From Hokkaido: Twins that got radiation exposure from riding in a contaminated car
My name is Hiro, and I live in Kamikawa-gun, Hokkaido. I am a registered nurse who manages a care facility. My older brother lives in the same town, so I have closely watched his 13-year-old twin sons grow up. When the nuclear accident happened in March, I knew there would be serious consequences. I immediately got a radiation detector and began taking anti-radiation protective measures. At the end of March, the twins’ maternal grandparents who lived in Kawauchi-mura in Fukushima relocated here. At the time they said their car had been decontaminated, so we thought nothing was amiss. The twins ended up riding in this car numerous times. From here on, please follow this timeline presentation.
3/11/2011
Tohoku earthquake and tsunami
Tohoku earthquake and tsunami
3/12/2011
Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactor #1 explosion
Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactor #1 explosion
Grandparents who lived in Kawauchi-mura did soup-run in Kawauchi-mura.
3/13/2011
Grandparents did soup-run in Kawauchi-mura again.
Grandparents did soup-run in Kawauchi-mura again.
3/14/2011
Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactor #3 explosion
Grandparents evacuated from Kawauchi-mura. They took their Subaru Forester to buy gasoline, but the gasoline was unavailable. They left Forester at home and took Mitsubishi Minica [shown in this picture http://2011kazu.web.fc2.com/
Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactor #3 explosion
Grandparents evacuated from Kawauchi-mura. They took their Subaru Forester to buy gasoline, but the gasoline was unavailable. They left Forester at home and took Mitsubishi Minica [shown in this picture http://2011kazu.web.fc2.com/
3/15-17/2011
Grandparents stayed at Kooriyama’s evacuation center.
3/17/2011
Grandparents left the Minica near Kooriyama’s evacuation center and evacuated to the eldest son’s house in Yokohama by Shinkansen (bullet train).
3/29/2011
After retrieving the Minica from Kooriyama, grandparents relocated to Hokkaido near their eldest daughter. From this point on, twins rode in their grandparents’ Minica as they were shuttled to places.
May 2011
Twins K and Y both were confined to bed for several days due to fatigue at the same time.
June 2011
Twins K and Y both were confined to bed for several days due to fatigue at the same time.
Mid July 2011
Twins K and Y both were confined to bed for several days due to fatigue at the same time.
7/28-30/2011
Grandparents temporarily returned home to Kawauchi-mura in order to collect their possessions and Forester. They left Hokkaido on
7/28/11
and arrived at their home in Kawauchi-mura on
7/29/11
They brought one car (Forester) and their belongings to Toma, Hokkaido. During this time period, they did not take any particular anti-radiation protective measures. During their absence, the Forester was outside for four and a half months [since the explosions in March]. Twins began to ride in the Forester several times from this point on.
8/4/2011
Twins K and Y once again were confined to bed for a day for fatigue and not feeling well.
Early August
Twin Y began to be confined to bed. Twin K was somewhat improved.
8/15/2011
Twins received medical care for nausea, headache, fatigue, night sweat and lethargy. Blood tests were normal.
8/18/2011
Twin K began to have right calf pain. Twin Y began to have twitching.
8/30/2011
A family friend, Mr. H, detected a radiation level of up to 0.9 microsievert/hr near the radiator of Minica. http://2011kazu.web.fc2.com/
9/1/2011
Cupping (Vankey) treatments were done in Sapporo. From this point on, home therapy using Vankey or Kai therapy was done on the twins daily.
Mid September
Twin Y began to have difficulty walking.
Late October
Twin Y’s twitching improved to be almost unnoticeable. (It was only felt if you touched his chest with your palm.)
11/6/2011
Exchange of parts in the contaminated cars was discussed in person with Asahikawa Toyopet and Asahikawa Honda, but the request was refused by both dealerships.
11/7/2011
Exchange of parts in the contaminated cars was discussed with Asahikawa Suzuki by phone, but the dealership said they couldn’t deal with cars with radioactive contamination. The Minica’s external radiation levels were measured again. http://2011kazu.web.fc2.com/
11/9/2011
The twins saw a neurologist at a hospital in Hokkaido. No abnormal findings in neurology exam and testing of motor functions. However, because of the history of symptoms such as twitching, difficulty walking, muscle pain and atrophy happening to both twins at the same time, the physician acknowledged the possibility of radiation as the cause and agreed to fill out medical certificates. http://2011kazu.web.fc2.com/
11/18/2011
Asahikawa Mitsubishi agreed to change the car parts, and the Minica’s contaminated parts were retrieved. http://2011kazu.web.fc2.com/
Late November
Twin Y’s twitching improved to the point it wasn’t obvious externally. (You couldn’t feel it when you touched his chest, but he could still feel a very small amount inside himself.)
