Frank Wild was the right-hand man to Sir Ernest Shackleton, joining him on several of his Antarctic expeditions. But is he finally stepping out of the great explorer's shadow, as his ashes make a poignant journey south?
Almost 100 years ago, the famous polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton set out to try to be the first to cross Antarctica.
He failed, but his ill-fated expedition on the Endurance, which began in 1914, is now seen as one of history's greatest stories of survival and leadership.
But while much has been written about Shackleton, his second-in-command on that voyage, a Yorkshireman called Frank Wild, has been largely overlooked by history. At least, until now.
Wild's relatives recently accompanied him on his final journey to Antarctica, as they took his ashes to South Georgia, to rest next to the grave of Shackleton, the man he affectionately referred to as "the boss".
The 18-day voyage retraced the disastrous Endurance expedition and ended in a final reunion of two great polar explorers.
The two men shared several trips to Antarctica, including the Nimrod expedition in 1907-09 which brought them to within 100 miles of the South Pole, a record at the time.
But within weeks of setting sail in early 1915, the Endurance was trapped in ice and 10 months later it was crushed, a moment recounted by Wild in his recently re-published polar memoirs.
"It was a sickening sensation to feel the decks breaking up under one's feet, the great beams bending and snapping with a noise of heavy gun fire…
"Shackleton was on the lookout platform and everybody else in the tents when we heard him shout, 'She's going boys!'
"Running out, we were just in time to see the stern of the Endurance rise and then a quick dive and all was over… I felt as if I had lost an old friend."
Among those on board the Akademik Ioffe, the former Russian research vessel retracing the voyage, was Alexandra Shackleton, who spoke touchingly about the relationship between her famous grandfather and Frank Wild.
"My grandfather was once asked to describe various members of his expedition team, and he was quite rude about some of them.
"But he said: 'There is nothing to say about Frank Wild, he is my other self.'"
Wild's relatives, Julie George and Brian and Martin Francis, described their great uncle as a small man, about 5ft 4in (1.65m) with piercing blue eyes and an expansive chest.He was also a great disciplinarian, with a good baritone voice and a love of music. His favourite sea shanty was "What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?" and he introduced the family to the song's rude verses as well.
Wild's love of music was to serve him well when the Endurance ran into trouble.
Having retrieved a banjo, and smuggled out a bottle of whisky from their sinking ship, he organised concerts - complete with liquid refreshment - to try to keep the crew's spirits up when they were forced to camp on the ice.
But faced with such extreme conditions, morale did not remain high for long. Cracks appeared in the camp and the ice began to melt.
The men realised they had no choice but to take to the sea in lifeboats in the hope of making it to Elephant Island, off the coast of Antarctica, across some of the most dangerous seas in the world.
From the deck of the Akademik Ioffe, Elephant Island looks savage - a row of snow-covered peaks rising perpendicularly out of the sea. It is too rough to land, which provides a sober reminder of the dangers Shackleton's men faced in lifeboats nearly 100 years ago.
But somehow they made it. After Shackleton and five crew members set off to seek rescue, Wild was left in charge of 21 men in temperatures as low as -45C (-49F).
They lived under two upturned boats and their meals consisted of raw seals and seaweed.
Shackleton managed to make it to South Georgia, a journey of around 800 miles.
But he landed on the wrong side of the island and was forced to scale a mountain range, that no-one had ever climbed before, to get to a whaling station at Stromness - all in the hope that someone would be there.
Dogs barked and children ran away, says Alexandra Shackleton. The whalers knew Shackleton but did not recognise him because he was so thin and his face had been blackened by the seal blubber the crew had used as fuel for a makeshift stove.
"When the manager realised who he was, he turned away and wept. Everyone had assumed the expedition members had died."
Shackleton returned to rescue Wild and his men - although it did take him four attempts.
It was Wild's wish to be laid to rest alongside Shackleton and seven years ago a plan to fulfil that hope began to take shape.Angie Butler, author of The Quest for Frank Wild, discovered his ashes in South Africa, where he was a farmer after World War I, and made it her mission to bring them "home". This made the Wild family trip to South Georgia possible.
Shackleton's grave is in one of the most desolate places in the world, the disused whaling station of Grytviken.
It is marked by a massive slab of granite and lies in a small whalers' cemetery surrounded by a white picket fence - to keep the seals and penguins out. The whaling station resembles a scrap metal yard, full of disintegrating buildings and whaling boats that have been left to rust on the shingle shore.
Butler hands the casket symbolically to Julie George who places it in the ground.
Wild's granite ledger reads: "Frank Wild, 19 April 1873 - 19 August 1939, Shackleton's right-hand man."
As the two great explorers are reunited for a final time, the ship's horn sounds, echoing across the bay below.
While all the other graves in the cemetery point east, Shackleton's and Wild's look south, to Antarctica where, on the Akademik Ioffe a few days later, the towering, blue icebergs form a lake of glinting ice sculptures.
In the distance, there is a rumble as a tiny fragment of a massive glacier tumbles into the sea.
This is a place where man has no real influence, where nature takes its course, and where, when we go ashore, ours will be the only footprints.
"Once you have been to the white unknown, you can never escape the call of the little voices," wrote Wild.
I know now what he meant. I think I can hear those little voices too.
Friday, December 30, 2011
China: Tens of thousands of ruins 'disappear' - BBC 30 Dec 2011
China says about 44,000 ancient ruins, temples and other cultural sites have disappeared.
That's the conclusion of the country's first heritage census for more than 20 years.
About a quarter of the sites that remain are in a poor state of repair.
Explaining the results, an official quoted by Chinese state media said many such sites were unprotected and had been demolished to make way for construction projects
The census, carried out by China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage, recorded the registration of 700,000 heritage sites.
Liu Xiaohe, deputy director of the survey, told state media that economic construction was the most important reason for the damage to cultural relics.
In the worst-affected region, Shaanxi province, which is the home of the terracotta warriors, the statistics indicate that more than 3,500 cultural sites have vanished.
No specific buildings or monuments were named in the census.
Correspondents say that even the iconic Great Wall of China has been threatened by erosion and unauthorised development, as conservation rules are flouted by hikers and exploited by local villagers who charge their own admission fees.
Two years ago a Qin Dynasty part of the Great Wall was said to have been damaged by miners who knocked holes in it while prospecting for gold
That's the conclusion of the country's first heritage census for more than 20 years.
About a quarter of the sites that remain are in a poor state of repair.
Explaining the results, an official quoted by Chinese state media said many such sites were unprotected and had been demolished to make way for construction projects
The census, carried out by China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage, recorded the registration of 700,000 heritage sites.
Liu Xiaohe, deputy director of the survey, told state media that economic construction was the most important reason for the damage to cultural relics.
In the worst-affected region, Shaanxi province, which is the home of the terracotta warriors, the statistics indicate that more than 3,500 cultural sites have vanished.
No specific buildings or monuments were named in the census.
Correspondents say that even the iconic Great Wall of China has been threatened by erosion and unauthorised development, as conservation rules are flouted by hikers and exploited by local villagers who charge their own admission fees.
Two years ago a Qin Dynasty part of the Great Wall was said to have been damaged by miners who knocked holes in it while prospecting for gold
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Human zoos: When real people were exhibits By Hugh Schofield 27 Dec 2011
Human zoos: When real people were exhibitsBy Hugh Schofield
BBC News, Paris
An exhibition in Paris looks at the history of so-called human zoos, that put inhabitants from foreign lands, mostly African countries, on display as article of curiosity.
Over four centuries from the first voyages of discovery, European societies developed an appetite for exhibiting exotic human "specimens" shipped back to Paris, London or Berlin for the interest and delectation of the crowd.
What started as wide-eyed curiosity on the part of observers turned into ghoulish pseudo-science in the mid-1800s, as researchers sought out physical evidence for their theory of races.
