Fukushima Daiichi Accident Victims in Schools
There are still deplorable reports on children who left their hometowns in Fukushima Prefecture after the nuclear accident of 2011, though almost six years have passed.
Specifically, one family that voluntarily moved from Fukushima to Yokohama City, immediately south of Tokyo, has complained publicly recently that their son, now a junior high school student, had been treated badly when he went to primary school in Yokohama.
When the boy started to go to the primary school, he was in the second grade. But, his new classmates called him a germ, since they knew the boy came from Fukushima where the nuclear accident had occurred and a high level of radioactive doses had been reported.
Through the second to the fourth grades, the boy was sometime mocked at or bullied by classmates. But when he advanced to the fifth and sixth grades, some classmates started to extort money from the boy for playing in a gaming arcade, a video game parlor, etc. Those bad boys said to the victimized boy that his family must have received big compensation money from the electric power company that owned the Fukushiama Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. For two years, they extorted total 1.5 million yen ($15,000) from the poor boy. The boy sometimes stopped going to school.
Of course, the boy sometimes asked help from teachers, but they did not sincerely respond to the boy's appeal. And, even when teachers knew that the boy was extorted money from, the school management did not inform boy's parents of the fact. In fact, other parents who heard of the extortion case from their children having not joined the bullying requested the school management to take some action to this problem. Then a meeting was held with the teachers, the parents, and the boy, but the teachers said that the family had to report the extortion case to the police, and as for bullying due to the Fukushima matter, the boy had to behave well and take care of himself.
After the boy graduated from the primary school and advanced to a junior high school, the parent asked a lawyer to handle this case. And then, this incident was exposed publicly, since newspapers, TV stations, etc. took up this case.
So, there must be not a few children who had moved from Fukushima Prefecture to other prefectures and started to go to new primary schools and then faced cold attitudes of some of their new classmates. Some children in other prefectures seem to believe that Fukushima children were contaminated by radioactive doses like getting plagued. And some of them think that their new classmates coming from Fuksuhima are dirty like germs.
As newspapers and TV critics and journalists criticize, the attitudes of those teachers who did not try to protect children from Fukushima Prefecture are graver and more alarming.
Finally, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan has issued official instructions to Yokohama City and its Education Commission to officially investigate into and respond to the case of bullying and extortion of pupils who moved from Fukushima Prefecture.
Though not all the schools and children who have received Fukushima boys and girls after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident have alienated, discriminated, insulted, bullied or intimidated the new classmates, this incident revealed how deplorable and foolish some Japanese are without learning correct things after the the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident.
There have been no reports that any medical doctors and staff have been physically damaged by radiation doses when they treated patients who were exposed to large radiation doses in Japan.
However, to children, radiation doses must look like something horrible. And, their instinct that people who have been exposed to strong radiation doses must continue to be under terrible influence cannot be simply dismissed. So, it is essential to educate primary school children on radiation and nuclear accidents. But how deplorable it is that children have to learn such things.
And it is more deplorable for teachers and adults to think that there is no need to build friendship between children who experienced a nuclear accident and other children.
However, this sort of prejudice once prevailed in Japan after WWII against the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb victims. Indeed, radiation doses even destroy ethics of people.
**** **** ****
Luk 12:3 Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.
