Hotels “Discriminating Against Quake Victims”
- Categories: Japan, News
- Date: Mar 20, 2011 06:03 JST
- Tags: Accidents, Crime, Earthquakes, Fukushima, Law, Mass Media, Politics
Complaints that Japanese hotels are treating quake victims from Fukushima prefecture as radioactive lepers and refusing them board have surfaced.
Japan’s ministry of health reports receiving a number of complaints from people forced from their homes in Fukushima prefecture, saying they were refused rooms at hotels and inns, apparently on the grounds that they came from the same prefecture as the crippled nuclear reactors and must therefore be considered dangerous.
The ministry is instructing local governments to tell their hoteliers that they should not refuse lodgings to people just because they have visited Fukushima prefecture, pointing out that the radiation levels involved are tiny and pose no risk to human health.
Such discrimination may be illegal under Japanese law, which only allows hotels refusals based on infectious diseases, suspicion of criminality and, of course, lack of room.
However, in practice hotels and landlords happily discriminate against potential patrons with no real legal repercussion, and for those affected is exceptionally difficult to demonstrate mysteriously disappearing vacancies are the result of such practices.
Further complicating matters is the fact that after the quake one large hotel chain has actually begun forcing those who wish to stay in its premises into signing a contract saying they will not sue the hotel for any reason, despite such provisions themselves being illegal.
There are now concerns that Japan may start seeing widespread discrimination against those from Fukushima prefecture, with some evacuation centres now insisting refugees submit to radiation screenings.
Discrimination against Japanese overseas also seems another unpleasant possibility – a number of nations have apparently been subjecting people leaving Japan to radiation tests with the intent of refusing them entry if sufficient radiation is detected.
The case has particular resonance in Japan – “hibakusha,” survivors of the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have at times been the subject of discrimination due to the hysterical superstitions the public frequently attaches to radiation.
Online, the reaction has largely been one of disgust, but with the public unable to comprehend the notion that minuscule amounts of radiation are harmless, it does not seem likely the hardships of quake victims will be end with recovery from the earthquake itself.
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Goes to show how stupid the public at large are.
Trying to stop da Nukular germs from spreading.
*George Bush Seal of Approval*
Children loooove talking about things they can't comprehend, huh, kiddo?
A long time ago, people did the same thing about aids victims, and black people. When will they learn?
People in the West learned. Japan is about fifty years behind in these terms though.
SOME people in the West learned. You need to visit some conservative forums to witness some of the ones who didn't.
Don't they know that CAT scans and such give off radiation too? Yet they aren't treating them as radioactive... Hell even your microwave gives off radiation and some older TVs! Even your cell phones! Almost everything electrical gives off some form of radiation.
There was a guy posting on the forums asking if his mail that came from Japan was safe... and that saddens me... Yes the mail is safe and even IF it did it wouldn't be enough to do anything.
Wish people would quit being stupid...
Baseless?
In fact, a person can carry amounts of radiation. Not harmful amounts thou in this case.
I guess they don't know how many becerels they "carry". Just a matter of hyseria and stupidity.
even so, I don't find anything wrong with testing. A small amount of radiation is fine but the density of radioactive material is still greater the closer you go to the plants. It being safe depends on it distributing through the air. Everyone should be fine but testing would probably be a good idea. I'm not the type that cares about invasions of privacy or insults like that, as long as I'm not kicked out or refuse for something stupid or untrue.
Thrie, not if we stop allowing the lie of religion to be taught to children.
People who work in Hotel and Hospitality industry in Japan looks like they failed in Science.
@Gogetters
"There was a guy posting on the forums asking if his mail that came from Japan was safe... and that saddens me... Yes the mail is safe and even IF it did it wouldn't be enough to do anything."
OMG, i LOL so hard I fell off, seriously... sometime stupidity is funny.
No matter where you are on this planet, there will always be some "bad apples" around.
@Gogetters
Yeah, well modern TVs also emit radiation. It's also sometimes refereed to as VISIBLE LIGHT and known to physicicts as electromagnetic waves. The process of emitting EW is called EW radiation or radiation for short.
Microwave ovens don't emit ionizing radiation either. They emit UHF radio waves (a.k.a. microwaves) which are as harmful as the amount of burn damage you can do with them (which also applies to all other EW). It's impossible for such an oven to emit radiation by accident. That would be like trying to power an entire city with a 9V battery. Alpha, Beta and Gama waves are pretty hard to produce, despite what some people would have you believe.
From what I've read the atomic bomb survivors periodically went through similar discrimination.
That they were somehow unclean or contaminated.
Guess the public is still an unthinking mob.
No shit. This is Japan we are talking about. What did you think Japan is like? An open minded society filled with intelligent people?
at least they dont treat 2d loli lover as pedo like the westerns do.
however they treat otakus like scums and freaks, there always a outcast group with all countries of the world >.>
@ Anon 11L59:- then the US are there little brothers and Europe it big sis :O
Do they allow men (realistically) to marry actual young females and own them and keep them? I would guess not. See then the man would have a nice obedient servant and can't have that
damn right
if those refugees were radioactive enough to put radiation hazard stickers on them they would be dead or more fittingly undead
again i feel shame for being a homo sapiens sapiens
Read carefully, troll. The victims were listed as safe, not your irradiated-omg-must-overreact kind of bullshit.
