Lone Holdout's First Nuclear Winter Looms in Tohoku

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

By Christopher Johnson - The Japan Times

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MIHARU VILLAGE, Fukushima Prefecture — As bitter winds blow around cesium and other radioactive particles spewed from the nearby Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant's reactors, Naoto Matsumura lights a cigarette, which he considers relatively good for his health.

"I would get sick if I stopped smoking; I have a lot to worry about," says Matsumura, 52, who reckons he is the only person still living within a 20-km radius of the world's worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl.

According to reports from Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency published in August, following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, and subsequent explosions at three reactors about 13 km from Matsumura's door, the plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) has released 168 times more radiation than the atomic bombs that razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. . . .

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/12/21-2

[prepperdad]

1. This guy is crazy

He should get out now before he gets cancer. Something like 30,000 people dies in the regions around Chernobyl. And even today, animals that go into that area routinely die of radiation sickness.


[url]http://www.survivingeconomiccollapse.net/[/url]

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

2. I don't think he's crazy...

... I think he just feels his life is there, on his farm caring for his animals as best he can manage, come what may. I can't help but admire him.

I don't know if you read the commentary on this piece at commondreams.org -- some of it was pretty good:

CD poster Minitrue:

This is a hard story for me to comment on. Fifty-five years ago I was at the H-Bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. I had radiation poisoning, but fortunately survived. This experience made me both anti-war, and anti-nuke in any way, shape, or form.

Chernobyl was horrifying enough. Three to six hundred years before it will be safe to live there. Horrible birth defects in the children born around the time of Chernobyl and after.

Only a few of the elderly from Chernobyl have moved back to their homes, intending to die there where they grew up and lived.

Still, we do not learn. Now Fukushima, being sugarcoated by the owned press, the owned government and TEPCO. The nuclear horrors awaiting us here in the US as our tired reactors are getting permission to operate another twenty years, at increased power output and new tax eating reactors are being approved by our bought government.

My heart goes out to Naoto san as he carries out his life in a nuclear desert.
Gomenasai, Naoto san, gomenasai, world.

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CD poster Oikos:

Very, very sad.

From Epitaph (1969), by King Crimson:

"The wall on which the prophets wrote
Is cracking at the seams.
Upon the instruments of death
The sunlight brightly gleams.
When every man is torn apart
With nightmares and with dreams,
Will no one lay the laurel wreath
As silence drowns the screams
...
But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying..."

Industrial society is mortiferous.

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CD poster Emaho

All honors to this valiant, peaceful gentleman. I only wish I might face my own end with such honor and dignity. Where, or whom, is the courageous film maker who will take the risk to document this incredible story, so that future generations might see and learn?