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2011 November 23 - 29 [NUCLEAR CRISIS]

Radiation scholar trapped in ‘glass cage’ for 17 years

Overcome discrimination and oppression (Part 5)

Anzai Ikuro, professor emeritus at Ritsumeikan University and well-known expert on radiation, was denied promotion from an assistant at the radioactive health control class at the University of Tokyo’s medical faculty for 17 years between 1969 and 1986. His experience was even reported in a weekly tabloid magazine under the headline “A Tokyo University assistant confined in a ‘glass cage’ for 17 years”.

Anzai looked back on the experience, saying, “No one spoke to me at the workplace. I was shut out from teaching tasks. I was told by the faculty head not to publish the results of my study without permissions.”

Research on disaster prevention

Anzai was among the first students of the atomic engineering department of the Tokyo University’s Engineering Faculty, the first such department in Japan established in 1962. It was founded to meet the government call to train engineers to promote nuclear energy. Ishida Hirohito, ex-vice minister of the Science and Technology Agency, was among Anzai’s classmates.

Anzai majored in radiation protection studies because he thought that the success or failure of atomic energy depended on control of radiation. His graduation thesis was on the study of disaster prevention at nuclear facilities. However, he gradually became suspicious that the nation’s nuclear energy policy was not one that entailed protecting residents’ safety.

In 1966, Anzai joined the Japan Scientists Association (JSA), a nationwide organization of scientists working for the independent, democratic, and integrated development of science, and he began to express his criticism of Japan’s nuclear energy policy.

In the first symposium on nuclear energy held by the Science Council of Japan (SCJ) in 1972, Anzai gave the keynote speech. He proposed six points as norms to judge whether the national policy on nuclear energy development was acceptable or not. He said that if it gives priority to economic interests rather than to guaranteeing safety and if there is no brakes put on the military use of such energy, that policy should be reviewed. In his speech, he gave a failing mark to Japan’s nuclear energy policy.

In 1973, he presented his opinions in the Diet. In a public hearing on a plan to construct the Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant, Anzai spoke against the planned construction on behalf of local residents concerned about the NPP’s safety.

Always watched and followed

The university system infringing on Anzai’s human rights was used to contain Anzai’s activities critical of national policy.

He recalled that when he gave any lecture off the campus, an “Anzai watcher” of an electric power company tailed him. His lecture would be tape-recorded, and the next day he would be blamed by the faculty head for having said something in his talk the day before.

An industrial doctor who had been sent to the university by the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) and whose desk was next to Anzai’s in a lab confessed later, “I was tasked to spy on and report what Anzai was doing.”

TEPCO once tried to take conciliatory measures towards Anzai by inviting him to accept a three-year all expenses paid study sabbatical in the United States with TEPCO covering all the expenses. However, Anzai rejected the offer, saying that he could conduct independent research without incurring high expenses. He then energetically applied himself to his research and became an acknowledged expert in his field.

Anzai said, “Such ways of making someone’s daily lives uncomfortable in order to make them change their minds or surrender is just the opposite of the thinking of scientific development based on free and critical inquiry. I really felt that the nation’s nuclear power establishment could not secure safety because it forbids researchers to speak freely.”

(To be continued)