SENDAI – When professional boxer and model Tomomi Takano heard that children in Fukushima Prefecture were becoming unfit and overweight because the 2011 nuclear crisis limited the time they could play outside, she decided to use her skills to help.
Last month, the glamorous 27-year-old taught some 200 junior high school students in the village of Otama an indoor workout based on boxing moves.
“They really concentrated on the boxing and tried hard,” she said at a recent U.N. conference hosted in Sendai about disaster risks. The boxer hopes to run more sessions in Fukushima to improve children’s agility and provide an outlet for their emotions.
Takano and social activists in Sendai said they wanted to communicate to the world the human impacts of the crisis sparked when the huge 3/11 earthquake and tsunami caused nuclear reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 plant to experience three core meltdowns.
The nuclear disaster was a sensitive subject at the U.N. summit, where 187 governments adopted a new 15-year plan to reduce the risk of disasters around the world.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made only passing reference to the nuclear catastrophe in his opening speech at the conference. But groups representing citizens affected by the crisis acknowledged in Sendai that tentative progress was being made.
Masaaki Ohashi, co-chair of JCC2015, a coalition of humanitarian nongovernmental organizations formed ahead of the summit, praised the new Sendai disaster mitigation framework for stating clearly that it applies to man-made and technological hazards, which cover nuclear power, as well as natural hazards.
He and others also noted the importance of an official presentation made at the conference about the lessons learned from the Fukushima crisis.
“The Japanese government, represented by the Cabinet Office, has clearly indicated that they are breaking away from the ‘safety’ myth around nuclear power plants, so we’re seeing a step forward,” said Takeshi Komino, general secretary of the aid agency CWS Japan.
