Radiation & Food Map in Japan
■Project Overview
The Great East Japan Earthquake and the accident at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
in March 11, 2011 caused considerable damage and left the Japanese people with a deep
emotional scar.
In particular the nuclear power plant accident posed the fundamental question “Who owns
information?” The Japanese Government did not release information immediately after the
accident, and as a result many evacuees were unnecessarily exposed to radiation and the
differences in opinions about radiation exposure from various experts confused the Japanese
people. For example, one expert said “The radiation pollution is more serious than in the
Chernobyl accident” and others denied it. In a way, it is still not even clear whether the present
accident is more serious than the Chernobyl accident.
Four years after the accident, there are still about 230 thousands of evacuees (as of January
2015) and the contaminated water problem still remains. However, the accident seems to be
gradually disappearing from public awareness.
We tried to think about what we could do as citizens and came up with the idea of providing
third parties with food contamination condition information by developing software and using a
data visualization technique. Data provided by many public organizations are just texts and not
easy to understand intuitively. Our technique, on the other hand, uses a colored map to help
people grasp the information intuitively.
We would like to enable you to be able to quickly grasp the current situation using this site, and
then look into more detailed data if you wish, for example that in the database of the National
Institute of Public Health.
■Interactive map
The interactive map has two ‘world first’ characteristics.
One is that the map data contains more than one million test results (as of February 2015)
released by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and the investigation results of fish
around Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant released by TEPCO. In particular, most news
media have not reported the data from TEPCO, which are only presented on TEPCO’s site in a
difficult location to find.
Of course, people have the right to obtain these data. So I integrated the data from the Ministry
and those from TEPCO. The 10 highest radiation level foods are presented on the right of the
map and the reference of the data can be found on an information window of each list item.
The second characteristic of the map is that the reference levels of radioactive materials in
foods specified in various countries and organizations after the Chernobyl accident can be
compared with each other. After the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident some
said that Japan’s tentative reference level was too low, but actually no tools were available to
objectively overview the reference levels of different countries over the world.
To create the map, we tried to access primary data as far as we could and incorporated the
cesium reference value designated by each country or organization after the Chernobyl
accident. If these values are used to evaluate Japanese foods, we would be able to compare
the percentage of foods whose radiation level exceeds the world’s levels. Namely, if the
reference level is high, the area where the food’s radiation level exceeds the reference value
would become smaller (the red area would become smaller), and, if the reference level is low,
more foods would be specified as high radiation foods (the red area would become larger).
■■Future works
We collected comments from various experts to create the interactive map. Please let us know
if you find any problems, and we endeavor to correct them.
On the premise that information should be owned by citizens, we would like to continue to
transform primary data released by public organizations and companies
into an
easy-to-understand form and providing people with the data. We would appreciate your
support.
What is important here is that the data used to create the radiation and food map are released
on the Internet to the public. I just re-edited the data.
■Project Site
http://www.foodradiation.org/map/index_e.html
■Author
Yasushi Noguchi