Finally, in high colonial times, hundreds of thousands of people visited "human zoos" created as part of the great international trade fairs.
Here they could watch whole villages of Kanaks or Senegalese, with real-life inhabitants paid to act out war dances or religious rituals before their colonial masters.
The story is told at the Quai Branly museum in Paris until June 2012, mainly through the display of paintings, old photographs, archive film, posters and postcards.
The aim of the exhibition is explicit - to teach how Western societies created a sense of "the other" in regard to foreign peoples, thus legitimising their eventual domination.
Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
The information allows people to understand why there are still faultlines in society based on the colour of our skins."”
End Quote
Ex-footballer Liliane Thuram
"What we tried to do is conduct a kind of archaeology of the stereotype," says curator Nanette Snoep.
The display, entitled "Inventing the Savage", was the inspiration of the Caribbean-born former international footballer Liliane Thuram, who today heads his own anti-racism foundation.
"I have long been interested in slavery because of the way my own family was affected by it," says Thuram.
"It became clear to me that racism was above all an intellectual construction. And as such, it was also susceptible to de-construction.
"That's what we are trying to do with the exhibition: putting on display the information that allows people to understand why there are still faultlines in society based on the colour of our skins."
At the start, all was relatively innocent. One of the first paintings is of four Greenlanders brought to the Danish court in 1664 by a Dutch sailor. They stare out with a look as bewildered as those that must have been on the faces of their captors.
"What is fascinating is that on top of the painting are written their names. In other words, at this early stage they are seen as individuals. Exotic yes, but people," says Snoep. "It is later when the names disappear that the relationship deteriorates."
Another early portrait is of the Tahitian man called Omai, who was brought to the court of King George III in London by the explorer Joseph Banks.
In his book The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes describes Omai as "quick-witted, charming and astute. His exotic good looks… were much admired in society, especially among the more racy of the aristocratic ladies."
But describing this same portrait, Holmes adds: "It is not clear if [Omai] is Banks's companion or his trophy."
Guest or specimen? If there was room for ambiguity in the early days - when explorers and explored often found each other mutually intriguing - this disappeared with the new certainties of the colonial epoch.
The saddest emblem of the coming era was the South African Saartjie Baartman, later to be known as the Hottentot Venus. Born around 1780, she was brought to London in 1810 and put on display.
She had the genetic characteristic known as steatopygia - extremely protuberant buttocks and elongated labia - which evidently delighted the cabaret-goers of the British capital.
Later she came to Paris, and was analysed by the budding racial anthropologists. According to the exhibition catalogue, one scientist described her as having the "buttocks of a mandrill".
When she died in poverty, her skeleton was put on display. It remained on show in the Museum of Mankind in Paris until 1974. In 2002, her remains were repatriated and buried in South Africa.
"Baartman marks the start of the period of description, measurement and classification, which soon leads us to hierarchisation - the idea that there are lesser and greater races," says Snoep.
The climax of the story comes with the imperialist high noon of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
A European public fed on notions of Christian evangelism and cultural superiority was titillated by re-enactments of life in the colonies which became a regular part of international trade fairs.
Entrepreneurs put on travelling stage shows featuring Hindu rope-dancers, Arabian camel-herders, Zulu warriors or hunters from New Caledonia. Whole African villages were recreated to allow Europeans a glimpse of "primitive" living.
The most famous impresario was "Buffalo Bill" Cody whose Wild West shows - according to the exhibition organisers - were another example of racial stereotyping.
Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
The story helps explain how millions of westerners were manipulated into a belief in the inequality of races”
End Quote
Voiceover on Inventing the Savage
Some 35,000 people are reckoned to have taken part in the displays. Most were paid.
"They were shows. Public entertainment. The villagers from Africa or India were acting out a role. Significantly there were barriers between the public and the performers, to reinforce the notion of separateness," says Snoep.
These ethnographic displays died out after World War II. Oddly it was Hitler who first banned them. The last was in Belgium in 1958.
The organisers of Inventing the Savage claim that these "human zoos" were seen by 1.4 billion people overall - and that they therefore played an important, and so far unacknowledged, part in the development of modern racism.
"What is left of this incredible story today?" intones the voice-over on a film which is part of the exhibition.
"A view of Africa and its people that is still contemptuous. A certain way in the West of believing oneself superior. Above all the story helps explain how millions of westerners were manipulated into a belief in the inequality of races."
Inventing the Savage provides plenty of food for thought, and there is no-one alive today who would for a minute defend the practice of human ethnographic exhibitions.
The show has been well-received but has come into some criticism for what some see as its heavy-handed didacticisim - as well as a kind of historical cherry-picking that leaves out what does not fit the message.
There is no mention for example of what the human "exhibits" themselves thought when brought to Europe. They are presented as victims, nothing more. Nor are the reactions of the audience explored. Maybe these were more complex than mere colonial self-satisfaction.
Writing in the left-wing newspaper Libération, columnist Marcela Iacub detects in the show "the frankly conservative role… of militant anti-racists and the consensus that they seek to create."
The spirit of the exhibition, she says, is a kind of "censorship, accompanied by the promotion of pedagogical, uplifting messages that will eradicate in us all those dangerous ideas that survive."
Iacub says it is ironic that it was just that kind of misguided moral superiority - the need to improve the unenlightened - that led to Europeans colonising Africa in the first place.
"In the eyes of the militant anti-racist, we are all violent, easily manipulated, barbarous, bloodthirsty, and incapable of thinking without the aid of people to teach us. In fact just like the 'savage' of old!"
BBC News, Paris
An exhibition in Paris looks at the history of so-called human zoos, that put inhabitants from foreign lands, mostly African countries, on display as article of curiosity.
Over four centuries from the first voyages of discovery, European societies developed an appetite for exhibiting exotic human "specimens" shipped back to Paris, London or Berlin for the interest and delectation of the crowd.
What started as wide-eyed curiosity on the part of observers turned into ghoulish pseudo-science in the mid-1800s, as researchers sought out physical evidence for their theory of races.
Finally, in high colonial times, hundreds of thousands of people visited "human zoos" created as part of the great international trade fairs.
Here they could watch whole villages of Kanaks or Senegalese, with real-life inhabitants paid to act out war dances or religious rituals before their colonial masters.
The story is told at the Quai Branly museum in Paris until June 2012, mainly through the display of paintings, old photographs, archive film, posters and postcards.
The aim of the exhibition is explicit - to teach how Western societies created a sense of "the other" in regard to foreign peoples, thus legitimising their eventual domination.
Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
The information allows people to understand why there are still faultlines in society based on the colour of our skins."”
End Quote
Ex-footballer Liliane Thuram
"What we tried to do is conduct a kind of archaeology of the stereotype," says curator Nanette Snoep.
The display, entitled "Inventing the Savage", was the inspiration of the Caribbean-born former international footballer Liliane Thuram, who today heads his own anti-racism foundation.
"I have long been interested in slavery because of the way my own family was affected by it," says Thuram.
"It became clear to me that racism was above all an intellectual construction. And as such, it was also susceptible to de-construction.
"That's what we are trying to do with the exhibition: putting on display the information that allows people to understand why there are still faultlines in society based on the colour of our skins."
At the start, all was relatively innocent. One of the first paintings is of four Greenlanders brought to the Danish court in 1664 by a Dutch sailor. They stare out with a look as bewildered as those that must have been on the faces of their captors.
"What is fascinating is that on top of the painting are written their names. In other words, at this early stage they are seen as individuals. Exotic yes, but people," says Snoep. "It is later when the names disappear that the relationship deteriorates."
Another early portrait is of the Tahitian man called Omai, who was brought to the court of King George III in London by the explorer Joseph Banks.
In his book The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes describes Omai as "quick-witted, charming and astute. His exotic good looks… were much admired in society, especially among the more racy of the aristocratic ladies."
But describing this same portrait, Holmes adds: "It is not clear if [Omai] is Banks's companion or his trophy."
