Safe and Trustworthy? Food Safety after Fukushima

Nicolas Sternsdorff Cisterna
Harvard University
nicolas123@gmail.com

In this paper I explore the mistrust of the government and experts in guiding the public through the Fukushima disaster as it relates to food. Radiation exposure can be external (ambient radiation), or internal (ingested). There is little that can be done to protect against external radiation other than relocation or avoiding the outdoors. Internal radiation, on the other hand, is a place where concerned people in Japan could exercise some degree of agency in limiting their exposure. Japan is a capitalist society with a well-developed food distribution system, so it is possible for consumers to choose foods in ways that limit their risk. The public has an option between trusting government assurances of safety and testing procedures, and purchase any food available without worrying about where it was grown. Or they can be suspicious of government standards and purchase food only from retailers that screen it to stricter radiation standards than the government (there are many such businesses currently operating in Japan). Or they can refuse to eat products grown in Northern Japan, and have their food sourced from areas unaffected by radiation or favor imported products[1]. In what follows I offer an ethnographic vignette to look at the mistrust of experts, explain the setting of government food safety standards, and how some groups have challenged that interpretation. In the conclusion I return to the question of what it means for food to be safe when there is little trust in the system. The research is based on 18 months of fieldwork in the Tokyo area and numerous trips to Tohoku starting in September 2011.

The villain

In October of 2011 I attended a food safety event organized by an anti-nuclear group in Tokyo, featuring a long-standing food activist and critic of industrial food practices. Since the earthquake, she had taken the cause of teaching people about the threat of radiation in the food supply, and had just published a book to teach people in simple terms how to choose and prepare food safely in light of the threat of radiation (Yasuda 2011).

When the lecture was finished, I assumed that the event was over, but one of the organizers told me to hold on because more was coming. I sat down, the lights dimmed, and the stage lit up as a man in his 40s dressed in a worn out ensemble of red track pants, a red sweatshirt and a comically small red cape came on stage. Behind him, approximately ten people came wearing white masks, drumming and doing cheerful dance steps that reminded me of folk dancing.

The red man identified himself as little red riding hood, and welcomed us to this popular theater performance (minshu-geki). He told us not to be shy, and to get involved in the play. The masked performers behind him sat down, and shouted comments in approval or disapproval with what he was saying.

Little Red Riding Hood started by narrating his experience the Great Tohoku Earthquake. His story resembled many similar accounts I heard from people in Tokyo. First, there was the shaking, and because he was on a tall building, it swayed from side to side and he was very scared. Then, the trains stopped running, and he had to walk home. At this point, members of the audience became involved in the spirit of popular theatre and would shout things like “me too!” or “I also had to walk home!”

Then a couple of days later radiation came, and here he paused to emphasize how scary it was. The problem, he said, is that you cannot see it coming. It does not have any visual cues, it has no smell, and it has no taste. It is all pervasive, but you do not know that it is there. The audience and the masked people behind him shouted in approval of his description of how frightening radiation was.

Towards the end of his monologue, Little Red Riding Hood told us that we needed to come together to fight against nuclear power. That we needed to raise our voices and tell the government that enough was enough. It was time to practice. He called “Hoi,” and as an audience we responded “hoi.” He repeated “hoi” again, and we replied in kind. “Say ‘hantai (to oppose)’,” he said, and as an audience we called “hantai,” to which he replied “genpatsu (nuclear power).” The fervor rose as he called over and over again “genpatsu” and in the audience we responded each time with “hantai.” When the intensity and the rhythm of the chants reached a peak, he exited the stage and a second character came in.

This second character had a crooked back, used a cane, and was wearing a red mask in the shape of a devil. He identified himself as a Tokyo University professor doing research on the effects of radiation[1]. The boos followed immediately. He waved our boos away, and told us that according to his research, everything was safe and there was nothing to worry about. The audience continued to boo him as he tried to defend the use of nuclear power and the safety of the current situation. His arguments got stranger as things moved along, and he suggested that kids would study more, since they would only be allowed to play outside for five minutes because of the high radiation. Eventually the boos mounted, and the masked people who kept asking him hard questions chased him off stage, to which the audience erupted in cheerful clapping.

As I walked back from the event, I wondered about the choice of villain for this popular theater play. There was no shortage of possible villains — the president of the Tokyo Electric Company (TEPCO), a government bureaucrat, even the prime minister could have played the role, but instead they chose a distinguished university professor who supports nuclear power. I later wrote in my notes that trust in government and experts to guide the public through the crisis was indeed running low if they bypassed the most obvious villains for one who was supposed to be an independent expert, but had fallen into the sphere of the nuclear industry. This brought to mind the skepticism I heard about Dr. Yamashita, one of the leading government experts on radiation and a professor at Nagasaki Medical University. At the beginning of the crisis he said that people could be exposed up to 100mSv/year without considerable health effects, and that people should smile to protect themselves from radiation. For people concerned about radiation, Dr. Yamashita’s remarks downplayed and trivialized the risks they were being exposed to, and contributed to their suspicion of government assurances of safety. I later attended an event with Sachiko Sato, one of the leading activists from the network of Fukushima women against radiation, and her opinion was that radiation would hit her body regardless of whether she was smiling or frowning. Much better it was to have real policies in place to protect children.

