hankyoreh

Li Tingting

By Li Tingting, associate professor of Korean studies at Peking University

The Japanese government made an official decision Tuesday to proceed with dumping contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the ocean. The US State Department immediately issued a statement indicating its support, saying that Tokyo had been “transparent” in its decision and adopted “an approach in accordance with globally accepted nuclear safety standards.”

This message stood in stark contrast with the widespread concerns and opposition emerging from the international community — and even from Japan’s own public.

The US is the world’s most influential country. Japan’s release of contaminated water from Fukushima into the ocean is a matter that stands to have a serious impact on the marine environment, food safety and human health. In that sense, the US ought to maintain a stance that is cautious, responsible and objective.

But the State Department’s statement is being seen as inappropriate in at least two respects.

First, it is ludicrous to claim that Japan has been “transparent” with its decision. The discharge of radioactively contaminated water into the ocean is a matter with direct bearing on the safety not just of Japan’s neighbors but of all the world’s countries.

Yet Japan has not provided prior notification to its neighbors, which have a major interest in the issue. Even after deciding to release the water, it has not shared adequate information about the contaminated water. This is why China, South Korea, Russia and North Korea have been so vocal with their protests.

What’s more, Japan has been claiming that it compared five different approaches to releasing the contaminated water — but because of the costs to businesses, it never even considered the approach of increasing the current contaminated water storage capacity.

Even within Japan, a sufficient consensus has not been reached on the rationality and legitimacy of this approach. You can’t call it a “transparent decision” simply because Japan announced that it had decided to dump the water and because it talked to the US about it beforehand.

The remarks about the approach being “in accordance with globally accepted nuclear safety standards” were also ill-considered.

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident is one of the most severe disasters to have ever occurred in the world. The uncertainties are all too great for us to apply the same standards for contaminated water produced from a normally functioning nuclear power plant.

While radioactive tritium has been drawing all the attention, scholars have also been saying that we should be paying attention to isotopes such as ruthenium-106, cobalt-60 and strontium-90, which can easily permeate marine organisms and sediment on the ocean floor.

It’s difficult to predict the effects of a massive discharge of carbon-14, which has a half-life of fully 5,700 years, and some have voiced concerns about other side effects such as distorting the accuracy of carbon-14 dating.

The pro-Japan bias that the US has shown in spite of all these comments is based on political and strategic considerations, and it also has to do with Japan’s diplomatic preparations. In addition, we should pay attention to the way that Japan has been framing things.

Japan has taken the ocean release of this radioactively contaminated water — a matter of global environmental health — and redefined it as a matter of economic costs and treatment technology. It has been transforming the discussion into an expertise and technology debate where the voices of a minority of countries and expert groups predominate, forging ahead with its plan with the support of the minority while shutting out the majority of direct stakeholders.

It’s a familiar sight to observers of Japanese diplomacy. We can see the most typical example of it in its handling of issues in the wake of World War II.

Referring to the example of World War I, Japan proposed to the US that issues related to its colonies should be handled through an equitable division of territory among parties to the hostilities. In the process, it laid the international law groundwork for the resolution of colonial rule and aggression issues with a unified framework of “postwar resolution.”

This approach combined with the US’ own regional strategy to form the structure for the Treaty of San Francisco and came to define the principles and direction of individual negotiations on the normalization of relations between Japan and its neighbors.

Within this frame, it became more difficult to resolve colonial issues such as military sexual slavery and forced labor conscription to gain attention. Even now, it remains a major obstacle to reconciliation and cooperation in Northeast Asia.

The ocean release of contaminated water from Fukushima is a matter on which the world’s environmental safety and our destiny as human beings hinge. One false step could have dire consequences.

No country has the right to unilaterally force through or support a decision that still has so many uncertainties associated with it — considering its own interests ahead of all else and using its own frame and voice to do an end run around the other stakeholders.

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