Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on August 2011

I’m one of those people who didn’t leave Japan after the 3/11 Tohoku Earthquake. For a long time now I’ve learned not to believe anything governments or other official sources say (especially when their primary goal is saving face and hiding dirty secrets), but I sincerely believed the reassuring words of those independent sources who downplayed the risks of possible nuclear contamination. As my family lives in Yokohama, I rather naively felt we were at a rather safe distance from the Fukushima Ichi nuclear plant.

All this changed a couple of months ago when I began to hear about groups of parents organizing all over the Kanto region in order to force the national and local authorities to come clean about food and water contamination. Even my increasingly worried wife joined the Yokohama no Kodomotachi o Hoshano Kara Mamoru Kai (Group to Protect Yokohama Children from Radiation), a group founded in May by Toshiko Yasuda, a 41-year-old housewife, after she grew suspicious about the food her daughter was being served at her elementary school. To her surprise, the school authorities proved thoroughly uncooperative to her requests: they flatly refused to check the meat and milk the children consumed every day, saying that the food had been declared safe by the Yokohama City Council. In turn, the Yokohama City Council said it was simply following the government’s directives.

The same thing happened at the school my two sons attend, where the PTA simply relayed the school’s decisions without challenging its policy, and the schoolmaster even urged people not to talk about this subject because they risked causing undue stress in the poor children. It was clear that nobody wanted to rock the boat. Their main goal was to avoid taking any kind of responsibility. Faced with such a level of hypocrisy, my wife’s group even resorted to guerrilla tactics like taking samples of food off the school premises (prohibited under school rules) in order to get them analyzed by a laboratory.

What surprised us the most, though, were most parents’ herd mentality reaction to the group’s activity: not only did they show a complete lack of interest and sympathy, they labeled the activists a nuisance—if not downright troublemakers. Most of them seem to be afraid of the truth; they want to believe the authorities, probably because they think that they can’t change anything, anyway. Someone even reported the people who had taken the food from school premises, even though they were neighbors they had known for years. Their reasoning was that rules were rules—regardless of whether they actually made sense.

In the meantime, as you already know, the authorities have finally admitted that the meat of hundreds of infected cows from Fukushima has been sold to many prefectures, thus confirming people’s worst fears. Toshiko Yasuda was even featured on TV Asahi in July, and the whole grassroots movement finally seems to be getting the recognition it deserves.

I believe that allowing something to continue, which is bad and potentially harmful to human beings, is a crime. It might not be labeled as such by the law, but still, it is a morally wrong and despicable act. I hope with all my heart that all of these kids are going to live a long and healthy life. If something happens to them, though, or to their children, then all the people involved in this story—including the brainwashed and hypocritical parents—should finally and directly accept responsibility for their shortsightedness and their actions. In a more traditional time and era in Japan, one can’t help but wonder if the Bushido code of seppuku would be a suitable atonement.

Yokohama no Kodomotachi o Hoshano Kara Mamoru Kai (Group to Protect Yokohama Children from Radiation) website (in Japanese): www.freeml.com/yokohama_safe