Near the end of World War II, the Japanese conducted Kamikaze or suicide attacks, designed to destroy warships more effectively than was possible with conventional attacks, against Allied naval vessels in the closing stages of the Pacific campaign. About 3,800 kamikaze pilots died, and fortunately, only a small percentage of kamikaze attacks managed to hit American ships.
Is the Kamikaze behavior alive and well in the 21st century in Japan?
Kamikaze Nuclear Disaster
Following a major earthquake, a huge tsunami disabled the power supply and cooling of three Fukushima Daiichi reactors, causing a nuclear accident in March 2011. All three cores largely melted in the first three days. Since then, over 80% of the radioactive water cooling the nuclear plant have been discharged into the Pacific Ocean.
Instead of trying to find solutions to contain radiation or finding ways to decontaminate the soil and water in Japan, one of the Japanese governors Nishikawa recently approved the restart of the No. 3 and No. 4 nuclear reactors at the plant in Fukui on the Sea of Japan, defying an injunction by the prefecture’s District Court that had been sought by residents living within about 60 miles of the nuclear facility. Knowing that roughly 300 or so big and small earthquakes hit Japan annually, is this government official crazy trying to destroy its own people and run the risk of spreading more radiation worldwide if another nuclear accident were to occur?
In recent months, Fukushima radiation has traveled across the Pacific. The level of radioactivity off the Canadian and American West coast is higher now than it has ever been, and the Japanese government and American mainstream press are scrambling to downplay the ever-increasing deadly threat that looms for millions of Americans and Canadians. According to professor Michio Aoyama of Japan’s Fukushima University Institute of Environmental Radioactivity, the amount of radiation from Fukushima that has now reached North America is probably nearly as much as was spread over Japan during the initial disaster. This has serious long-term implications to the contamination and therefore safety of eating any seafood from the Pacific Ocean.
