People often call me brave to evacuate Japan, but I haven’t found myself brave. It was just a rational decision. No bravery is needed to make a right decision. I think they need to be more brave to stay in Japan.
Rationally think, the only solution is to get out of Japan. No matter how many times you measure radiation, the radionuclide does not decay. Also, most of the radiation measurement of food is about only cesium, but nobody has measured actinoid, strontium and tritium in food. The possible symptom is not even known.
However, I was in Japan for 9 months. Because I had a lot of chance to touch the soil and work in dust, I’m aware that I was irradiated too. I even had the heart pain since Autumn. I recognize that fact that I might die in a few years. Dead cells of my heart will never come back alive. Now I’m living on the assumption that I will live only for another few years. Maybe not, maybe yes. If I don’t die, I’m just lucky.
I want to do my best before I leave this world.
On the other hand, most of the people don’t share this feeling with me. They keep trying to ignore the fact and forcing their family to take radiation risk.
Why ? That’s what I have been thinking, and many people want to know as well. Now that everyone knows how terrible Fukushima accident was / is, the mysterious mentality of Japanese needs to be explained.
To get the right answer, we need to ask the right question. It’s ..Why don’t Japanese (Everyone in Japan regardless of the DNA type.) escape? It is not why mass media cover up or why government manipulates. Mass media report what people want to see. Government manipulates all through the history. The answer is in people.
I made this model below to explain why Japanese people don’t escape. It’s an interaction to demotivate people to evacuate which consists of 4 elements.
<Elements>
1. Bias to underestimate the radiation risk
One average Japanese person would want to think Fukushima accident was nothing because he can’t sense radiation by any means. He has not experienced a nuclear disaster either. It might affect his life in 2 years or 5 years, but at this moment, there is no problem seemingly. He has a job, house, car, family, everything. He can never imagine his life outside of Japan. He wants to think nothing’s gona change his world.
2. Group mind
Whether mass media affects or not, once the average Japanese goes out of his house, he meets his neighbors, other salary man on the train. Everyone lives like normal because everyone else lives like normal. If something bad is really going on, they must evacuate too. He can just follow them, like everyone else.
3. Faith in penance
This is a unique sense of value for Japanese. They like to tortue themselves. They make an imaginary reward for the penance whatever it is and feel content to tortue themselves somehow. Working until midnight even though the company is not making any profit, commuting by the busiest train, setting millions of social taboo to blame each other for breaking it etc.. You see this “faith in penance” in every generation from 5 to 100 years old. They like to imagine they are training themselves through penance so they will be rewarded for the pain. It is not based on reality. This is just their pattern of thinking. It comes out in this logic, they set an imaginary reward for the painful ceremony. It needs two elements of imaginary reward and painful ceremony.
4. Financial problem
House mortgage, education loan, car loan, and living expense for everyday life. This is the issue of money strongly connected to the emotion of “fear”.
<Connections among the elements>
From Financial problem to Bias to underestimate the radiation risk
Fear from financial problem provokes bias for the reality. The fear is overestimated and the reality is underestimated. It makes people see their property bigger than actual and harder to rebuild in their new country. People are more used to worrying about money from their everyday life, drama and movies than radiation effect so financial fear triggers this circulation sooner than radiation risk.
From Bias to underestimate the radiation risk to Group mind
Now they underestimate the radiation risk but they want to justify themselves. They look for someone to do the same. If someone does not do the same, they pressure this person to do the same, to kill the fear.
They end up building their virtual reality among themselves. They check each other to confirm “I’m not going wrong”, just like self hypnosis.
From Group mind to Faith in Penance
To make their virtual reality more concrete, they stick to their traditional custom, such as camping in the Fukushima mountain for training or going to a hot spot for school trip etc..as if it would change the actual reality. In the logic of Faith in Penance, they set imaginary reward for their painful ceremony.
In this case, the ceremony is to repeat their traditional custom. Imaginary reward is to remove the radiation risk by training their body to be stronger for radiation or impressing god or heaven to clean up the contaminated world. Obsessive radiation measurement is one of these cases. Reward is to remove radiation from food imaginarily. Ceremony is to measure radiation of thousands of the items at a supermarket. The more painful it is, the more content they feel. They hold these kinds of ceremony like group enchantment.
From Faith in Penance to Financial problem
Through the ceremony, they end up overestimating their corporation activity or school activity. As a result, they overestimate their property as the output of their corporation activity or school activity. By overestimating the property, they relatively underestimate the potential risk of radiation.
This is how they become more blind and exclusive for the advice of outsiders to evacuate.
Iori Mochizuki