Another North Korean Ballistic Missile & more –29th Aug 2023

Konnichiwa from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 29th of August twenty twenty-three A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Thursday the 24th, North Korea launched what appeared to be an intercontinental ballistic missile. It flew over Okinawa Prefecture and broke apart over the Yellow Sea and East China Sea, west of the Korean Peninsula. It appeared to be heading to the Pacific Ocean. This marked the eighteenth time this year that North Korea has launched a missile. Each time, North Korea has made up an excuse for their launches. They have either said they fired a missile in protest of other countries’ military drills or that they had actually launched a satellite.

In other news, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began releasing treated water into the ocean on Thursday the 24th. This water used to be radioactive but has been treated and diluted to make it safe. Some still worry because the treated water still contains a small amount of tritium that, while diluted, can’t be completely removed. Unsurprisingly, people in both Japan and China had a lot to say about the water release.

In Japan, a group of residents and fishers from Fukushima Prefecture held a press conference on Wednesday the 23rd, announcing that it plans to file a lawsuit on the 8th of September to stop the treated water release. Eight years ago, the government and the power plant’s owner promised that they wouldn’t release any treated water without the public’s understanding. The group said that the current water release violates that promise since many still oppose the plan.

China’s reaction, meanwhile, has been much more heated. China outright banned imports of Japanese seafood starting on Thursday the 24th, the day of the water release. On Weibo, a Chinese social media platform similar to Twitter, many individuals posted Japanese phone numbers and encouraged people to harass different organizations in Japan asking why they were releasing “contaminated nuclear water,” even if the organization didn’t have anything to do with the release. Someone even posted the phone number of a member of Japan’s Diet. Many also encouraged people to avoid using Japanese cosmetics - because what eyeshadow would be complete without a touch of ocean water? Even so, the cosmetic companies reassured people on the Chinese version of their websites that all their products met safety standards.

Other Chinese citizens have even gone as far as to target organizations related to Japan in China. One person threw rocks into a Japanese school in Qingdao, Shandong Province, and another egged a Japanese school in Jiangsu Province. Someone even threw bricks at the Japanese embassy in Beijing on Thursday the 24th. Fortunately, they didn’t hurt anyone, and police arrested the suspects in each case.

What’s ironic is that China’s own statistics show that thirteen Chinese nuclear power plants released so much treated water into the oceans in twenty twenty-one that it contained almost ten times the amount of tritium that the Daiichi plant plans to dump in one year. One individual on Weibo called this out, saying that China has already put way more radioactive water into the ocean than Japan. The person said they were a scientist, but it’s now impossible to verify that, as the platform deleted both the post and the account shortly after it went viral.

In an effort to calm the chaos surrounding the treated water release, Japan’s environment ministry tested seawater from eleven different places around the Fukushima Daiichi plant. They gathered the samples on Friday the 25th and published the test results on Sunday the 27th. They found that the tritium levels were so low, they couldn’t even detect them. The fisheries agency is also in the process of catching fish in the area and testing them, and so far, they haven’t detected any tritium in the fish.

An industry minister even visited Fukushima on Friday the 25th to eat some local raw fish to reassure people it’s safe. That same minister also met local businesses, telling people the government wants to be as transparent and safe as possible during the treated water release. It hasn’t stopped the harassment from China, but some experts suspect that the Chinese government doesn’t want to put a stop to the harassment because it’s such a good distraction from their own domestic problems, like high unemployment.

In terms of weather, the Meteorological Agency warned that two new typhoons are headed towards Japan’s southernmost islands, the main Okinawa island and the Sakishima Islands. The first will likely pass through on Wednesday the 30th and Thursday the 31st, so people in the area should be careful of high waves and rough seas. The second typhoon might arrive on Thursday the 31st or Friday the 1st, but officials say it could still change course and avoid Okinawa altogether.

Meanwhile, it’s no secret that it’s been H-O-T hot in Japan this summer. Many cities across the country experienced temperatures over thirty-eight degrees Celsius, or a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Northern Japan also saw the highest average late July temperatures since the Meteorological Agency started recording it eighty years ago. When the agency held a meeting on Monday the 28th, they said the heat was probably because of jet streams above Japan moving further north than usual. The typhoons that came around during the summer didn’t help either, because they made sure the air was warm and wet in late July and August. The ocean warming up around the north only made things worse, a side effect of climate change.

In other news, the Nippon Foundation surveyed a thousand Ukrainian refugees in Japan between March and June and found out that seventy percent wanted to extend their stay in Japan. Of those who wanted to stay, half said they wanted to return to Ukraine only once it’s more peaceful, while the other half said they wanted to stay in Japan as long as possible. The Nippon Foundation has now conducted three of these online surveys asking about visa stays, Japanese speaking ability, and employment. In the most recent study, forty-two percent of respondents were working, three percent more compared to the last survey done between November and December, and eighty percent of respondents spoke little to no Japanese. The Nippon Foundation said that more refugees are working because this way they can get a working visa and stay longer. The foundation said that the government and local communities need to build a support system to help refugees.

While the refugees work toward a better future, others mourn past injustices. On Wednesday the 23rd, former internees hosted an annual memorial service at Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery. This service marked the 78th year since the Soviet Union captured Japanese citizens and interned them at labor camps after World War Two. The health and welfare ministry reported that around 55,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians died at these camps, but more than half of those remains haven’t yet been returned to Japan. The government had been working to retrieve them, but efforts stopped once Russia invaded Ukraine. The former internees called for the government to go back to recovering the remains of other internees.

In some tech news, The Tokyo Metropolitan Government is now using generative AI across all its bureaus and its 50,000 civil servants. They started this AI project in May with guidelines that included a ban on putting personal or confidential information into the AI system. The system can create easy-to-understand explanations of bureau projects for social media. Officials said it’s good for coming up with ideas quickly but needs careful checking to make sure information is correct and doesn’t violate copyright. The Tokyo government also plans to use the AI system for things like summarizing conferences.

And to close this edition, sports news. Javelin thrower Haruka Kitaguchi became the first Japanese woman to win a gold medal at the World Athletics Championships. Kitaguchi was also picked to be a part of Japan’s team at the twenty twenty-four Olympics in Paris.

And that’s it for this week! Thanks for joining us!

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Mata Ne!