Japan makes a start on sharing lessons from nuclear crisis

By Megan Rowling SENDAI, Japan (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – When professional boxer and model Tomomi Takano heard that children in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture were becoming unfit and overweight as the 2011 nuclear crisis there limited the time they could play outside, she decided to use her skills to help. “They really concentrated on the boxing and tried hard,” she said at a recent U.N. conference on disasters in the northeastern city of Sendai. The boxer hopes to run more sessions in Fukushima to improve children’s agility and provide an outlet for their emotions. Takano and civil society activists in Sendai said they wanted to communicate to the rest of the world the human impacts of the crisis sparked when a huge earthquake and tsunami caused nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant to melt down four years ago.