, where I have resided since 1995.  Despite my nomadic background, there was a moment, as I watched the horrors of the 3/11 disaster unfold on my TV screen in Los Angeles, that I knew without a doubt that these were indeed my people suffering, in my home country.

One thing was certain. Every member of the Bishamon team is extremely dedicated to this project, seeing this as something beyond our regular work flow but rather a mutual devotion and unmistakable drive to do everything in our power to help the region and the people still suffering from the disaster.

So what exactly is Bishamon? While it serves as the name and identity of the research team, it refers to the device that Dr. Goto has put together that measures airborne radiation levels through a mobile and vehicle mounted sensor.  Simply put, it combines a dosimeter , which measures radiation, a GPS, for position and altitude, and a laptop, which houses a custom built application that compiles, stores and visualizes the data streaming from the multiple devices. What makes Bishamon unique is the relentless pursuit towards accuracy and consistency. The team believes in a single measuring protocol that can be replicated for years to come, if not decades into the future. This approach comes with the belief that this is a long term project, and that measurements need to be made, possible over the life of an entire generation, to accurately measure the effects that the nuclear crisis has had upon the populace it has affected.

The project itself has a simple mission: to empower local governments to measure for remnants of radiation within their communities and to inform the residents and the general public of existing levels of radiation near and around their homes.  While other projects may not have the capacity to measure over an extended period of time, Bishamon plans to be around for a while.  The transfer of technology, from Research Universities to local governments is at the core of the missions objectives. For local governments, having the capacity and the procedural knowhow to measure radiation on their own, is imperative to conduct targeted and prioritized decontamination efforts to accelerate the process of healing and to ultimately allow residents to come home and resume their lives. For the residents, this information can serve as a reality indicator and a determinant factor towards important decisions needed to be made on whether or not to resume life in these confines. While the demand for this information has accelerated, little if anything has been done by the federal government to make this data available to the public in a timely fashion. To this regard, the Bishamon team intends to provide full transparency and access to all the data collected, both locally and to the international community to consume. The “openness” of the data remains an important, long term underlying goal of the team.  Given the unprecedented nature of the disaster, it is imperative for the world to know what has, and continues to transpire, in Fukushima, and to be able to research the effects of radiation over space and time for generations to come. In order to learn from this experience and to better prepare ourselves from future crises, the data must be made open for the world to consume.

And so it was that on the day of July 17, the four of us took off from Niigata University heading towards the Fukushima Nuclear Zone.  While this marked my first physical encounter with the Bishamon device and the first time I was part of this drive towards Fukushima, it was the 25th such trip for Yugo, Goto and Naito. Of course, I made sure to honor my earlier cab drivers recommendations, and asked Yugo to swing by the Sea of Japan, where I had a first (and hopefully not last) look at the “other” side of Japan, which was certainly not bad at all.

Along the 170 mile drive, we stopped by a rest area that was an apparent routine lunch and photo opp location:

Our only scheduled meeting for this day was to visit Naraha City officials.  More than 90% of the City of Naraha is within the Evacuation Zone, forcing the entire population to evacuate, where to this day, not a single resident has been allowed to return.  Therefore, the City Hall offices have been temporarily set up in building within Iwaki Meisei University, a city located just south of the evacuation perimeter.

Here, we were to negotiate a potential collaboration, where we would offer the entire Bishamon “package” for them to use.

July 18

Spending the night in Iwaki, just south of the nuclear zone, we woke up early and had breakfast at our hotel. The hotel was called the “Washington Hotel”, an odd name given that it was located in rural Japan.  The front desk clerk was unable to provide any insight as to the origin of the name. Nevertheless, the hotel provided an excellent breakfast package.  One thing that caught my attention was the rice.  There were two options: Fukushima rice, and Akita rice.  Perhaps, to give guests the option to choose a possibly “contaminated” local brand, verses another option that was surely safe.  It symbolized the existing sensitivity towards the nuclear situation.

After all four of us consumed the local Fukushima rice for breakfast, we took off to enter the Nuclear Zone. First, we stopped by the gas station to fill up our vehicle.  Here, Yugo and Jun exchange a light moment, something that is of critical importance, given the gravity of what the rest of the day would bring.

One last preparatory task was to put on our radiation protective suits (放射線防護服).  While this was not mandatory, it served to mark the reality of the moment, to form a sort of unwritten code of solidarity, that we, as a team, were ready to venture into a territory that was otherwise forbidden to the world.

We proceeded to enter the Nuclear Evacuation Zone from the South, heading North from Iwaki.  The entrance was heavily barricaded, and I was surprised to see the large contingent of security officers present.

Once inside, it literally felt like we were in a bubble, a time capsule per se that had descended upon this land, filled with crumpled buildings, unkept shrubbery and debris that had been left untouched since March 11, 2011.  While there was a decent amount of traffic on the road (military, police, decontamination workers), there was not a single soul to be seen occupying any of the residential or commercial structures around. I was also struck on how incredibly beautiful the landscape was inside.  Unlike urban Japan, this region was representative of the nature that abounds rural Japan, with gently winding roads, small bridges, fogs clinging on to the mountains, a myriad of rivers, an agricultural landscape dominated by rice fields, and a nice blend of traditional and modern Japanese structures.