Guest or specimen? If there was room for ambiguity in the early days - when explorers and explored often found each other mutually intriguing - this disappeared with the new certainties of the colonial epoch.
The saddest emblem of the coming era was the South African Saartjie Baartman, later to be known as the Hottentot Venus. Born around 1780, she was brought to London in 1810 and put on display.
She had the genetic characteristic known as steatopygia - extremely protuberant buttocks and elongated labia - which evidently delighted the cabaret-goers of the British capital.
Later she came to Paris, and was analysed by the budding racial anthropologists. According to the exhibition catalogue, one scientist described her as having the "buttocks of a mandrill".
When she died in poverty, her skeleton was put on display. It remained on show in the Museum of Mankind in Paris until 1974. In 2002, her remains were repatriated and buried in South Africa.
"Baartman marks the start of the period of description, measurement and classification, which soon leads us to hierarchisation - the idea that there are lesser and greater races," says Snoep.
The climax of the story comes with the imperialist high noon of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
A European public fed on notions of Christian evangelism and cultural superiority was titillated by re-enactments of life in the colonies which became a regular part of international trade fairs.
Entrepreneurs put on travelling stage shows featuring Hindu rope-dancers, Arabian camel-herders, Zulu warriors or hunters from New Caledonia. Whole African villages were recreated to allow Europeans a glimpse of "primitive" living.
The most famous impresario was "Buffalo Bill" Cody whose Wild West shows - according to the exhibition organisers - were another example of racial stereotyping.
Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
The story helps explain how millions of westerners were manipulated into a belief in the inequality of races”
End Quote
Voiceover on Inventing the Savage
Some 35,000 people are reckoned to have taken part in the displays. Most were paid.
"They were shows. Public entertainment. The villagers from Africa or India were acting out a role. Significantly there were barriers between the public and the performers, to reinforce the notion of separateness," says Snoep.
These ethnographic displays died out after World War II. Oddly it was Hitler who first banned them. The last was in Belgium in 1958.
The organisers of Inventing the Savage claim that these "human zoos" were seen by 1.4 billion people overall - and that they therefore played an important, and so far unacknowledged, part in the development of modern racism.
"What is left of this incredible story today?" intones the voice-over on a film which is part of the exhibition.
"A view of Africa and its people that is still contemptuous. A certain way in the West of believing oneself superior. Above all the story helps explain how millions of westerners were manipulated into a belief in the inequality of races."
Inventing the Savage provides plenty of food for thought, and there is no-one alive today who would for a minute defend the practice of human ethnographic exhibitions.
The show has been well-received but has come into some criticism for what some see as its heavy-handed didacticisim - as well as a kind of historical cherry-picking that leaves out what does not fit the message.
There is no mention for example of what the human "exhibits" themselves thought when brought to Europe. They are presented as victims, nothing more. Nor are the reactions of the audience explored. Maybe these were more complex than mere colonial self-satisfaction.
Writing in the left-wing newspaper Libération, columnist Marcela Iacub detects in the show "the frankly conservative role… of militant anti-racists and the consensus that they seek to create."
The spirit of the exhibition, she says, is a kind of "censorship, accompanied by the promotion of pedagogical, uplifting messages that will eradicate in us all those dangerous ideas that survive."
Iacub says it is ironic that it was just that kind of misguided moral superiority - the need to improve the unenlightened - that led to Europeans colonising Africa in the first place.
"In the eyes of the militant anti-racist, we are all violent, easily manipulated, barbarous, bloodthirsty, and incapable of thinking without the aid of people to teach us. In fact just like the 'savage' of old!"
Obituary: Vaclav Havel Vaclav Havel: Engineer of the Velvet Revolution - BBC 18 Dec 2011
For Vaclav Havel, and for his people, everything changed in 1989, the year of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, when he led the extraordinary display of people power which toppled the ruling communist regime.
The world watched with astonishment as, within weeks, the dissident playwright became president.
Vaclav Havel was born in 1936. His father was a successful engineer and, by his own admission, young Vaclav was a pampered child from a wealthy family.
Drama critic
But when the communists came to power he saw his family lose everything.
The new government decided the young Havel was "too bourgeois" to be allowed a secondary education.
He organised one for himself, studying at night school, while working as a laboratory technician during the day.
The year 1968 brought the Prague Spring led by Alexander Dubcek, the first flowering of reform and of hope for Czechoslovakia.
Havel, now a successful playwright, could openly criticise old guard Stalinists, satirising them in drama, which won instant worldwide acclaim.
But the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia crushed the dreams of Havel and his generation. Suddenly, his work was banned in his homeland.
He produced a series of one-act plays, which had to be performed in private homes. His underground theatre was steeped in politics, and yet Havel denied he was anything other than an artist.
Famous dissident
"I never wanted to be a political writer," he once said. "I think that good writers and good art and particularly, good theatre, is always political, not because writers and directors want to be political, but because it is something which is in the substance of theatre."
A few years later he helped found the Charter 77 movement for democratic change. By now, Vaclav Havel had become Czechoslovakia's most famous dissident.
Jailed for the alleged crime of "anti-state activity", he was kept under constant surveillance by the secret police, even when he was out of prison.
But by the end of 1989, Havel found himself discussing the future of the nation with the very people who had sent him to jail. The Communist Party was disintegrating, and democracy was taking its place.
After the 18 days of peaceful demonstrations and strikes that became known as the Velvet Revolution, the communist government was brought down.
The Velvet Revolution takes hold in 1989
In a solemn service at Prague's Roman Catholic cathedral in December 1989, Havel was duly installed as head of state. The prisoner-turned-president said afterwards that he had never felt so absurd.
Unlike previous eastern European leaders, he was refreshingly open, some would say eccentric, on occasions travelling around his vast palace on a child's scooter.
A fan of rock music, he made the American musician Frank Zappa an honorary cultural ambassador.
Havel's country divided
But the fairy tale soon went sour. Slovakian nationalists campaigned for, and won, independence. Havel's beloved country was divided into two and he was shouted down by demonstrators.
Commenting that "after every party there's a hangover", Havel resigned the presidency, only to be re-elected leader of the new Czech Republic a few months later, in January 1993.
He presided over the painful transition from communism to capitalism. Industry was privatised en masse. Foreign firms like Volkswagen started taking over and Havel criticised the corruption that accompanied the sale of huge state assets.
In his later years, Vaclav Havel was beset by bad health. He had part of a lung removed during surgery for cancer and had a number of serious bouts of pneumonia.
After stepping down at the end of his second term as president in 2003, he devoted time to supporting human rights activists around the world.
Havel also returned to writing and published a new play, Leaving, which premiered in 2008. He then, at the age of 74, made his debut as a film director, adapting Leaving for the cinema earlier this year.
He was uncomfortable with pomp and ceremony
And while he was shut out of day-to-day politics by shrewder Czech politicians, Vaclav Havel was still feted around the world as a much-admired, if rather nervous, ambassador for his country and never a natural professional politician.
Havel was uncomfortable with the pomp and ceremony which surrounded him. He longed to return to full-time writing which was, perhaps, why his people so loved and respected him.
This, after all, was the man who had not only helped destroy communist rule, but who had managed to do so without bloodshed.
The world watched with astonishment as, within weeks, the dissident playwright became president.
Vaclav Havel was born in 1936. His father was a successful engineer and, by his own admission, young Vaclav was a pampered child from a wealthy family.
Drama critic
But when the communists came to power he saw his family lose everything.
The new government decided the young Havel was "too bourgeois" to be allowed a secondary education.
He organised one for himself, studying at night school, while working as a laboratory technician during the day.
The year 1968 brought the Prague Spring led by Alexander Dubcek, the first flowering of reform and of hope for Czechoslovakia.
Havel, now a successful playwright, could openly criticise old guard Stalinists, satirising them in drama, which won instant worldwide acclaim.
