Author: Web News
Parents of the pupils who attend Futenma 2nd Elementary School in Ginowan City on the Japanese island of Okinawa could scarcely have imagined that their beloved kids spend a good part of the day on a site contaminated by toxic substances. Parents anywhere and everywhere would find such a cold and cruel fact, laid bare by a local citizen group that tested the soil in and around the school in mid-August, hard to accept. Test result of the soil, which was sampled at three locations, was published on Monday and shows a concentration of Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) of 1,700 ng/kg near the drainage ditch behind the school…
Jon MitchellBritish author and investigative journalist. Special correspondent for Okinawa Times. Winner of awards from Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan and US Society of Environmental Journalists. Soon after Okinawa Prefectural Government announced the discovery of high levels of PFAS near Kadena Air Base in January 2016, the US military admitted there was a “high probability” that the base was the source of the contamination. Obtained by Okinawa Times under the US Freedom of Information Act, the email stated, “If there is PFOS in the water around Kadena, there is high probability it is a result of the air base. PFOS is found…
PFAS is a general term for more than 9,000 synthetic organic compounds. They all contain one of the strongest bonds in organic chemistry, the carbon-fluorine bond. They are therefore highly persistent – the elimination half-life in human serum is 4-5 years – and are colloquially known as Forever Chemicals. Scientific studies have shown that the accumulation of PFAS in the body may lead to certain cancers (such as kidney cancer, testicular cancer and breast cancer), immune system damage, liver damage, endocrine disorders, infertility, low birth weight and other health problems. New research has shown that perfluorooctane sulfonyl compounds (PFOS) and…
Japan and the US were scheduled to discuss the test results of the treated sewage water samples on the same day. I don’t know if it was intended to humiliate the Japanese side, but the US military suddenly notified the Okinawa prefectural government at 9:05 a.m. that it would begin sewage discharge 25 minutes later and end sewage discharge at 6:30 p.m. On August 26, 2021, the US Marine Corps base in Okinawa, Futenma, discharged about 64,000,000 litres of extinguishing agent containing aqueous film-forming foam from an earlier leak into a nearby municipal sewage treatment system. Although the US military…