On trust

If there was one constant to virtually every interview I did in Japan about food safety, it was how few people trusted the government. Even before I asked the question, I had several people tell me they believed nothing the government said, and others told me that they used to trust the government, but after seeing their response to 3/11, they no longer did. In a quantitative study of trust after 3/11, Hommerich (2012) found low levels of trust in government, and furthermore, respondents often did not differentiate between the government and TEPCO. The public relations firm Edelman also found a drop in trust for the government in Japan after the earthquake. This was notable because trust in government had remained constant for several years, and had now dropped only slightly above Russia (The Economist 2012). The general feeling was that the government was in cahoots with the nuclear industry (Kingston 2012), suppressed information about the scope of the nuclear meltdown, and failed to put the interests of the population first. Furthermore, in regards to food safety, during the initial months after the meltdown there were several contaminated products such as spinach or beef that were not detected in time and made it into the food commodity chain. This also contributed to the lack of trust in the ability of government to protect the food supply from nuclear contamination.

The official safety standards

On March 17, 2011, six days after the earthquake, the government issued emergency standards to monitor the food supply. These standards were derived from the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) guidelines which state that the general population should not be exposed to more than 5 millisievert per year (mSv/year). The Ministry of Health translated this to food, and created standards for the various radioactive substances emitted from the nuclear meltdown. Of primary concern were radioactive Iodine 131, which has a short half-life of eight days but it can be quite damaging to human and animal health, and radioactive Cesium 134 and 137, which amounted to over 90[1]percent of the pollutants dispersed over Japan. The maximum allowable standard became 500 becquerels per kilogram (bq/kg) for Cesium, and 2000 bq/kg for Iodine (Nougyou to keizai 2012).

Figure 1: Explanation sheet for Japan’s emergency safety standards in comparison to other locations, given at a citizen testing center in Tokyo. The top is for drinking water, and shows Japan with 100 bq/kg for children and 200 for adults. The lower part is for food, and shows Japan with 200-500 bq/kg depending on the product

A year after the meltdown, the government went back to the drawing board and revised the maximum allowable radiation in food products down from 500 to 100 bq/kg. With this new standard that became law on April 2012, Japan lowered the exposure limit to 1mSv/year. This standard is in line, or stricter, than the recommendations of organizations like the World Health Organization or the International Atomic Energy Agency. It is also considerably lower than the safety limits in the United States where the maximum allowed is 1,000bq[1]/kg. On the other hand, critics of the government compared it to standards found in countries that suffered from the fallout of Chernobyl: The Ukraine and Belarus both allow a maximum of 20-40 bq/kg, depending on the food product, and Germany has strict standards of 8 bq/kg for adults and 4 bq/kg for children.

Figure 2: Comparison chart received in a handout at a food safety event. This chart compares Japan’s emergency standards with other countries, and puts Japan on the high end. It argues that Japan’s standards are weak, and that children must be protected.

Amongst those concerned about food safety, there was some ambivalence about what the changes in safety standards meant. After attending an information session by the government in Fukushima city about the upcoming changes to the safety standards, I brought back a set of handouts for food activists in the city I had met earlier that day. When I handed them over, they flipped through the printed powerpoint slides, and asked why they could not make it strict like this from the beginning? They were particularly pleased to see that the maximum allowable limit for drinking water had gone down from 200 to 10 bq/kg. The new law also made separate standards for small children. Still, they wondered what this meant for the past year. If the government had revised their safety standards, did this mean that the food they had been consuming was no longer considered safe? And, it was January and the new law would not come into effect until April. Did this mean that food polluted with say 300 bq/kg was fine for the next three months, but then deemed unsafe afterwards?The government position tried to walk a fine line on this issue, and argued that food was considered safe under the emergency levels, and that the new safety limits were designed to further food safety and boost consumer confidence. I spoke with Takamori-san, a radiation specialist for a food coop that was particularly careful about monitoring radiation in their product line up. He thought that the decision to lower the standards was purely political — there was little to be gained from a public health perspective, and that the government figured that it could live with stricter standards and raise the anshin (peace of mind) of the population with the new standards.Even though Takamori-san believed that the decision to lower the safety standard was primarily political, his understanding of the threat of radiation and how he framed it for coop members was different: in a study session about radiation and food that he conducted in front of approximately twenty members, he argued that even if the risk from ingesting radiation was low, there is no such thing as zero risk. Even small amounts of radiation carry with them a potential risk, so the policy of the coop was to limit that exposure as much as possible. In the absence of a clear rationale for radiation exposure (such as having an x-ray for medical purposes), what is the goal of ingesting slightly contaminated food products?

