AntonA comments

This is nothing surprising. Radioactive materials are everywhere. Many American fluorescent paints from 50's-60's also contain A LOT of radiation (radium) just like those old fluorescent paints found in Setagaya. My grandfather in Australia still has a lot of them in his loft, and he is healthy 95 years old. His loft is probably like Guarapari (in Brazil) where you constantly receive TEN microsieverts, and Guarapari is a health resort in Brazil and many people live long and healthy there. Also my dad's old camera lenses have high radiation (thorium), especially these old lenses from Leica, Olympus and Pentax.

This is nothing surprising. Radioactive materials are everywhere. Many American fluorescent paints from 60's contain as much radium as those found in Setagaya. My grandfather in Australia still has them in his loft and probably many more bottles than what they found in Setagaya, and he is healthy 95 years old. Also my dad's old camera lenses have very high radiation (thorium). You can detect 1.5 microsieverts from the expensive old lenses by Leica and Olympus.

Japan has never made any whale species extinct. They have been aware of controlling numbers for many centuries. We western people are the ones that made several whales species including Steller's Sea Cow (Hydrodamalis gigas) but many western people behave as if they have been protecting them all the time. Anyway, Australia used to be a leading nation in whale research and had scientists like R Allen, Chief of CSIRO Div of Fisheries and Oceanography. Unfortunately the whaling issue has corrupted the science of the management of whale populations. It is instructive to read the Letter of Resignation of the Chairman of the Scientific Committee of IWC, Dr P. Hammond in 1993. When the Blue whales were decimated from about 230,000 to its present population of 2,500 the Minke whales increased in the Antarctica. According to IWC data there are more than 500,000 Minke. Bad luck for the Blue and Minke whales the krill population has declined due to global warming and this has been documented by Atkinson and Team and published in Nature 2004. The only way we humans can help prevent the extremely endangered and largest of whales the Blue whales from going extinct is to cull the Minke whales, which Japan did. Any Australian farmer can tell you what to do in the management of two species competing for the same food when one species has declined and the other has increased. Sadly our leaders do not understand Science or Farming.