12/1/2011
Dust collected previously was retested with SOEKS-01. It registered 3.03 microsievert/hr. Even with an aluminum plate shielding beta rays, it still registered 0.62 microsievert/hr. Note: this dust was only a few grams in quantity.
12/6/2011
This few grams of dust was measured using the Becquerel Monitor LB200 http://www.berthold-jp.com/
12/14/2011
The result of analysis by the Isotope Research Center was as follows: Cesium 137 = 3,587 Bq, Cesium 134 = 2,907 Bq, Total Cesium = 6,494 Bq Assuming the dust sample was approximately 5 grams, this would mean about 1,300,000 Bq/Kg of total cesium.
This concludes the timeline of the events.
Currently the twins’ health condition changes daily, waxing and waning. They often are confined to bed due to fatigue, headaches and leg pain. I think their immune function might be extremely low. One uses a cane to go to school if he feels well enough, but the other hasn’t been able to attend school since summer.
We worried about making their situation public on the web. What would happen to their future? Would they be discriminated against due to their radiation exposure?
Seeing how hard they are fighting against their circumstances, we decided we couldn’t just stop here.
We could not sit still thinking about many others who might have radiation exposure just like them from riding contaminated cars. We decided to release the information with a hope to save even just one more person.
As my brother wrote on his website, we are not thinking about legal actions. At any rate it is our desire to inform people of this fact so that they can prevent radiation exposure. All we want is for people to protect against radiation.
As my brother wrote on his website, we are not thinking about legal actions. At any rate it is our desire to inform people of this fact so that they can prevent radiation exposure. All we want is for people to protect against radiation.
After careful consideration, if you don’t see any problems with the content, please spread this information to as many people as possible.
Thank you for reading this.
Thank you for reading this.
My wholehearted request to all the Japanese people:
We really went through a lot of worries and anguish trying to decide whether to make public all this information about the twins. I kept thinking about how I would clear the path for their future and how they themselves would pursue the path to their future.
Twenty-three years ago, when Hokkaido was facing a huge controversy over issues surrounding the Kashiwa nuclear plant and the highly radioactive waste products in Horonobe, I was a college senior trying to comprehend the issues, frantically thinking about them and causing an action, despite my young age.
Kashiwa, Horonobe, Rokkasho, Onagawa, Fukushima, Tokai, Ooi, Mihama, Monju, and Shimane… I visited all these nuclear plants, stared at this inorganic monster of “nuclear power,” and hoped to stop all of them eventually.
However, immediately after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the day I was afraid of finally came.
The first thing I did was to apologize to the twins who are the youngest of my four children, “I am really sorry I couldn’t stop the construction of the nuclear power plants.”
Staring at the images of explosions of Fukushima Dai-ichi’s reactors 1 and 3 dumbfoundedly, I fell into terrible despair. However, there was no time to remain stunned. It’s because the distance between Fukushima and Hokkaido meant very little in the case of a nuclear accident.
Available information was confusing, but I determined that this was going to bring damages far worse than the Chernobyl accident, guessing from pieces of news reports as well as the knowledge I acquired 23 years ago. My friends and I prepared so that we could confine ourselves to homes for a month or two, in order to protect our children from iodine 131. (We didn’t actually confine ourselves to homes.) I told the children to see which way the wind was blowing. I told them never to get wet from the rain.
However, they got radiation exposure from unexpected places and became ill. As reported on my site, there is hardly any question that their radiation exposure originated in the contaminated cars.
I worried about how to act as a parent and as a human being, regarding this whole sequence of events.
First, of course, the utmost priority was given to how quickly and completely the twins would recover from these symptoms of radiation exposure.
It was almost 7 pm on 8/30/2011 when my friend Mr. H. first called me after realizing the car had high radiation levels in some places. (I shudder to think what would have happened if the call came a day later.) I immediately drove to the site in darkness and verified the high radiation levels with a radiation detector. Then I rushed home to check on the twins who had been often ill. I contacted my friends who were in alternative and natural medicine to find the most effective methods to treat them with.
The next day I had a work commitment that I couldn’t miss due to deliveries for my business. Even while making deliveries, I contacted them to figure out a treatment method to eliminate radioactive material from the body.
I told the children not to ride in the contaminated cars and told my wife to immediately tell the grandparents about the contamination. Two days after the discovery, I took Twin Y, who had more severe symptoms, to a Vankey (similar to cupping) teaching facility in Sapporo.
I told the children not to ride in the contaminated cars and told my wife to immediately tell the grandparents about the contamination. Two days after the discovery, I took Twin Y, who had more severe symptoms, to a Vankey (similar to cupping) teaching facility in Sapporo.
The twins had repeated episodes of being confined to bed due to fatigue and lethargy in the absence of fever for several days at a time in May, June and July. In mid-August, Twin Y began to have twitching. In September they began to have walking difficulty in addition, but the twitching slowly subsided.
