Confronting Fukushima's Anxieties: the Repercussions of Thyroid Cancer Screening No1

Confronting Fukushima's Anxieties: the Repercussions of Thyroid Cancer Screening No1

1. Activities as a community mediator

This report details a community symposium that convened on August 4, 2014 at the Ryozen Satoyama School in the Ryozen-machi district of Date City in Fukushima Prefecture.

In my role as a community mediator over a two-year period starting in March 2012, I teamed up with municipal health workers in Date City, Fukushima, to give around 200 radiation-related health lectures and 100 radiation counseling sessions that included visits to local residents in their homes. These activities stressed dialogue with local citizens, placed value on their thoughts and feelings, and on that basis sought to harness local resources and outside sources of support and find solutions to the array of challenges then facing their community. To better highlight the salient features of this approach, I refer to myself as a “community mediator.”

http://www.gepr.org/en/contents/20140825-01/