News stories by Suvendrini Kakuchi, page 6

The Fukushima disaster has thrown up the first opportunity in decades to bring justice to thousands of unskilled workers who risk radioactive contamination to keep Japan’s nuclear power plants running.

After decades of not bothering to switch off the lights in unoccupied rooms in their Tokyo home, Masayoshi Sakurai and his children now meticulously make sure they do.

Shahdul Huq, a Bangladeshi national living in Japan for more than 20 years, last saw his daughter almost three years ago when he lost his ‘spouse visa’ following divorce from his Japanese wife.

Matashichi Oishi, 78, a radiation victim from Bikini Atoll, the site of a U.S. hydrogen bomb test in 1954, will make his annual lone visit this week to commemorate the Aug. 6 anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima 66 years ago.

In a matter of minutes on Mar. 11, 33-year-old Hiroshi Yoshida became a widower and a single father, as the massive tsunami swept over his home in Rikuzentakata in northern Japan and took away his wife and younger son.

After decades of being relegated to the sidelines, Japan’s fledging renewable energy industry is now basking in the limelight as the nation struggles to cope with the Fukushima nuclear accident.

Twenty-eight-year-old Yushi Sato washes cars for a living, but they are no ordinary cars. Every day, Sato hoses down vehicles contaminated with radiation from the Fukushima Nuclear Power plant that was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami that hit north-east Japan Mar 11.

Three months after the devastating Mar. 11 earthquake that caused an accident at the Fukushima power plant, energy experts warn of economic fallout if nuclear energy is snuffed out too quickly, much to the dismay of an increasingly angry and frustrated public.

Slackening awareness and deep-rooted social discrimination are behind the latest figures that show Japan with a record number of HIV-positive and AIDS patients, officials and experts say.

International campaigns against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria are headed for cuts in funding assistance, now that Japan is reducing its Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) budget in the wake of the disaster that hit the country in March.