Twin Y’s walking difficulty persists as of December. Twin K’s right calf pain and atrophy still persist. However, since they stopped riding in the contaminated cars and began treatments, they have not had episodes of bed confinement due to an extreme fatigue.
They were seen by doctors 3 times as of December, and they said there was no medical treatment available and all they could do was observation and follow-up.
(I would like to write about various modalities of natural medicine done on them on a daily basis some other time.)
This problem is not limited to my children. There may be tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of contaminated cars operated all over Japan. Unless we immediately stop them, there would be more children exposed to radiation. The twins, through radiation exposure (probably through inhalation) developed such symptoms as fatigue, lethargy, twitching, walking difficulty, muscle pain and muscle atrophy, but not everyone develops the same symptoms. It usually cannot be predicted how the radioactive material inside the body works: where it accumulates, what it weakens, what kind of symptoms it might cause along with co-existing infections. I think it could lead to a wide variety of illnesses. Unless you recognize the facts of radioactive contamination, you will only receive an ordinary, routine diagnosis of colds or something like that, and you will be given usual medications, when you or your children develop some symptoms. It is extremely difficult to assess individually whether the symptoms are due to radiation. It’s not until one year, or five, ten, or twenty years later, when there is enough statistical data available that they might say that it might be due to radiation. Do you want your child to be just one of the statistical numbers?
I was in anguish.
For me, revealing this fact meant that the twins might face such hardship as “discrimination” in the future.
The reason I decided to disclose the issue, despite such anguish, was because their smiling faces made me certain that they would not want to live a future life of fearing radiation exposure and discrimination, silently suffering.
There is one thing I would like to request of everyone who is reading this on my site here.
Please know the level of contamination in your car, your backyard, and your living space. The aerial radiation level is absolutely not sufficient!
Please know the level of contamination in your car, your backyard, and your living space. The aerial radiation level is absolutely not sufficient!
Even if the ambient radiation level is 0.2 to 0.3 microsievert/hr, there is a possibility that several thousand bequerels to several tens of thousands bequerels of contamination could exist right nearby. That’s why the government only refers to the ambient radiation level when they talk about such things as the degree of contamination, decontamination, and evacuation zones.
Please, investigate fully the contamination and keep a record of the measurements as proof. Otherwise the issue will remain clouded.
Please, investigate fully the contamination and keep a record of the measurements as proof. Otherwise the issue will remain clouded.
When we took measurements, parts of the car that were easily washable, such as metal plates, only registered the level around 0.1 microsievert/hr. However, parts such as gaskets were 0.2 to 0.5 microsievert/hr, and the intake port such as the root of wiper blades registered 1 to 2 microsievert/hr with just a swipe of dust from the area registering several thousand becquerels of radiation.
The total amount of radioactive contamination of this car is estimated to be several hundred to several million becquerels.
You should not let your children near such a place. You cannot just scrap or discard such cars. This car is already radioactive waste.
There is a movement to force local governments all over the nation to accept debris that has a similar level of radioactive contamination as this car. This absolutely needs to be stopped. Actual soil contamination measurements have revealed that areas from Iwate to the north to the entire Kanto area, Shizuoka, Nagano and Niigata to the south have exceeded what’s legally referred to as a “radiation controlled area”. (Aerial radiation survey results by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology are too low compared to the actual soil measurements.)
There is a movement to force local governments all over the nation to accept debris that has a similar level of radioactive contamination as this car. This absolutely needs to be stopped. Actual soil contamination measurements have revealed that areas from Iwate to the north to the entire Kanto area, Shizuoka, Nagano and Niigata to the south have exceeded what’s legally referred to as a “radiation controlled area”. (Aerial radiation survey results by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology are too low compared to the actual soil measurements.)
I hope more people evacuate the contaminated areas. Please, absolutely do not remove any contaminated objects from contaminate area. The twins have proven what would happen as a consequence.
I don’t want their pain to be in vain.
I will repeat one more time.
Get out of denial and recognize the contamination. And please protect yourself, your children and friends from contamination.
Decontamination is dangerous and at this point in time just meaningless.
First, evacuate. Or help evacuate others.
Anti-nuclear activities and new alternative energies can come after evacuation and recognition of the facts. That’s all you have to do.
If you do that, nuclear power plants will stop on their own. The development of alternative natural energy sources will advance on its own. If you don’t protect your own children now, when would you?
This country will not protect its own people.
You are the only one that can protect yourself
I am the only one that can protect myself.
I will defer such a thing as legal actions. I wrote what I really wanted to tell you here. I ask from the bottom of my heart…..
2011.12.20 kazu
2011.12.20 kazu
I feel for your pain. We are trying to do things here in the US. We are forming citizen groups and encouraging action, to form an international team to stop the disaster at Fukushima. I hope we can all together be successful at making a safe, nuke-free future.
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