As if the salt scare wasn't enough proof, they involve even their own kind in the mess.
Cowards.
Shove a radioactive isotope up your ass!
Trol fag!
Not long after the begging of the Undead Infected came to be..
Is this the same dumbass posting again and again?
Yare, yare you must have no lifeXD
Holy crap. You'd think the people there would be better educated?
it was only a matter of time before japan discriminate against itself... how does that work?
in reality, Japanese have been discriminating against themselfs for decades. Part of the japanese themselfs are deemed "unpure" due to their ancestors and themselfs holding jobs such as butcher, skinner, gravedigger and such, and people who come from that familyline are still discriminated upon.
Yeah, the "burakumin" discrimination, if memory serves.
Sadly, Japan hasn't come to total grips with actual official apologies and restitutions on totally destroying the Ainu culture and the Okinawan/RyuuKyuu culture quite the way Australia has for the Aborigines and the Germans continue to do for the Jews.
This story reminds me of the downright willful social ignorance in Grave of the Fireflies and another story that is about societal neglect with the Dog of Flanders story.
I think what's sad is that the government of Japan does not do anyone any favors. The reason why the society may be so apathetic (bluntly proclaiming "we have moved on" in the aftermath of the Earthquake) and a general attitude of cynicism that some Japanese are showing can be attributed to how everybody felt so betrayed by their own government and peoples dating back centuries.
The forced modernization, the forced national isolationism, slaughter of their own samurai class, the major world wars (it all coming to a head at the end of WW2), the nationalistic/racist propaganda against the 'sub-humans' in China, Korea, Phillipines, Taiwan, etc etc. And in the recent years, the whaling/dolphin hunting which resulted in entire towns being poisoned with mercury MULTIPLE TIMES in history and now, with the reports saying that the nuclear reactors of Japan today had falsified inspection papers to downplay the costs and the risks involved with Nuclear energy.
I don't really appreciate people getting so blunt with 'we are totally okay' after Earthquakes all the while people hog up gasoline, bread, milk (okay, so us Japanese people don't exactly loot on a massive basis. We just HOARD! Hoard like the best of them apparently!).
Even though it's kind of a dirty/disgusting act for the hotels to refuse those affected by the radiation, I actually can't blame them too much. The mistrust of information in the Japanese media and the government is STAGGERING. People think it's bad in the US and it is too, but that sense of mistrust is almost on a genetic level for the Japanese people. We have been betrayed so many times, it's sometimes hard to know who to trust and what we should be doing sometimes.
Or "Departures".
Well said 'Shippoyasha'
Only the hypocrite
Japanese traveler had not already been accepted in the world, and it was refused.
this guy seriously need an IP ban from sancom...
No, don't ban tor and other proxies. Other people who support men marrying young females (the opposite of this guy complaing) use tor to post.
While you are at it, you would need to ban Tor as well as any anonymous proxy service in the entire world, and keep banning any new ones that appear.
Are you trolling, or fucking retarded?
You just said the same thing twice and separated it by a comma.
what, as educated as the foreign news media perhaps? There are ignorant asses everywhere in the world. It's a shame that these people have lived through the biggest earthquake they'll likely ever see, biggest tsunami they'll ever see, nuclear accident, and now discrimination in their own country.
Good old human prejudice...never change
Ok, thats simple: landlords out, refugees in!
This is one case I would support some heavy handed government intervention.
Well you know, Japan has a long, proud tradition of discriminating against people they see as 'tainted'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin
wow, cannot unsee
Why did I read Burakumin as Black Men?
They would not be accepting either way.
We simply kill the bat
This is very easy, just say: "You shouldn't care, after all you're already dead!".
Caps, outright flaming for no reason.. typical fail trolls.
Really that's just stupid there is nothing to fear as they were evacuated before they could get any contamination that would be of concern.
Technically even the 50 who stayed at the plant would not be dangerous.
Maybe the government should step in and temporarily seize the hotels of those who discriminate.
No compensation either for the hotel owners.
They should be happy the government does not keep it and sell it to the highest bidder.
I was thinking that. These people were evacuated ahead of time- there's no reason they should be infected.
Radiation is not an infection it won't spread.
If someone was irradiated enough to actually be dangerous to other people they'd be showing signs of severe radiation poisoning such hair falling out, swelling up like a hot dog in a microwave etc and would die in just a few days.
"The Red Comet", if you have radioactive particles in your body you "will" be dosing anything nearby with radiation. This is common knowledge for anyone that gets a PET Scan. I honestly wonder why you are spreading false knowledge but the danger is dependant on the amount of the dosage and, technically, no dosage is ever "safe". There is always the chance it can start a chain reaction of mutated cells. We call this mutation Cancer, "The Red Comet".
"But yes, even small amounts of radiation sickness should be shown if they were exposed."
No.
My apologies, but that's along the lines of what I meant. But yes, even small amounts of radiation sickness should be shown if they were exposed.