But the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia crushed the dreams of Havel and his generation. Suddenly, his work was banned in his homeland.
He produced a series of one-act plays, which had to be performed in private homes. His underground theatre was steeped in politics, and yet Havel denied he was anything other than an artist.
Famous dissident
"I never wanted to be a political writer," he once said. "I think that good writers and good art and particularly, good theatre, is always political, not because writers and directors want to be political, but because it is something which is in the substance of theatre."
A few years later he helped found the Charter 77 movement for democratic change. By now, Vaclav Havel had become Czechoslovakia's most famous dissident.
Jailed for the alleged crime of "anti-state activity", he was kept under constant surveillance by the secret police, even when he was out of prison.
But by the end of 1989, Havel found himself discussing the future of the nation with the very people who had sent him to jail. The Communist Party was disintegrating, and democracy was taking its place.
After the 18 days of peaceful demonstrations and strikes that became known as the Velvet Revolution, the communist government was brought down.
The Velvet Revolution takes hold in 1989
In a solemn service at Prague's Roman Catholic cathedral in December 1989, Havel was duly installed as head of state. The prisoner-turned-president said afterwards that he had never felt so absurd.
Unlike previous eastern European leaders, he was refreshingly open, some would say eccentric, on occasions travelling around his vast palace on a child's scooter.
A fan of rock music, he made the American musician Frank Zappa an honorary cultural ambassador.
Havel's country divided
But the fairy tale soon went sour. Slovakian nationalists campaigned for, and won, independence. Havel's beloved country was divided into two and he was shouted down by demonstrators.
Commenting that "after every party there's a hangover", Havel resigned the presidency, only to be re-elected leader of the new Czech Republic a few months later, in January 1993.
He presided over the painful transition from communism to capitalism. Industry was privatised en masse. Foreign firms like Volkswagen started taking over and Havel criticised the corruption that accompanied the sale of huge state assets.
In his later years, Vaclav Havel was beset by bad health. He had part of a lung removed during surgery for cancer and had a number of serious bouts of pneumonia.
After stepping down at the end of his second term as president in 2003, he devoted time to supporting human rights activists around the world.
Havel also returned to writing and published a new play, Leaving, which premiered in 2008. He then, at the age of 74, made his debut as a film director, adapting Leaving for the cinema earlier this year.
He was uncomfortable with pomp and ceremony
And while he was shut out of day-to-day politics by shrewder Czech politicians, Vaclav Havel was still feted around the world as a much-admired, if rather nervous, ambassador for his country and never a natural professional politician.
Havel was uncomfortable with the pomp and ceremony which surrounded him. He longed to return to full-time writing which was, perhaps, why his people so loved and respected him.
This, after all, was the man who had not only helped destroy communist rule, but who had managed to do so without bloodshed.
How Germany's feared Scharnhorst ship was sunk in WWIIBy Claire Bowes BBC 26 Dec 2011
On 26 December 1943 one of the great sea battles of World War II took place.
Germany's most famous battleship - the Scharnhorst - was sunk by Allied forces during the Battle of the North Cape.
Norman Scarth was an 18-year-old on board the British naval destroyer HMS Matchless, which was protecting a convoy taking vital supplies to the Russian ports of the Arctic Circle.
In a BBC World Service interview he described how he witnessed the sinking of the Scharnhorst:
On Christmas Day we had been ordered to join another convoy because it was rumoured that the Scharnhorst was out.
The Scharnhorst was greatly feared. She was the most successful fighting ship of any navy during World War II and she was the bravest ship.
We were full speed at 36 knots and going through those mountainous seas.
Norman as a 17-year-old in the navy blue uniform of the Home Fleet
It was a full gale blowing. To go through that at full speed, the bow would rise in the air and come down, hover there and come down with a clatter as if on concrete; mountains of water coming all over the ship.
We were ordered to join the 10th Cruiser Squadron - HMS Belfast, Norfolk and Sheffield. They had met up with the Scharnhorst and they had engaged her.
There was a brief skirmish, then the Scharnhorst broke off - she was a very fast ship - and with her superior speed she was able to get out of range.
But our vice-admiral guessed that she was heading north to attack this convoy that we had been escorting and the guess proved correct.
She had a reputation and she deserved it.
There was an awe of her reputation, the excitement that we may be able to end the career of this most dangerous threat to us, to Britain, to the Allies - and fear knowing what we were up against.
Hunted down
It was Boxing Day when we finally met up with 10th Cruiser Squadron and the Scharnhorst. She had abandoned her mission and set off for the Norwegian fjords, which was her base and safe haven.
“She had a reputation and she deserved it”
It was pitch black and we shadowed with the use of radars.
We knew that she was heading straight towards HMS Duke of York, which was cutting off her escape. She was hit by the Duke of York and was damaged and her speed was slowed.
There was the Duke of York, the Scharnhorst, the 10th Cruiser Squadron with various destroyers and another cruiser, the Jamaica.
All of us met up and all hell broke loose. Although it was pitch black the sky was lit up, bright as day, by star shells - fired into the sky like fireworks - providing brilliant light illuminating the area as broad as day.
Towards the end we had been ordered to fire a torpedo. Because the weather had eased a little I had taken up my action station as lookout on the starboard wing of the bridge.
The Scharnhorst was close and she was lit up by the star shells and by the fires aboard her. As we steamed past to fire the torpedo I was the closest man - on the wing of the bridge - to the Scharnhorst.
She looked magnificent and beautiful. I would describe her as the most beautiful fighting ship of any navy.
Gesture of defiance
She was firing with all guns still available to her. Most of the big guns were put out. They were gradually disabled one by one. As we were steaming past at full speed a 20mm cannon was firing tracer bullets from the Scharnhorst.
A 20mm cannon was like a pea-shooter compared to the other guns and it could have no part in this battle, but it was just a gesture of defiance from the sloping deck of her.
And that's one of the things that remains in my memory - a futile gesture but it was a gesture of defiance right to the very end.
“I grieve for those men every day of my life”
I can picture that man on the sloping deck of the Scharnhorst. I can picture that man to this day.
Eventually it took 14 ships of the Royal Navy to find her, trap her and sink her.
At that point it went pitch black.
The star shells had finished and I presumed the Scharnhorst had been sunk.
We set off to do another torpedo run to fire from the port side and the Scharnhorst was nowhere to be seen.
So we slowed and we soon saw many men floating in the water - most of them dead, face down in the water, but some were alive.
We switched our searchlight on and I remember our captain calling out to the men in the water "Scharnhorst gesunken?" and the reply came back "Ja, Scharnhorst gesunken", so we threw scrambling nets down and began to haul these men aboard.
Thirty-six were saved out of 2,000 men.
We then received an order from the commander-in-chief to join the Duke of York. So we switched off the searchlight, pulled up the scrambling nets and steamed away.
We could still hear voices calling from the black of that Arctic winter night, calling for help, and we were leaving those men to certain death within minutes.
It seemed a terrible thing to do and it was. But it was the right thing to do.
If we had stayed a moment too long we could have joined those unfortunate men.
I can hear those voices and I grieve for those men every day of my life.
I've even had someone accuse me of being a traitor because I praised the bravery of the German sailors.
I can imagine their feelings as that searchlight went out and they heard that ship steaming away.
I truly can imagine the feelings of those men.
Claire Bowes' interview with Norman Scarth was broadcast on the BBC World Service's Witness programme on 26 December. You can download a podcast of the programme or browse the archive.
Germany's most famous battleship - the Scharnhorst - was sunk by Allied forces during the Battle of the North Cape.
Norman Scarth was an 18-year-old on board the British naval destroyer HMS Matchless, which was protecting a convoy taking vital supplies to the Russian ports of the Arctic Circle.
In a BBC World Service interview he described how he witnessed the sinking of the Scharnhorst:
On Christmas Day we had been ordered to join another convoy because it was rumoured that the Scharnhorst was out.
