– 20-year-old documentary foreshadows Fukushima: Men picked up in slums of Tokyo to go work at nuclear plants — Many become ill with radiation sickness — Too frightened to speak out (VIDEO) (ENENews, Jan 19, 2014):
Channel 4 (UK) ‘Nuclear Ginza’ Part I, Kenji Higuchi, 1995:
At 1:00 in
Kazuyuki Iwasa, nuclear worker: The diagnosis was “radio dermatitis secondary lymphedema”
Kenji Higuchi, photographer: How long did you work in the nuclear plant?
Iwasa: Two and a half hours.
At 2:00 in
Higuchi: I stumbled upon these stories as a young photographer 20 years ago, it changed my life. The scenes I saw, the stories I heard, I found them difficult to believe at first, like workers go near the reactor and get exposed and that many of them become ill with radiation sickness and sometimes die. Or that these people are farmers or fisherman or even laborers picked off the street in the slums of Osaka and Tokyo. But when I started looking, I found so many of these people, people who didn’t know what had happened to them, or if they did, too frightened to speak out. The thing that struck me was that all their stories were the same. […] People simply don’t believe this could happen in a country like Japan.
