Enter/Exit: Japan

And I had so looked forward to it.

At the end of February, when most of the ”What the hell am I doing” had changed to ”Hell yes! I'm doing this”, I decided that I would spend the 4 weeks left until my departure to Japan in elatedness.

You see, the plan is/was a one year exchange to Toyama University, Takaoka campus, Toyama prefecture, Japan. Quite a mouthful.

The 4 weeks would be perfect to calmly organize all the things that still had to be done, all the while looking forward to something I had been planning to do for many years. On the 7^th of march I went to pick up my visa from the Japanese embassy in Helsinki. It was great. To have the words ”Have a nice trip!” directed at me has probably never felt quite as wonderful.

Then, the 11^th came along...
And with it a complete helplessness. I am an egoistic asshole of course, because it is my own helplessness that bothers me the most right now. Of course I feel sorry for the people who lost their lives as well as for those who are left behind. I feel terrible about all that was lost, cultural and personal, carried away by tremor and wave. But it seems too far away. So hard to really register for one tugged savely away in northern Europe. Except that, I might leave that 'safety' and enter what most people see as the 'danger'.

Not the danger of possible earthquakes or tsunamis, of course. Let's face it, if anybody is well equipped to deal with this, it's the Japanese. If I don't trust in anything else, I trust in that.

No, the danger is of course the Fukushima nuclear plant and the way it was damaged by the wave and has since then been in a precarious state. While over the first days following the quake there were only bad news followed by more bad news, for the last few days there has been a slight, very careful shift to a more positive outlook. Well, really very little improvements, unfortunately. 

Actually rather a stagnation, a movement nowhere. A suspension in nothing. A suspension in which I cannot move, in which I can look forward to nothing, in which I feel paralized to make any decision whatsoever.

What can I believe? How much information are we given? How great is the danger really? And how great in which parts of Japan specifically?

We are exposed to radiation every day. In Finland alone, according to the internet page of the STUK, the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority Finland, every Finn is exposed to 0,5 mSv (millisievert) per year. Other sources, the Reuters new agency for example, give as much as 2-3 mSv per person per year, generally. As explanation to the effects Reuters says further: ”For example, a single one sievert (1,000 mSv) dose causes radiation sickness such as nausea, vomiting, hemorrhaging, but not death. A single dose of 5 sieverts would kill about half of those exposed to it within a month.”

And: ”Exposure to 100 mSv a year is the lowest level at which any increase in cancer risk is clearly evident. A cumulative 1,000 mSv (1 sievert) would probably cause a fatal cancer many years later in five out of every 100 persons exposed to it.” 

(http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/us-japan-quake-radiation-idUSTRE72E14R20110315)

But what do you do with numbers like that? 5 out of 100 doesn't sound that much. How sure can one be, that those 5 actually really died of the radiation and not of smoking or something similarly unhealthy?

On the other hand there's of course the Tschernobyl accident and its effects. The deaths caused directly by the emitted radiation as well as the deaths following over many years to come. A number of mutations, cancers and other diseases so high that they cannot be attributed to anything else but the radiation.

But in the case of Fukushima its much harder to tell what the consequences will be. The ocean before the coast of the plant is positively glowing, and not from bioluminiscent creatures (there have been very high measures of radioation, acording to the German paper 'Sueddeutsche Zeitung and the New York Times) 

The amount of the radiation is supposedly going to be dispersing fast by water and wind, carried away to somewhere else. Well isn't that nice. A very typical human reaction – out of sight, out of mind. It will return in fish and other seafood, the rain, or when the wind doesn't carry it out to sea, but towards Tokyo. But it will return. And still nobody knows what exactly it will do. What the hell do you do with the information that ”in 50 years you might die of cancer”. Yes, well, with the world we live in, with the stuff we put in our food, and expose ourselves to otherwise and all the time, I might die of cancer in 50 years in any case! Or then I won't, because medicine might have found a much more effective cure. Or then everything has ended already until then; pick whatever you want.

Obviously I is hard to rely on numbers like that to make a decision.

I am definitely not defending nuclear power. I don't think that something, which leaves the kind of waste that has to be buried kilometres deep into the earth and left there for thousands of years until it is not dangerous anymore, has any right to be called 'sustainable'. But the sudden surge of indignation and the demand to shut down all nuclear reactors is just as unreasonable. With the amount of energy we consume every day that simply would not work. I do think that instead of building new nuclear power plants the money should rather go into researching truly sustainable alternatives until those alternatives finally become effective enough to take over and not be alternatives anymore, but the norm.

About the exchange... I could wait a year, go later. Discard all organization, try to get back the 800€ of my flight, apply for another visum, apply for supporting money anew, after discarding that which I should get starting next month. I would have to change the plans for my final work and my yet to be carried out practical trainings. There's more and yes I know, I'm back in egoistic mode.

To make the whole thing just a little more complicated I am getting hugely helpful comments from everybody around me, including pretty much anything from a shocked ”Oh god, I would never go in your place” to a ”Go hug the reactor for me”.

Thanks.

In the end I think I my be less worried about myself, than about the people around me.

Sometimes it feels that there is so much wrong with this world, but still I want to see it and experience as much of it as possible. I do care what happens to me in years to come, but still think that the time frame of 'Right Now' is the most important.

If nobody was there to care for me and cry for me, this might be easier. But then again I would not be here without those people, would not be who I am. I cannot and will not disregard their worries.

And even after this post, hardly more than just a rambling with way too little real information, the problem at hand still hasn't become any clearer. Not that I seriously expected it to. 

I am leaning towards going right now, while tomorrow morning it might again be the opposite.

I remain unsatisfyingly undecided.