The Scharnhorst was greatly feared. She was the most successful fighting ship of any navy during World War II and she was the bravest ship.
We were full speed at 36 knots and going through those mountainous seas.
Norman as a 17-year-old in the navy blue uniform of the Home Fleet
It was a full gale blowing. To go through that at full speed, the bow would rise in the air and come down, hover there and come down with a clatter as if on concrete; mountains of water coming all over the ship.
We were ordered to join the 10th Cruiser Squadron - HMS Belfast, Norfolk and Sheffield. They had met up with the Scharnhorst and they had engaged her.
There was a brief skirmish, then the Scharnhorst broke off - she was a very fast ship - and with her superior speed she was able to get out of range.
But our vice-admiral guessed that she was heading north to attack this convoy that we had been escorting and the guess proved correct.
She had a reputation and she deserved it.
There was an awe of her reputation, the excitement that we may be able to end the career of this most dangerous threat to us, to Britain, to the Allies - and fear knowing what we were up against.
Hunted down
It was Boxing Day when we finally met up with 10th Cruiser Squadron and the Scharnhorst. She had abandoned her mission and set off for the Norwegian fjords, which was her base and safe haven.
“She had a reputation and she deserved it”
It was pitch black and we shadowed with the use of radars.
We knew that she was heading straight towards HMS Duke of York, which was cutting off her escape. She was hit by the Duke of York and was damaged and her speed was slowed.
There was the Duke of York, the Scharnhorst, the 10th Cruiser Squadron with various destroyers and another cruiser, the Jamaica.
All of us met up and all hell broke loose. Although it was pitch black the sky was lit up, bright as day, by star shells - fired into the sky like fireworks - providing brilliant light illuminating the area as broad as day.
Towards the end we had been ordered to fire a torpedo. Because the weather had eased a little I had taken up my action station as lookout on the starboard wing of the bridge.
The Scharnhorst was close and she was lit up by the star shells and by the fires aboard her. As we steamed past to fire the torpedo I was the closest man - on the wing of the bridge - to the Scharnhorst.
She looked magnificent and beautiful. I would describe her as the most beautiful fighting ship of any navy.
Gesture of defiance
She was firing with all guns still available to her. Most of the big guns were put out. They were gradually disabled one by one. As we were steaming past at full speed a 20mm cannon was firing tracer bullets from the Scharnhorst.
A 20mm cannon was like a pea-shooter compared to the other guns and it could have no part in this battle, but it was just a gesture of defiance from the sloping deck of her.
And that's one of the things that remains in my memory - a futile gesture but it was a gesture of defiance right to the very end.
“I grieve for those men every day of my life”
I can picture that man on the sloping deck of the Scharnhorst. I can picture that man to this day.
Eventually it took 14 ships of the Royal Navy to find her, trap her and sink her.
At that point it went pitch black.
The star shells had finished and I presumed the Scharnhorst had been sunk.
We set off to do another torpedo run to fire from the port side and the Scharnhorst was nowhere to be seen.
So we slowed and we soon saw many men floating in the water - most of them dead, face down in the water, but some were alive.
We switched our searchlight on and I remember our captain calling out to the men in the water "Scharnhorst gesunken?" and the reply came back "Ja, Scharnhorst gesunken", so we threw scrambling nets down and began to haul these men aboard.
Thirty-six were saved out of 2,000 men.
We then received an order from the commander-in-chief to join the Duke of York. So we switched off the searchlight, pulled up the scrambling nets and steamed away.
We could still hear voices calling from the black of that Arctic winter night, calling for help, and we were leaving those men to certain death within minutes.
It seemed a terrible thing to do and it was. But it was the right thing to do.
If we had stayed a moment too long we could have joined those unfortunate men.
I can hear those voices and I grieve for those men every day of my life.
I've even had someone accuse me of being a traitor because I praised the bravery of the German sailors.
I can imagine their feelings as that searchlight went out and they heard that ship steaming away.
I truly can imagine the feelings of those men.
Claire Bowes' interview with Norman Scarth was broadcast on the BBC World Service's Witness programme on 26 December. You can download a podcast of the programme or browse the archive.
Canadian soldier's Christmas with D-Day hero Lord Lovat - BBC News, 25 Dec 2011
Canadian soldier's Christmas with D-Day hero Lord Lovat Patrick Hennessy was posted to Scotland during World War II Continue reading the main story
Related Stories
War bride author tackles granddad
Memorial to explosives store hero
Canada war brides retrace steps
An author has uncovered details about how her grandfather spent part of Christmas Day 1941 with World War II hero Lord Lovat.
Canadian Melynda Jarratt has been examining almost 300 letters Canadian Forestry Corps cook Patrick Hennessy exchanged with his family back home.
One tells of Lord and Lady Lovat's invitation to the corps to join them at their Highlands castle.
Lord Lovat's actions at D-Day were recalled in the film The Longest Day.
Born Simon Fraser, the clan chief's best known order was to instruct Glaswegian piper Bill Millin to play the bagpipes as he came ashore at Sword Beach on 6 June 1944.
Mr Millin was unarmed as he marched up and down the beach playing Hieland Laddie.
He continued to play as his friends fell around him and later moved inland to pipe the troops to Pegasus Bridge.
In the 1962 film, which features a re-creation of Mr Millin's piping, Lord Lovat is played by actor Peter Lawford.
It also stars Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum and Henry Fonda.
Father-of-six Mr Hennessy was among hundreds of experienced woodsmen from New Brunswick, Canada, who logged Highland forests for the war effort.
Skilled in the kitchen, Mr Hennessy served as camp cook with the corps' 15 Company at Beauly, near Inverness.
His family said his time in Scotland were among the happiest years of his life.
Granddaughter Ms Jarratt has been researching his war-time stories.
She has previously written about war brides, many of them Scots who married Canadian servicemen.
'Star-struck'
Ms Jarratt said her father and other Catholic worshippers among the corps' ranks were invited to mass at the Lovat's Beaufort Castle, near Beauly.
In a letter to his wife Beatrice, who he called Bee, Mr Hennessy wrote: "This invitation we got to the castle is something rare. It was wonderful to see the lovely chapel in the castle and some lovely statues of the Blessed Virgin and the crucifix and Joseph.
"A very magnificent altar. So Bee when you look at Beaufort Castle, think I was at mass on Christmas morning December 25, 1941."
Ms Jarratt said her grandfather and his fellow soldiers would have been awe struck by the invite.
She said: "For men like Patrick, with a grade three education and who had spent most of their lives working the woods and farms of rural Canada, it must have seemed like a dream come true.
"We don't know exactly what happened that day, how many soldiers were invited and what was said to the Canadians by the Lord and Lady - research in the Library and Archives Canada this spring will tell the full story.
"In all likelihood, the Canadians were left star-struck by their hosts and the opulent interior of a grand Scottish castle with two giant ballrooms and its own private chapel, a scene right out of the 'pictures' - as the movies were called then."
Related Stories
War bride author tackles granddad
Memorial to explosives store hero
Canada war brides retrace steps
An author has uncovered details about how her grandfather spent part of Christmas Day 1941 with World War II hero Lord Lovat.
Canadian Melynda Jarratt has been examining almost 300 letters Canadian Forestry Corps cook Patrick Hennessy exchanged with his family back home.
One tells of Lord and Lady Lovat's invitation to the corps to join them at their Highlands castle.
Lord Lovat's actions at D-Day were recalled in the film The Longest Day.
Born Simon Fraser, the clan chief's best known order was to instruct Glaswegian piper Bill Millin to play the bagpipes as he came ashore at Sword Beach on 6 June 1944.
Mr Millin was unarmed as he marched up and down the beach playing Hieland Laddie.
He continued to play as his friends fell around him and later moved inland to pipe the troops to Pegasus Bridge.
