Some Parents Fleeing Tokyo
Apparently, there's a growing trend in Japan for anxious people- especially parents- to move as far south as they can get, hoping to escape the radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Government standards for “safe” radiation exposure are based solely on external sources of radiation, but fail to consider internal sources such as drinking contaminated tap water. As a result, there's really no way for anyone to know whether or not Tokyo and other cities closer to Fukushima are actually safe in the long term.
In an attempt to get as far as possible from the scene of the disaster in order to minimize exposure to radiation through tap water and other sources, people have been moving as far south as Okinawa, where there are not enough jobs for all the newcomers. In some cases, husbands have stayed behind in Tokyo to work while wives and children have gone down to Okinawa to live. It is unclear how many people have been leaving Tokyo and moving south, but the trend is significant enough to have been covered in the Japan Times, the primary English-language newspaper in Japan.
Because the dangers of radiation are not easy to quantify, there may never be a way to say for certain whether or not moving south will make any difference. Cancer cases may increase in Tokyo and other cities in the coming years, or they may not, and cancer rates may be effected by many factors other than radiation exposure. Still, the fact that people are fleeing Tokyo represents a huge vote of no-confidence in the government's handling of the crisis.










