This video was presented at the Institute for Strategic Leadership‘s “Carry On Fukushima” program in Tokyo on 7/21/11. It includes voices from food producers in the area around the still-leaking Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant:

• Ohashi may need to look outside Fukushima now for organic suppliers for his bread. He says we need to learn to coexist with radiation.
• Suzuki and Fukumoto are leaving the idyllic farming community of Kaidomari to live in balance with nature elsewhere.
• Hongo won’t sell his potentially contaminated rice this year, but he’s eating it himself.
• Yoshizawa wants to save his 300 irradiated dairy cows from a death sentence.
• Yamamoto was a farming intern when the disaster struck. She decided to stay and volunteer at an evacuation center.
• Yoshida is committed to stay and continue farming on the land his family has cultivated for 200 years.

Uncanny Terrain is a documentary about organic farmers facing Japan’s nuclear crisis, and an online community fostering dialogue on food safety, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy and disaster response. Please keep the conversation going by making a donation.

ISL（institute for strategic leadership)の主催で開かれた「頑張っぺ福島」フォーラムで上映した映像。これまでアップしてきた映像をまとめ、銀嶺食品の大橋雄二さんの話を加えました。この映像はこれまで撮影してきたものほんの１０％です。今後も編集、撮影を継続し、福島の声を残します。

Yoshizawa’s ranch is 14km downwind from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The government ordered him to kill his 300 cows. Most of his neighbors’ animals are gone, but some have been released and joined his herd. Yoshizawa refuses to kill his cows. He wants them to be studied for the effects of radiation.

Uncanny Terrain is a documentary about organic farmers facing Japan’s nuclear crisis, and an online community fostering dialogue on food safety, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy and disaster response. Please donate to keep the conversation going.

吉沢正己さん福島県、相馬市の酪農家。原発から１４キロ地点に３００頭の乳牛を飼う。原発事故で二本松市へ避難し、週１で牛の面等を見に牧場へ変える。吉沢さんの訴えは、「牛を守りたい」という一念のみ。垂れ幕や、旗を持ち、牛を生かすために声を上げる吉沢さん。今後、吉沢さんの活動を追って行きます。

People from across Japan gather in Fukushima City on 6/26/11 to protest the ongoing danger of nuclear power and to call for accountability in the nuclear disaster. Ruiko Mutou of the Fukushima Network Against Nuclear Power has been opposing the plants since the Chernobyl disaster. Sachiko Soto of the Fukushima Network to Protect Children From Radiation says that families need support to evacuate children, who are most at risk from radiation. A representative of the Tokyo Association to Protect the Victims of TEPCO says that Tokyo must take responsibility for the nuclear crisis. One woman calls on the skeptical crowd to trust their fate to God. And a 25-year old farmer in western Fukushima chooses to stay and do what she can to help rather than return home to Nagano. Uncanny Terrain is a documentary about organic farmers facing Japan’s nuclear crisis, and an online community fostering dialogue on food safety, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy and disaster response. Please keep the conversation going by making a donation.

http://uncannyterrain.com
Takahashi was banned from selling rice grown on his land in Nishigo Village, Nishishirakawa-gun, Fukushima, due to soil contamination from the nuclear disaster. But he was also told that to receive compensation for the lost income, he must grow the rice. So he's planting the crop, expecting it will never be eaten.

http://uncannyterrain.com/jp/
西白河郡西郷村の高橋さん。大きな田んぼを季節外れに耕す。作付け禁止で今年は米は売れない。日焼けした肌が本当に健康的な高橋さん。この他にも大きなハウスで沢山の野菜も作る。若い研修生がいるが、福島の農業の現状に何を言ってあげれば良いか悩み、悲しむそう。毎晩、自分の野菜がスーパーの裏に捨てられているかもしれないと思うといてもたってもいられないという。

Uncanny Terrain is a documentary about organic farmers facing Japan's nuclear crisis, and an online community fostering dialogue on food safety, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy, and disaster response. Donate

Hiruta has spent decades recruiting farmers from across Japan to join him in the tiny agricultural community of Kaidomari, nestled among tall pines in the mountains on the edge of Iwaki in Fukushima. But since the nuclear disaster, especially the younger farmers are fleeing. Fukumoto is returning to Hiroshima with his free range dairy cows, unwilling to let them graze on contaminated grass. Suzuki and her husband are divided about whether to stay or go. Background radiation here is .4 microsieverts/hour outside, .3 inside.

We landed in Japan on 5/24 to and spent our first three days in Tokyo. There we interviewed representatives of Greenpeace who've engaged in independent testing of land and sea contamination. They argue that Japanese authorities have underreported radiation levels, due to some combination of flawed testing methods and an effort to minimize compensation claims, thus jeopardizing the public, particularly children, who are most vulnerable to radiation. Readings are commonly taken a meter high, which doesn't register alpha and beta radiation emitting from the ground, and doesn't account for children's exposure to breathed and swallowed dirt.

After a Greenpeace press conference on the contamination they found in sea life off the Pacific coast, we met with Pieter Franken, cofounder of Safecast, a radiation monitoring group that promotes regular people doing their own reading and reporting of contamination levels. Pieter supplied us with an Inspector Geiger counter and instructed us in its use. He showed us levels as high as 350 counts per minute (the equivalent of 1 microsievert per hour) on concrete in his Tokyo backyard. Radioactive cesium apparently fell from above all over Japan and attached itself especially to horizontal exposed concrete, wood and stone.

On 5/27 we took a bus to Hanawa, Fukushima, a mountain farming town 45 miles from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Hanawa was spared the worst of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear fallout, and the farmers we've met mostly see the stigma of being from Fukushima as their biggest obstacle. Soil samples here registered 250 becquerels of cesium 137 and 137, far below the legal limit for cultivation of 5,000 becquerels. The air outside mostly reads about .15 microsieverts per hour, 50% above natural background levels but a fraction of the levels seen closer to the power plant. But there are hotspots here that are much higher. We found levels of nearly 1,000 counts per minute on stones in front of a house where a one-year-old baby lives.

We're staying with the Yoshida family, who've farmed this land for nine generations, over 200 years. They grow premium quality rice free of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, that they supply to international consumers and macrobiotic restaurants. Their soil showed low levels of contamination, but it will not be certain whether the rice is contaminated until it's been grown, harvested and analyzed. So they planted their five rice fields, though orders are down to nearly zero. The Yoshidas are not sure they can stay here, but they're not sure they can leave either. The family patriarch, Hiroaki Yoshida, talks about trying to make the farm completely self-sufficient, so they can survive on what they grow even if they can't sell their crops. 

Farmers across the region face similar dilemmas. Those outside the evacuation zone are told to go about their business as normal, so long as their crops stay below the high maximum levels set by the government. But what health risks do they face by staying here, and what risks are posed by foods with legal levels of contamination?

Chicago-based filmmakers Junko Kajino and Ed M. Koziarski are spending the summer in Fukushima, Japan documenting the organic farmers here from planting through harvest, and examining the impact of the nuclear disaster on the farmers, their land, the food they produce, and their customers. The questions they are investigating are ones that every nuclear society must face, as they follow these conscientious stewards of the land contending with the fallout from others’ irresponsibility...

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