In the 1962 film, which features a re-creation of Mr Millin's piping, Lord Lovat is played by actor Peter Lawford.
It also stars Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum and Henry Fonda.
Father-of-six Mr Hennessy was among hundreds of experienced woodsmen from New Brunswick, Canada, who logged Highland forests for the war effort.
Skilled in the kitchen, Mr Hennessy served as camp cook with the corps' 15 Company at Beauly, near Inverness.
His family said his time in Scotland were among the happiest years of his life.
Granddaughter Ms Jarratt has been researching his war-time stories.
She has previously written about war brides, many of them Scots who married Canadian servicemen.
'Star-struck'
Ms Jarratt said her father and other Catholic worshippers among the corps' ranks were invited to mass at the Lovat's Beaufort Castle, near Beauly.
In a letter to his wife Beatrice, who he called Bee, Mr Hennessy wrote: "This invitation we got to the castle is something rare. It was wonderful to see the lovely chapel in the castle and some lovely statues of the Blessed Virgin and the crucifix and Joseph.
"A very magnificent altar. So Bee when you look at Beaufort Castle, think I was at mass on Christmas morning December 25, 1941."
Ms Jarratt said her grandfather and his fellow soldiers would have been awe struck by the invite.
She said: "For men like Patrick, with a grade three education and who had spent most of their lives working the woods and farms of rural Canada, it must have seemed like a dream come true.
"We don't know exactly what happened that day, how many soldiers were invited and what was said to the Canadians by the Lord and Lady - research in the Library and Archives Canada this spring will tell the full story.
"In all likelihood, the Canadians were left star-struck by their hosts and the opulent interior of a grand Scottish castle with two giant ballrooms and its own private chapel, a scene right out of the 'pictures' - as the movies were called then."
Remembering Nagasaki and Hiroshima - Wall Street Journal/ Dec 23 2011
By YUKA HAYASHI
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204879004577108954246383844.html?mod=WSJ_World_LeftCarousel_3
KASHIWA, Japan—The struggle to understand the health consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown carries an eerie echo of Japan's past: The nation is still debating who is a victim of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.
On Wednesday, in the latest in a series of high-profile lawsuits, four of five people who were exposed to radiation from the bombings—but weren't present at the actual blasts—won official recognition as victims. Until recent years, Japan held that only people who experienced the actual blasts at close range were victims, because secondary radiation posed negligible danger.
This debate resonates today because many potential victims of the Fukushima disaster will have received only secondary radiation, for instance from eating tainted food or inhaling dust.
Which is one reason why Takashi Asahina, 79 years old, says he recently brought a megaphone to the train station in Kashiwa—a town on high alert because radiation "hot spots" from Fukushima have been found here, 120 miles away.
As commuters hustled by in a winter shower, Mr. Asahina warned passing mothers to keep children sheltered from the rain and advised anyone who would listen to track their radiation exposure. "Radiation effects won't show up immediately," he said. "Don't take down your guard."
It's a lesson Mr. Asahina says he learned from his own years-long court battle to gain recognition as a Hiroshima victim. He wasn't near the hypocenter, or ground zero, for the blast in August 1945, but went there two days later, putting him in a category known as "early entrants." A cancer survivor, he was recognized as a victim only in 2008.
"I think the court cases will serve as a great textbook for people in Fukushima," Mr. Asahina said in an interview. "For so long, the government rejected the notion of internal exposure," he said, referring to the ingesting of radioactive material.
There are some emerging indications that the impact of the Fukushima disaster on public health may not be as severe as some have feared. Researchers at Hirosaki University, north of Fukushima City, surveyed 5,000 affected residents at shelters in the area between March 15 and June 20 and found only 10 people with relatively high exposure levels; they weren't high enough to need decontamination.
Still, there is little science on long-term health consequences of low-level radiation. In fact, Fukushima provides the world one of the few opportunities to start filling the scientific gap.
For years after the World War II bombings, Japan kept its criteria for victim status vague, never stating one way or the other whether internal exposure (or other conditions) qualified. But before 2008, virtually all "early entrants" to the bombed areas were denied benefits, according to a health-ministry official.
Vast studies of Japan's hibakusha, "the people exposed to bombs," provide a foundation of the scientific understanding of radiation's human effects. These studies today are the basis for global nuclear-safety standards.
But hibakusha studies focused on people exposed most intensively to the blasts. They gave minimal attention to people a few miles from the blast or who visited the hypocenters later, and to people exposed over time from tainted food, rain or snow.
The 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine deepened the understanding of internal exposure. When thyroid cancer surged among children there, it was traced to contaminated cows' milk they had consumed. Still, Chernobyl data covers only a quarter-century—not enough time to study radiation's full effects—and the information isn't extensive or consistent enough, Japanese and U.S. experts say.
Critics argue that the lack of research on low-level or internal exposure means today's policies may downplay the health risks, whether for bomb survivors or for people near power plants.
"The government has always underestimated the impact of radiation exposure," says Shoji Sawada, a Hiroshima survivor and retired nuclear physicist who advocates for greater attention to the bombs' health effects.
There are big differences, of course, between the bombs and Fukushima. Estimates vary, but 150,000 to nearly 250,000 people died in the blasts. People within 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) received an average 200 millisieverts of radiation, according to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima.
By contrast, exposure for three of the most affected towns in Fukushima were less than 5 millisieverts for 97% of the population, according to Fukushima Prefecture. A spokesman for Fukushima Daiichi's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., says the company isn't aware of any local residents or plant workers sickened from exposure. The spokesman says Tepco believes government officials have taken the appropriate steps to protect citizens.
The power plant, however, released more radiation than either bomb because it contained much more radioactive material.
Tatsuhiko Kodama, a physician and head of the Radioisotope Center at Tokyo University, has criticized Japan for not providing children in Fukushima enough protection from internal exposure. "We must strategize on the assumption that the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, like Chernobyl, released radiation equal to several dozen nuclear bombs and created far larger amounts of fallout," he said at a July parliamentary session.
The government has said Fukushima released cesium-137 in an amount 168 times larger than that of the Hiroshima bomb. It released about half the amount of Chernobyl, experts said. The cesium, with a half-life of 30 years, is likely the main long-term health threat from Fukushima, although prevailing winds during the March accident blew most of it out to sea.
Japanese officials admit that missteps may have exposed people to radiation. "We apologize deeply for the residents in the nearby areas who have been exposed," Yukio Edano, a minister overseeing the nuclear industry, said at a parliamentary committee meeting last month. He said the government will provide health checkups "continuously for the affected residents."
The government defends its standards, suggesting that people may have overreacted to the risk of low-level exposure. "We need to look at what exactly the impact on people's day-to-day life will be from an additional exposure of one or two millisieverts," says Goshi Hosono, state minister in charge of the Fukushima accident. "We may still need to ask people to continue with their lives after taking into account such impact."
Two years after the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American occupation in 1947 launched studies of survivors. The studies continue today under the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, or RERF, funded by the U.S. and Japan.
Over decades, some 120,000 survivors were tracked. Exposure was based on people's distance from the blasts, adjusted for whether they were shielded by a building, for instance.
The research didn't take into account the effects of fallout over time, and "didn't encompass the impact of internal exposure," for the most part, says Takanobu Teramoto, RERF's permanent director. "We didn't have data on people's detailed behaviors that would have allowed us to estimate that."
For decades, Japan's official conclusion from the study was that about 1% of the 400,000 hibakusha had radiation-induced problems, and the government compensated them. Among the 99% of hibakusha deemed unaffected were tens of thousands who lived a few miles from the hypocenters, or those who, like the megaphone-wielding Mr. Asahina, were "early entrants."
When hibakusha claiming just low-level exposure started seeking compensation in the 1960s, they faced a kind of Catch-22: They were told there was no conclusive evidence to prove health effects, because low-level exposure hadn't been studied. Many claimed ailments similar to people who had been hit directly by the blast: hair loss, bleeding and, years later, cancer, cataracts and heart problems.
