Michael Sailer (Louis Templado)

The Japanese government’s intention to dispose of contaminated debris and topsoil from Fukushima in storage facilities in other prefectures is misguided and will not reduce health risks, according to nuclear waste disposal expert Michael Sailer, 58, who spoke at the Global Conference for a Nuclear-Free World held on Jan. 14-15 in Yokohama.

“It doesn’t matter whether you give a small number of high doses to a small number of individuals or you give the same total amount in low doses to a lot of individuals because the amount of fatalities by cancer would be the same,” said Sailer, who is the CEO of the Öko-Institut for Applied Ecology, a research and consultancy agency based in Berlin.

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The foreign press have recently picked up on a new ‘craze’ in Japan: cosmetic dentistry for yaeba, or, as I like to call them, fangs.
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Chris Berthelsen

To those who see Michael Woodford as a hero for blowing the whistle on a $1.5 billion accounting cover-up at Olympus Corp., the firm’s insistence that he was fired for failing to understand the Japanese business culture is absurd.

Yet to Chris Berthelsen, a Tokyo-based consultant who has researched the experience of foreign executives in Japan, there may be some weight in Olympus’s claim.
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