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Forty-five plaintiffs, including fishermen who say they were exposed to radiation from U.S. hydrogen bomb tests near Bikini Atoll decades ago, are suing the Japanese government over the alleged cover-up of their suspected exposure.
The group is demanding 65 million yen ($602,000) together in the suit, filed at the Kochi District Court on May 9, including 2 million yen for each former crew member.
“We lost an opportunity to be compensated because the government deprived us of the chance to prove our exposure by ending the official investigation, with Japan and the United States closing the curtain on the issue through a political solution in 1955,” the plaintiffs said.
According to lawyers for the plaintiffs, this is apparently the first lawsuit over the damage Japanese fishermen who claimed to have suffered from the hydrogen bomb tests conducted by the United States around the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.
The group includes 23 former crew members and 20 relatives of deceased crew members from about 20 boats.
In a test conducted on the Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, the crew of the Fukuryu Maru No. 5, a tuna-fishing vessel from Shizuoka Prefecture, was subject to radioactive fallout near the atoll. The United States carried out five other hydrogen bomb tests from March to May that year.
After the first test, a total of 1,000 Japanese vessels were known to have traveled in waters surrounding the area by the end of 1954. Of those, 270 ships were believed to be from Kochi Prefecture.
Japan and the United States dealt with the Fukuryu Maru No. 5 issue politically, with the latter agreeing in January 1955 to pay $2 million as a token of sympathy.
In the court document, the plaintiffs argued that when the government investigated the incident before Tokyo and Washington reached the political settlement, it was aware that a total of 556 vessels had traveled in areas subject to radioactive fallout from the tests between March and May 1954.
But the government had kept its findings under wraps until it released them to a citizens group in Kochi Prefecture in 2014, the plaintiffs said. The group obtained the information through the information disclosure law.
“The information was deliberately kept from us,” said the plaintiffs in the filing. “It is beyond words to describe the extent of psychological damage and outrage of former crew members about how their health problems were neglected.”
The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare set up a task force in January last year to assess the cases of ships other than the Fukuryu Maru No. 5.
The ministry is expected to compile a report on its findings by the end of this month.
“We have not read the court document yet, so we want to refrain from commenting at this stage,” said an official with the ministry’s General Affairs Division of the Health Service Bureau.
The United States carried out 67 hydrogen bomb tests around the Bikini Atoll and Enewetak Atoll between 1946 and 1958.
(ASAHISHINBUM)