They took to the courts, launching a remarkable decades-long debate—part scientific, part legal—over low-level radiation risks. The cases offer some of the most comprehensive records assembled on a question today at the heart of assessing Fukushima's potential danger.
The movement built slowly. But in 2000, the Supreme Court sided with a Nagasaki woman who linked her partial paralysis to exposure and proximity to the blast, some 2.5 kilometers away. The court also ruled the government should consider compensating hibakusha who received low-level radiation at greater distances.
That ruling opened the gates. Since 2006, about 300 hibakusha have won in 30 class-action suits nationwide.
In many, judges ruled "early entrants" should also get benefits. In effect, this was the first official acknowledgment that internal exposure could cause health problems, given that these people weren't exposed to the blasts, but to later fallout.
In 2008 Japan eased its criteria for survivor benefits, granting them to people with certain health problems who were within 3.5 kilometers of the epicenters, compared to 1-to-2 kilometers previously. In addition, "early entrants" who went near hypocenters within 100 hours of the bombings are now included.
Now, just as the court cases are winding down, debate over Fukushima is building. Discovery of radiation in autumn rice crops from Fukushima has put people on alert. The government is expected soon to unveil a timeline for the return of residents evacuated from the 20-kilometer zone around the nuclear plant.
In making key decisions, Tokyo has relied on guidelines from a Canada-based scientific body, the International Commission on Radiological Protection, that used the Hiroshima-Nagasaki studies as a cornerstone.
Many radiation experts say a population will face a measurable cancer increase only if exposed to doses defined as 100 millisieverts or more in a short period. The commission suggests a policy of limiting people's exposure after a nuclear accident to the "lower part of the 1-20 millisievert-per-year band." As the Fukushima disaster unfolded, these guidelines shaped Tokyo's decision to evacuate areas with estimated annual exposure above 20 millisieverts, the government has said.
The ICRP guidelines don't come from firsthand studies of exposure at those levels, but are extrapolated from the much higher exposure levels from the bombs. In Japan, 300 out of 1,000 deaths annually are cancer-caused. If the population is exposed to 100 millisieverts of radiation, it would rise to an estimated 305, according to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences of Japan, partly as victims tend to develop cancer earlier than the general public.
But some medical experts argue that's just guesswork. One theory: Extended low-level exposure might actually be more hazardous than a one-time blast if a brief, high dose just kills cells, whereas internal exposure could damage them even at low levels, ultimately causing cancer. Other experts say it's simply prudent to use extra caution on low-level exposure, since little data exists.
The ICRP guidelines reflect the "general consensus of scientific experts," says Michiaki Kai, a professor at Oita University of Nursing and Health Sciences and ICRP committee member. "It is true the risk is uncertain for very low-level radiation. The question is how to respond to that uncertainty. It's an ethical question, not a scientific one." Should people stay away "until radiation levels return to zero?" he asks. "Or shall we allow them to go home before that so they can resume their lives?"
Dale Preston, an American researcher of hibakusha at RERF for more than two decades, says the studies demonstrated radiation exposure did increase cancer risk even at low doses, but in proportion to the dose size. "In no analyses was there any evidence of larger-than-expected risks at low doses," he says.
Several experts and advocates from the fight over Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now joining the Fukushima debate.
Shuntaro Hida, a doctor at a Hiroshima hospital at the time of the bombing who has treated more than 6,000 survivors, was the key expert witness in a class-action suit in Osaka that concluded in 2006. There he described in detail the symptoms of "early entrants" and told the story of a young woman who entered Hiroshima a week after the bombing, searching for her husband, who quickly died from hemorrhaging.
Now 94 years old, Mr. Hida is again in the spotlight. He says he received calls from more than 50 readers of his recent book on internal radiation exposure—mostly from anxious mothers—after Fukushima. One woman was frantic that cesium was detected in her breast milk, he says. Others worried that their children's nosebleeds or canker sores were tied to radiation.
"I say to them, once radiation enters your body, there is no reversing it, and that there is no medicine," Mr. Hida says. "I tell them, now it's up to them to have a positive attitude."
Mr. Asahina, the Hiroshima survivor, says he brought his megaphone to the train station because he fears people will do what he did as a young man and simply avoid the issue of radiation exposure. As a 13-year-old middle-school student, he approached the hypocenter two days after the blast, he says, to look for bodies of his classmates. He found only buttons and belts.
Soon Mr. Asahina showed symptoms of acute radiation sickness, including hair loss and bleeding gums. But once the moment passed, he says, he tried to forget those days, despite years of health problems, until his cancer finally struck.
"We Japanese tend to look the other way when something really awful happens," Mr. Asahina says. "We need to learn to face it."
—Robert Lee Hotz contributed to this article.
Write to Yuka Hayashi at yuka.hayashi@wsj.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204879004577108954246383844.html?mod=WSJ_World_LeftCarousel_3
KASHIWA, Japan—The struggle to understand the health consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown carries an eerie echo of Japan's past: The nation is still debating who is a victim of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.
On Wednesday, in the latest in a series of high-profile lawsuits, four of five people who were exposed to radiation from the bombings—but weren't present at the actual blasts—won official recognition as victims. Until recent years, Japan held that only people who experienced the actual blasts at close range were victims, because secondary radiation posed negligible danger.
This debate resonates today because many potential victims of the Fukushima disaster will have received only secondary radiation, for instance from eating tainted food or inhaling dust.
Which is one reason why Takashi Asahina, 79 years old, says he recently brought a megaphone to the train station in Kashiwa—a town on high alert because radiation "hot spots" from Fukushima have been found here, 120 miles away.
As commuters hustled by in a winter shower, Mr. Asahina warned passing mothers to keep children sheltered from the rain and advised anyone who would listen to track their radiation exposure. "Radiation effects won't show up immediately," he said. "Don't take down your guard."
It's a lesson Mr. Asahina says he learned from his own years-long court battle to gain recognition as a Hiroshima victim. He wasn't near the hypocenter, or ground zero, for the blast in August 1945, but went there two days later, putting him in a category known as "early entrants." A cancer survivor, he was recognized as a victim only in 2008.
"I think the court cases will serve as a great textbook for people in Fukushima," Mr. Asahina said in an interview. "For so long, the government rejected the notion of internal exposure," he said, referring to the ingesting of radioactive material.
There are some emerging indications that the impact of the Fukushima disaster on public health may not be as severe as some have feared. Researchers at Hirosaki University, north of Fukushima City, surveyed 5,000 affected residents at shelters in the area between March 15 and June 20 and found only 10 people with relatively high exposure levels; they weren't high enough to need decontamination.
Still, there is little science on long-term health consequences of low-level radiation. In fact, Fukushima provides the world one of the few opportunities to start filling the scientific gap.
For years after the World War II bombings, Japan kept its criteria for victim status vague, never stating one way or the other whether internal exposure (or other conditions) qualified. But before 2008, virtually all "early entrants" to the bombed areas were denied benefits, according to a health-ministry official.
Vast studies of Japan's hibakusha, "the people exposed to bombs," provide a foundation of the scientific understanding of radiation's human effects. These studies today are the basis for global nuclear-safety standards.
But hibakusha studies focused on people exposed most intensively to the blasts. They gave minimal attention to people a few miles from the blast or who visited the hypocenters later, and to people exposed over time from tainted food, rain or snow.
The 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine deepened the understanding of internal exposure. When thyroid cancer surged among children there, it was traced to contaminated cows' milk they had consumed. Still, Chernobyl data covers only a quarter-century—not enough time to study radiation's full effects—and the information isn't extensive or consistent enough, Japanese and U.S. experts say.
Critics argue that the lack of research on low-level or internal exposure means today's policies may downplay the health risks, whether for bomb survivors or for people near power plants.
