Japanese food products became dangerous after Fukushima

The negative image around food produced in Japan has weighed heavily on the Japanese economy and on local producers who still struggle to make a living from their production, which nevertheless conforms with consumer standards.

While radioactive releases from the nuclear accident were significant at the beginning and had consequences on food production in the first year, they quickly became imperceptible, except at the margin and in rare exceptions (forest mushrooms, for example). [1]

In the years following the Fukushima accident, export of Japanese food products, especially fish, almost completely stopped [2]. The Japanese themselves increased their consumption of imported food products, due to the fear of contamination. Anti-nuclear associations and some countries bordering Japan have not hesitated to accentuate this fear, despite numerous and increasingly reassuring control measures. 

The draconian thresholds imposed by the Japanese health authorities are indeed much more restrictive than those applied in Europe [3] and agricultural production in the Fukushima region, which is now only sold locally, poses no risk to health. 

The Japanese authorities are generally tightening regulatory radioactivity thresholds, especially for baby food products, schools, vegetables, and many other consumer products, requiring local authorities to purchase new measuring instruments to detect unusually low thresholds.

The economic cost of the disaster seems difficult to assess. The Japanese government estimates the direct cost of the nuclear accident at around 170-177 billion euro (more than 20 trillion yen), doubling the numbers from 2013 due to additional costs for compensation, decontamination, and dismantling. Some estimates suggest a cost of $250 to $500 billion for abandoned cities and territories (about 800 km²). These estimates remain very conservative since they exclude the effects of speculation on the yen, the fall in consumer product exports, the sharp and lasting increase in fossil energy imports, the slowdown imposed on the economy, the decline in production due to energy retraction, and the decline in domestic consumption. 

It should be noted that in IRSN’s costing of what an accident like Fukushima could cost in France, they include reputation costs which amount to nearly 40% of the total [5]. This cost of reputation, the definition of which emphasizes it is not justified by the facts, has a lot to do with the way the tragedy of some is reported and publicized by others.