The catch from six small fishing boats, the first to resume commercial fishing in the waters off Fukushima since last year’s nuclear catastrophe, went on sale at local supermarkets on Monday, raising hopes and concerns in a region struggling to return to something like normal.
For now, the catch is limited to octopus and whelk, a type of sea snail, because those species are thought to trap fewer radioactive particles in their bodies. Still, local residents said it was a milestone for a vital source of food and employment in the region.
The past year has been long and hard, but the thing is, I never once gave up on being a fisherman, Toru Takahashi, 57, said before sailing early Saturday from Matsukawa, about 30 miles north of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. But the fishermen’s hope to resume working the waters they fished for decades is causing unease all around. Experts say the effects of the disaster on the ocean are still not fully understood.
Hours before the boats set out, the central government hastily banned Fukushima’s fishermen from selling 36 types of fish other than octopus and whelk. Until then, there had been no explicit ban on fishing near Fukushima, because the region’s fishermen had voluntarily suspended work after the tsunami and nuclear disaster. In return, they have received about $125 million from the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power.
We are not opposed to fishermen in Fukushima starting to fish again, if they can show that what they are catching does not contain high levels of radiation, said Yasunobu Matsui, a government food safety official. We just don’t want them to make a mistake and catch the wrong kind.
Japan is still grappling with the effects of the meltdowns and other problems at the plant, which led to the largest accidental release of radioactive material into the sea on record. Levels of radioactive cesium off the coast peaked at more than 100,000 becquerels per cubic meter in early April about 100 times higher than the peak levels detected in the Black Sea after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, according to a study led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
What that means for sea life is far from clear, Mr. Matsui said. Away from the immediate area of the plant, the radiation is too diffuse to pose an immediate risk to human health, but experts worry that radioactive material will accumulate in the marine food chain.
Radiation levels in some fish exceed the government’s safety limits of 100 becquerels a kilogram, including one bottom-dwelling poacher fish that registered 690 becquerels a kilogram in April. But other sea produce show negligible radiation readings, including octopus and sea snails caught by fishermen from Soma.
Given that Japan has the highest seafood consumption rate in the world, understanding concentrations and assimilation in marine biota is an important task, Ken Buesseler, a marine chemist who led the Woods Hole study, wrote in the journal Environmental Science and Technology last fall.
Fishermen in Fukushima are desperate to get back to work. Mr. Takahashi, the fisherman, who lost his old trawler to the tsunami, said he worked all year to obtain another, the Myojinmaru.
On Saturday, those sailing the Myojinmaru and five other boats chose a spot about 30 miles offshore where radioactivity was thought to be adequately diluted. They returned 15 hours later to deliver buckets of octopus and sea snails to a Soma fish market still largely in ruins, with much of its roof gone, carried away by the tsunami. Tests found no radioactivity in their catch.
Fusayuki Nambu, who heads the local Soma-Futaba fishing cooperative, said another run was planned for Wednesday, and after that, officials would draw up more detailed fishing plans.
We’re still fearful, because we do not have any guarantee that anyone will ever buy fish from Fukushima again, he said. But we can’t stay idle forever.
It is unclear whether a public that is jittery about radiation generally will trust fish caught off Fukushima. Many Japanese are wary of the government’s assurances about test results, and Tokyo Electric has made people more suspicious by refusing to let independent experts survey waters inside the roughly 12-mile exclusion zone around the plant.
2012 The New York Times Company