"The government has always underestimated the impact of radiation exposure," says Shoji Sawada, a Hiroshima survivor and retired nuclear physicist who advocates for greater attention to the bombs' health effects.
There are big differences, of course, between the bombs and Fukushima. Estimates vary, but 150,000 to nearly 250,000 people died in the blasts. People within 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) received an average 200 millisieverts of radiation, according to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima.
By contrast, exposure for three of the most affected towns in Fukushima were less than 5 millisieverts for 97% of the population, according to Fukushima Prefecture. A spokesman for Fukushima Daiichi's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., says the company isn't aware of any local residents or plant workers sickened from exposure. The spokesman says Tepco believes government officials have taken the appropriate steps to protect citizens.
The power plant, however, released more radiation than either bomb because it contained much more radioactive material.
Tatsuhiko Kodama, a physician and head of the Radioisotope Center at Tokyo University, has criticized Japan for not providing children in Fukushima enough protection from internal exposure. "We must strategize on the assumption that the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, like Chernobyl, released radiation equal to several dozen nuclear bombs and created far larger amounts of fallout," he said at a July parliamentary session.
The government has said Fukushima released cesium-137 in an amount 168 times larger than that of the Hiroshima bomb. It released about half the amount of Chernobyl, experts said. The cesium, with a half-life of 30 years, is likely the main long-term health threat from Fukushima, although prevailing winds during the March accident blew most of it out to sea.
Japanese officials admit that missteps may have exposed people to radiation. "We apologize deeply for the residents in the nearby areas who have been exposed," Yukio Edano, a minister overseeing the nuclear industry, said at a parliamentary committee meeting last month. He said the government will provide health checkups "continuously for the affected residents."
The government defends its standards, suggesting that people may have overreacted to the risk of low-level exposure. "We need to look at what exactly the impact on people's day-to-day life will be from an additional exposure of one or two millisieverts," says Goshi Hosono, state minister in charge of the Fukushima accident. "We may still need to ask people to continue with their lives after taking into account such impact."
Two years after the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American occupation in 1947 launched studies of survivors. The studies continue today under the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, or RERF, funded by the U.S. and Japan.
Over decades, some 120,000 survivors were tracked. Exposure was based on people's distance from the blasts, adjusted for whether they were shielded by a building, for instance.
The research didn't take into account the effects of fallout over time, and "didn't encompass the impact of internal exposure," for the most part, says Takanobu Teramoto, RERF's permanent director. "We didn't have data on people's detailed behaviors that would have allowed us to estimate that."
For decades, Japan's official conclusion from the study was that about 1% of the 400,000 hibakusha had radiation-induced problems, and the government compensated them. Among the 99% of hibakusha deemed unaffected were tens of thousands who lived a few miles from the hypocenters, or those who, like the megaphone-wielding Mr. Asahina, were "early entrants."
When hibakusha claiming just low-level exposure started seeking compensation in the 1960s, they faced a kind of Catch-22: They were told there was no conclusive evidence to prove health effects, because low-level exposure hadn't been studied. Many claimed ailments similar to people who had been hit directly by the blast: hair loss, bleeding and, years later, cancer, cataracts and heart problems.
They took to the courts, launching a remarkable decades-long debate—part scientific, part legal—over low-level radiation risks. The cases offer some of the most comprehensive records assembled on a question today at the heart of assessing Fukushima's potential danger.
The movement built slowly. But in 2000, the Supreme Court sided with a Nagasaki woman who linked her partial paralysis to exposure and proximity to the blast, some 2.5 kilometers away. The court also ruled the government should consider compensating hibakusha who received low-level radiation at greater distances.
That ruling opened the gates. Since 2006, about 300 hibakusha have won in 30 class-action suits nationwide.
In many, judges ruled "early entrants" should also get benefits. In effect, this was the first official acknowledgment that internal exposure could cause health problems, given that these people weren't exposed to the blasts, but to later fallout.
In 2008 Japan eased its criteria for survivor benefits, granting them to people with certain health problems who were within 3.5 kilometers of the epicenters, compared to 1-to-2 kilometers previously. In addition, "early entrants" who went near hypocenters within 100 hours of the bombings are now included.
Now, just as the court cases are winding down, debate over Fukushima is building. Discovery of radiation in autumn rice crops from Fukushima has put people on alert. The government is expected soon to unveil a timeline for the return of residents evacuated from the 20-kilometer zone around the nuclear plant.
In making key decisions, Tokyo has relied on guidelines from a Canada-based scientific body, the International Commission on Radiological Protection, that used the Hiroshima-Nagasaki studies as a cornerstone.
Many radiation experts say a population will face a measurable cancer increase only if exposed to doses defined as 100 millisieverts or more in a short period. The commission suggests a policy of limiting people's exposure after a nuclear accident to the "lower part of the 1-20 millisievert-per-year band." As the Fukushima disaster unfolded, these guidelines shaped Tokyo's decision to evacuate areas with estimated annual exposure above 20 millisieverts, the government has said.
The ICRP guidelines don't come from firsthand studies of exposure at those levels, but are extrapolated from the much higher exposure levels from the bombs. In Japan, 300 out of 1,000 deaths annually are cancer-caused. If the population is exposed to 100 millisieverts of radiation, it would rise to an estimated 305, according to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences of Japan, partly as victims tend to develop cancer earlier than the general public.
But some medical experts argue that's just guesswork. One theory: Extended low-level exposure might actually be more hazardous than a one-time blast if a brief, high dose just kills cells, whereas internal exposure could damage them even at low levels, ultimately causing cancer. Other experts say it's simply prudent to use extra caution on low-level exposure, since little data exists.
The ICRP guidelines reflect the "general consensus of scientific experts," says Michiaki Kai, a professor at Oita University of Nursing and Health Sciences and ICRP committee member. "It is true the risk is uncertain for very low-level radiation. The question is how to respond to that uncertainty. It's an ethical question, not a scientific one." Should people stay away "until radiation levels return to zero?" he asks. "Or shall we allow them to go home before that so they can resume their lives?"
Dale Preston, an American researcher of hibakusha at RERF for more than two decades, says the studies demonstrated radiation exposure did increase cancer risk even at low doses, but in proportion to the dose size. "In no analyses was there any evidence of larger-than-expected risks at low doses," he says.
Several experts and advocates from the fight over Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now joining the Fukushima debate.
Shuntaro Hida, a doctor at a Hiroshima hospital at the time of the bombing who has treated more than 6,000 survivors, was the key expert witness in a class-action suit in Osaka that concluded in 2006. There he described in detail the symptoms of "early entrants" and told the story of a young woman who entered Hiroshima a week after the bombing, searching for her husband, who quickly died from hemorrhaging.
Now 94 years old, Mr. Hida is again in the spotlight. He says he received calls from more than 50 readers of his recent book on internal radiation exposure—mostly from anxious mothers—after Fukushima. One woman was frantic that cesium was detected in her breast milk, he says. Others worried that their children's nosebleeds or canker sores were tied to radiation.
"I say to them, once radiation enters your body, there is no reversing it, and that there is no medicine," Mr. Hida says. "I tell them, now it's up to them to have a positive attitude."
Mr. Asahina, the Hiroshima survivor, says he brought his megaphone to the train station because he fears people will do what he did as a young man and simply avoid the issue of radiation exposure. As a 13-year-old middle-school student, he approached the hypocenter two days after the blast, he says, to look for bodies of his classmates. He found only buttons and belts.
Soon Mr. Asahina showed symptoms of acute radiation sickness, including hair loss and bleeding gums. But once the moment passed, he says, he tried to forget those days, despite years of health problems, until his cancer finally struck.
"We Japanese tend to look the other way when something really awful happens," Mr. Asahina says. "We need to learn to face it."
—Robert Lee Hotz contributed to this article.
Write to Yuka Hayashi at yuka.hayashi@wsj.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)