MS. JANE BIRKIN AND OTHER SURREALISM

As the Fukushima disaster is elevated to level 7, the same as Chernobyl, our good friend Yukiko writes from Tokyo.

“On a more general level, things are turning pretty surrealistic. Just like a daily weather report, we now have a daily "radiation report" which informs us the level of radiation concentration in the air measured in each prefecture near Fukushima. (For Tokyo, the measurement point is right here in Shinjuku.) After all, what are we expected to do when we are told, "It won't harm your health immediately" or, more confusingly, "It won't harm your health unless you continue to eat it everyday for one year" - should we keep one day a year not to eat it? Many people are beginning to fear this will all go Chernobyl, but almost nobody knows exactly what happened in Chernobyl.
Not a few Japanese must have decided to go get drunk when we heard that TEPCO began to release "less contaminated water" (100 times legal limit) into the sea to make storage space for the "more contaminated water" which is a supposed cause of the radioactive iodine 7.5 MILLION times legal limit detected in the sea water near one of the troubled reactors.
The spokesman of NISA is now widely known to be wearing a wig, about which a part of the media is noisy questioning if we can expect the truth from someone that can't be true even about his baldness.
In the wake of 3.11 and Fukushima Daiichi, the rich Chinese tourists have disappeared from the town and a large number of foreigners - Russian fashion models, U.S./EU businessmen, etc. fled from Japan. Hawkwind and the Sonics cancelled their Japanese tour in April, but two dudes from Canvey Island, Lew Lewis and Wilko Johnson, played Tokyo with their bands, in March and April respectively. And Ms. Jane Birkin suddenly flew in from Paris last week to hold a charity concert in Tokyo for the disaster site. At the press conference she said, "My children and friends tried to stop me, saying it's very dangerous in Japan now, but I couldn't stay in France doing nothing.”