Conclusion

In the absence of trust in the role of experts to guide the public through the effects of the nuclear meltdown, what options did people have to cope in this new environment? To be sure, mistrust of the current state of affairs is not a universal position, and there are many people who are comfortable eating food grown in Northern Japan. Nonetheless, according to a recent survey (Hosono 2013), mistrust of Fukushima-grown food has increased compared to 2011, and a little over 20 percent of respondents in the survey would not buy Fukushima products if they tested below government standards even if they were free, and about 16 percent would not eat them even if they tested with undetectable levels of radiation.

The erosion of trust in the ability of experts and the government to guide those concerned about food safety through the crisis has resulted in people having to take this risk in their own hands. In order to make those decisions, people must decide whether the foods before them are safe, and if they are trustworthy. Ulrich Beck argues that one of the features of risk society is an individualization of risk, where the individual and consumer must make those choices (Beck 2006). In the current moment in Japan, people concerned about food safety must navigate a world where they are required to make decisions about the science of radiation, and whom to trust amongst competing voices in a sea of experts who range in opinion from those who think nothing will happen with current levels of radiation, to others who advise people to be as vigilant as possible. Gregory Button (2010) argued that science is often unable to resolutely resolve uncertainties in the wake of a disaster. The science of the effects of low-exposure to radiation is indeed inconclusive (Normile 2011) and there are multiple interpretations of it. In the wake of the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, I have seen a deep mistrust of the role of experts, government or otherwise (especially those who argue that the situation is not as bad), to give people those reassurances.

In Japanese, safe food is often described as having both anzen (安全) and anshin (安心). Anzen refers to the world of science and precision; it is a measurable and quantifiable form of safety that has thresholds and can be measured in units like “below 100 bq/kg.” Anshin, on the other hand, speaks to questions of the heart, as many informants have pointed out to me. It is a subjective and emotional relationship to food. It is personal, and describes the degree of confidence one feels about the safety of food supplies. Both terms are often used in conjunction to describe foods as anzen anshin na shokuhin (safe and trustworthy food).

For the anzen/anshin relationship to exist, there must be trust in the procedures and science that determines something is safe. Given the widespread mistrust in the government, many of the people I worked with in Japan were not ready to take a leap of trust and consume foods without scrutinizing them further as to their origins. They consequently demanded much higher standards for foods to be trusted (such as undetectable levels of radiation, or grown in areas unaffected by radiation). Food safety is not a question of science alone, and for it to exist in a way that the public trusts it, there is an affective relationship of trust. The scientific and the subjective co-exist in the production of safe food. Anzen and anshin is a formulation that brings these two aspects together. In the wake of Fukushima, for the people I worked with concerned about food safety, there is little trust in the ability of the government and its cadre of experts to determine what safe is, which makes the relationship between safe and trustworthy much harder to exist.

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[1] These are idealized options, and most people I met who were concerned about radiation and food shifted between these options depending on the context and cost involved.

[2] The choice of Tokyo University is not coincidental, as some of the engineering departments of this university were seen as part of the so-called “nuclear village” that formed the backbone of the Japanese nuclear industry. These departments trained many of the engineers running the plants, and their professors received grants from utility companies to conduct research on nuclear power (see Kingston 2012).

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References

Beck, Ulrich. 2006. Living in the world risk society. Economy and Society 35 (3): 329-345.

Button, Gregory. 2010. Disaster Culture. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

The Economist. 2012. The Death of Trust: Japan After the 3/11 Disaster. March 10.

Hommerich, Carola. 2012. Trust and subjective well-being after the great east japan earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown: Preliminary results. International Journal of Japanese Sociology 21 (1): 46-64.

Hosono, Hiromi. 2013. Shohisha chousa no jouhou [Report on consumer research]. Presented at Houshaseibushitsu osen to shoku no anzen [Radioactive pollution and food safety]. Tokyo University, March 16.

Kingston, Jeff. 2012. Japan’s nuclear village. Japan Focus 10 (37).

Normile, Dennis. 2011. Fukushima Revives the Low-Dose Debate. Science, May.

Nougyou to keizai. 2012. Houshaseibushitsu to Shokuhin Kenkou Risuku [radioactive Materials and Food and Health Risks]. Showado.

Yasuda, Setsuko. 2011. Tabemono to houshanou no hanashi. [Stories about radiation and food]. Tokyo: Crayon House.

Nicolas Sternsdorff Cisterna is a Ph.D. candidate in social anthropology at Harvard University. His research looks at the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown and food safety. He has also worked on place branding and food commodity chains, and his latest publication is “Space and terroir in the Chilean wine industry (Wine and Culture, Bloomsbury 2013).”