The issue of food safety in the wake of 3.11 remains the subject of deep concern in Japan and abroad. In this article consumere policy specialist Martin J. Frid examines the question of risk in light of international standards on radiation. The Asia-Pacific Journal welcomes further discussion of radiation risk in food and all other realms. APJ

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, what can be said about Japan's food safety? Clearly, the issue continues to worry may people. Having worked in the field of consumer policy for over 15 years, I understand that contamination by radioactive substances is terrifying because it cannot be tasted, smelled or seen. Immediately after an accident like Chernobyl or Fukushima, many people are exposed to radioactivity through the air or by touching items that have been contaminated.

While much has been written recently on Okinawan emigration abroad, The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan: Crossing the Borders Within is the first book in English on the Okinawan diaspora in Japan. It draws on a two-year study in residence, 1999-2001, with follow-up research in 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008. For the purpose of this study, I defined Okinawans living on the mainland as anyone with at least one grandparent or two great-grandparents from Okinawa. The majority of respondents were either first-generation migrants or the children of two migrant parents. I conducted interviews, administered a survey questionnaire, and collected writings by and about Okinawans on the mainland.

The engineering of a series of provocations to justify military intervention is feasible and could be accomplished with the resources available. - Report of May 1963 to Joint Chiefs of Staff

On September 11, 2001, within hours of the murderous 9/11 attacks, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney had committed America to what they later called the “War on Terror.” It should more properly, I believe, be called the “Terror War,” one in which terror has been directed repeatedly against civilians by all participants, both states and non-state actors. It should also be seen as part of a larger, indeed global, process in which terror has been used against civilians in interrelated campaigns by all major powers, including China in Xinjiang and Russia in Chechnya, as well as the United States. Terror war in its global context should perhaps be seen as the latest stage of the age-long secular spread of transurban civilization into areas of mostly rural resistance – areas where conventional forms of warfare, for either geographic or cultural reasons, prove inconclusive.

“Though global safety standards kept on improving, we wasted our time coming up with excuses for why Japan didn't need to bother meeting them.” Madarame Haruki, Chairman, Nuclear Safety Commission, Diet testimony, 2/15/12

The nuclear accident at Fukushima was precipitated by natural disaster, but poor risk management, including a failure to comprehend tectonic risk in the most earthquake prone country in the world, and an institutionalized complacency about risk, were major factors increasing the likelihood of a major accident and fumbling crisis response. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the utility operating the Fukushima Daiichi Plant, and the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), the government regulatory authority, mismanaged a range of risks - siting, seismic, tsunami, emergency preparedness and radiation - and it is this mismanagement that made Fukushima into Japan's Chernobyl. Investigations into the accident have established that the crisis response was improvised and inadequate because of lack of preparation, institutional flaws in emergency procedures, and poor communication within the government and between officials and TEPCO.

The Fukushima nuclear accident spurred expectations in the Japanese public and around the world that Japan would pull the plug on nuclear energy. Indeed, in July 2011 Prime Minister Kan Naoto announced that he no longer believed that nuclear reactors could be operated safely in Japan because it is so prone to devastating earthquakes and tsunami; by May 2012 all of Japan's 50 viable reactors were shut down for safety inspections. Plans to boost nuclear energy to 50% of Japan's electricity generating capacity were scrapped and in 2012 the government introduced subsidies to boost renewable energy. Incredibly, an aroused public took to the streets in the largest display of activism since the turbulent 1960s as the summer of discontent featured numerous demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of anti-nuclear protestors. Moreover, public opinion polls indicate that more than 70% of Japanese want to phase out nuclear energy by 2030.

The challenges of nuclear proliferation, conflict and terrorism, poverty and inequality, climate change and the deteriorating environment, are inextricably linked in our current world, and can only be tackled by a broad and unified effort to achieve peace in its fullest sense. Yet the perception of peace is much less vivid in popular imagination than that of war, and the growing body of serious peace studies is less accessible than it should be. Peace is often written off - especially by war historians - as a difficult concept to define, as a dull subject compared to war, or simply as ‘the absence of war’, a mere interval between wars which are claimed to be the driving motor of history. In my new book, The Glorious Art of Peace: From the Iliad to Iraq, I argue to the contrary that from ancient times onwards there has been a rich discourse about the meaning of peace and how to secure it, that there is a wealth of ideas and debate which continues to be relevant, and that The Art of Peace is as complex as the Art of War. Human civilisation could not have developed without long periods of productive peace, which have allowed for the emergence of stable agriculture, the growth of urban society, and the expansion of peaceful trade and intercourse between societies. Peace, as the great humanist thinker Erasmus (1466-1536) put it, is ‘the mother and nurse of all that is good for man’.