The village and its hinterland are designated as either being inside the 20-kilometer no-go zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant or areas where residents must be prepared to evacuate in an emergency.

90 percent, or 2,800 of the villagers, have left.

Local governments must submit recovery plans as a condition for the central government to lift the emergency evacuation areas.

The Kawauchi plan calls for thoroughly monitoring underground water for radioactive substances. Decontamination of schools and other areas is to be completed before the end of the year.

Once the government gives the all clear, the village plans to build temporary housing for the 350 residents who are from the no-go zone. Kawauchi is the first of the 5 municipalities in Fukushima under emergency evacuation orders to announce a recovery plan.

SKF reports another terrible contamination revealed for Date City 60 kilometers (outside the evacuation zones) northwest of the plant.

Nikkan SPA Magazine: Researcher Says Large Amount of Neptunium-239 Also in Date City, Fukushima

It's the same researcher who said several thousand becquerels/kg of neptunium-239 was found in the soil in Iitate-mura, about 35 km northwest of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant. It seems it's not just Iitate-mura that got doused with neptunium, which decays into plutonium. Date City, about 25 km northwest from Iitate-mura and 60 km from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, also got a large amount of neptunium.

To recap, uranium-239, whose half life is about 24 minutes, decays into neptunium-239 with a half life of about 2.5 days, which then decays into plutonium-239 whose half life is 24,200 years.
 
[...] I'm sure the nuclear experts who have appeared on TV to soothe the populace ever since the March 11 nuclear accident has the good explanation for neptunium-239 in these locations. They've kept saying "No way plutonium will be found outside the compound, because it is heavy and it doesn't fly". Oh I get it. It's plutonium they were talking about, not neptunium which decays into plutonium. My bad.

[...] Date City by the way has been selected by the national government to conduct "decontamination" experiments. So is Iitate-mura. They are using high-pressure spray washers to blast roofs, sidings and roads, and digging up the soil. Plutonium? What plutonium?

Unlike Iitate-mura, though, almost all residents in Date City still live within the city. Even those who are ordered to move because of high radiation level in their homes have moved to temporary housing that the city has provided, within the city.

SKF also reports on youth protest, largely unreported in Japanese media and certainly not in the international press.

Nuclear Protest in Japan: 4 Young Men on Hunger Strike In Front of METI

Upon the 6-month anniversary of the March 11 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima I Nuke Plant, 4 young men in their late 10s and early 20s started a 10-day hunger strike in front of the most powerful ministry in the Japanese government, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

[...] There was a 2,000-person protest at the Ministry on September 11. The protesters formed a human chain link around the ministry.
10,000-strong demonstration in Shinjuku saw more than 2,000-strong police and riot police, who did their best to provoke protesters and managed to bloody several people and arrested 13.
Their offense? It looks like nothing more than touching the policemen and walking on the sidewalk.

A small coverage of the human chain link around METI, Hardly any coverage on the Shinjuku protest other than blaming the protesters, in the Japanese mainstream media.

I have some personal knowledge of the use of incineration ash as discussed in this next article. In Powell River, citizens have made every effort for many years to stop the storage of paper mill incinerator ash in a dump site located next to a residential neighbourhood and directly above both a lake and a river and the ocean. The concerns included contamination due to blown dust and direct contamination through leaching into the water table. The ash contains dioxins and furans (carcinogens) and is “concretized” by the addition of water prior to dumping. However both water and wind action erode this material.

When citizens urged the company to find an industrial use for the ash rather than dumping it, they were told by the company that the carcinogen count was too high to be used in road building or other industrial applications like manufacturing concrete blocks. It could only be stored in the landfill which was required to be lined and to be monitored with test wells.

So knowing what I know, I’m appalled the government is allowing the dumping of the radioactive ash and other industrial waste directly into the ocean as a landfilling process for future business development. The link has photographs of the site and of trucks dumping ashes into the bay as “landfill”.

Yokohama's Solution of Ever-Increasing Radioactive Ashes from Sewer Sludge: Dump In the Ocean as Landfill

[...] Newspapers reported on September 10 that Yokohama City would start burying the ashes from sewer sludge in its final processing facility[...] According to the city, the ashes measure less than the national safety standard [for radiation contamination] of 8,000 becquerels/kg and therefore they can be disposed in a normal manner. The ashes have so far tested the maximum 6,468 becquerels/kg.

What the report didn't show the readers is this: Photograph of this final processing facility, "Minami Honmoku Waste Final Processing Facility" (from Yokohama City website), which turns out to be a landfill site on the Tokyo Bay:


Yokohama City's plan is to fill this area [of the bay] with radioactive ashes and other industrial wastes, and build a site for offices and businesses. The plan basically says what ex-Chief Cabinet Secretary and soon-to-be Minister of Economy has said all along, that it is safe enough and there is no immediate effect on health.

The plan freely admits that some minute amount of radioactive materials (they only talk about cesium, of course) will leak into the environment - in this case the ocean, marine life, beach sand, and fishing nets of the fishermen. But in conclusion, it declares that the safety of dumping radioactive materials in the landfill is proven "scientifically" because the estimated amount of radiation leaked into the environment is within the level deemed safe by the experts with whom the City consulted.